If you want to build Firefox 10 out of pkgsrc, make sure your DragonFly system is up to date; there’s a recent fix needed to make that happen.
This is the week where I remember to actually write introductory text. I also didn’t think I was going to have anything good this week, but The Internet came through for me at the last minute. Thanks, Internet! It’s also the week where I mis-schedule this post for Friday, temporarily.
- You may not need to Build Command Line Tools in Style, but I like the way the slides in this presentation … slide.
- This is another version of the “my computer should be free” argument. (via) The argument has been made before, though this version is slightly less antic.
- It’s always neat to see notes from someone trying DragonFly for the first time. Desktop and video editing… that’s going to be a hard road, though.
- Unix == ZZ Top. (via)
- Where vi came from. The original terminal had arrows on the HJKL keys.
- An in-depth explanation of HTTPS Everywhere.
- Dungeon creation using a dungeon! Next: recursive dragons, I just know it. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!
I tagged these when they happened in previous months, but I forgot to post them:
“peeter” got wip/jdk16 to build normally on DragonFly, and listed how to do it. I don’t know if it still applies.
Sascha Wildner updated the isp(4) driver from FreeBSD, adding new supported chipsets and making it able to load as a module.
Also from Sascha Wildner, we’re now using one source only for PCI IDs. Think of that next time you are looking at dmesg, and it makes sense.
If you’re in New York City or the UK, there’s two new DragonFly mirrors for your downloading pleasure. Check the mirrors page for details.
Matthew Dillon’s CPU bug hunt has scattered its way across various news sites, some more accurate than others. He’s posted a followup that is probably a more valuable read than any of the news reports.
Have you ever tried to run a service and realized you forgot to make an entry in rc.conf to enable it? It’s mildly annoying. There’s now a “one’ keyword (via NetBSD) that lets you enable a service, once. It still apparently performs sanity checks, unlike the otherwise-similar ‘force’ keyword.
The March issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as always. It’s a real grab-bag of topics this time, so there should be something to interest you. This time, it might be an article on DragonFly and Beowulf clusters. (I was totally not expecting that.)
A few days ago, I posted about Python 2.4 and Python 2.5 leaving pkgsrc – it looks like it’ll be a little bit longer, at least for the 2.5 version. This means the Zope packages will be gone too, since they depend on Python 2.4. This won’t affect you if you aren’t using these packages, of course.
Notice how the 2.12 release never really happened, and 3.0 came out about 6 months later than usual? A lot of that delay was caused by a vigorous search for a weird bug. Multi-threaded buildworlds would crash, seemingly randomly and rarely. It turns out we have confirmation from AMD that it is, indeed, a CPU hardware bug.
The organization application for DragonFly is in for Google Summer of Code. If you are thinking of working as a mentor or as a student, please let me know soon! We will know if we’re accepted (for the 5th time!) on the 16th.
Whee!
- “Entropy is a programming langauge where data decays as the program runs. ” (via) It was used to write Drunk Eliza, a form of the famous Eliza program that uses Rogerian-therapy-style interaction. That led me to find Esolang, the esoteric programming languages wiki. You will be amused/horrified, perhaps simultaneously, by some of the languages described there. (Did I link to Esolang before? I recall something like that but can’t find it…)
- Here’s someone asking for an implementation of DragonFly’s swapcache, for Postgres. The response, quite correctly, is “No.” I can’t imagine how painful it would be to support a database-specific disk caching system across multiple platforms, on top of whatever each platform did on its own. (Thanks, Jan Lentfer)
- Surrealist humor mixed with typographical humor.
- SSH Mastery is now available on Amazon, in hardcopy form.
- Cat vs. Router.
- Armenia has abolished summer time. It’s just a time zone update, but I like the phrase.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Friends With Boys. The whole comic is available online starting with the first page here and going on for about 200 more. The full comic is only going to be online for a few days – hopefully enough for people to see it – and then you have to buy it. (There will still be a preview.) It’s a good story.
If you said “Yes!”, you’re in luck. Markus Pfeiffer got ghc to compile on DragonFly, and his fixes (for DragonFly at least) to enable it are already committed.
I’ve seen notices in the past 24 hours for 2 different BSD events: BSD-Day, at UAS Technikum Wien in Vienna, Austria on May 5, 2012, and EuroBSDcon 2012, in Warsaw, Poland, October 18-21. The Call For Proposals is out for EuroBSDcon, for submission by May 20th.
The default version of Python in pkgsrc is going to become 2.7. This will mean the 2012Q1 release will use that version by default. Older versions, meaning Python 2.4 and 2.5, may be going away. At least, that’s how the linked thread started but I’m not totally sure about it as I read farther through.
Here’s an interesting side effect that came up in Hammer 2 development: deleting files can potentially require modification of only one parent element. If I’m reading it right, that means deletion always takes about the same time, independent of the amount of data being deleted. Your ‘rm -rf /largedrive’ could complete, removing multiple terabytes of data before you realize it. I suppose it’s silly to complain about speedy results. Of course, being Hammer, it would still be available in history.
Is it possible to boot with only 48M of RAM in a DragonFly system? Probably not. 128M would be better. I usually talk about the lower memory limit for Hammer, since it’s so relatively low for a snapshotting file system, but the converse applies here. 128M is probably the comfortable lower limit, though it’s pretty hard to find a system that would limit you that way without doing it on purpose. 128M sticks of RAM are practically disposable these days, really.
Thanks to John Marino’s work, it’s now possible to build the DragonFly kernel and world using gold, and have it work. You just have to set WORLD_LDVER to make it work. I don’t think there’s any user-visible change from this, other than a tiny speedup in building. I don’t know if any other BSD is using gold yet.
Alex Hornung added support for rdrand(4), the random number generator built into some Intel CPUs. That would be Ivy Bridge CPUs, which aren’t released yet, so it hasn’t been tested… but you’re covered for that day in the future when they arrive.
Take a look at the schedule if you’ve been thinking about going… (seen via multiple places) This is as good a time as any to point out, once again, the very valuable BSD Events Twitter feed.
That’s exactly what Michael Lucas talks about in this recent post; using ssh to browse from a different machine, but using a local web browser. He uses it to get around a network problem, but I imagine there’s a number of other applications. This is one of the valuable tips from his recent book.