Justin Sherrill – Page 212 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2012/05/202012/05/18

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/20

There’s been so much activity this week in DragonFly that I’m having a hard time keeping up. There’s always time for Lazy Reading, though.

The March of Progress. (via)
My Third Attempt at Vim. Follow the link to pathogen, if you haven’t heard of it.
From the same article, Destroy All Software screencasts. They look interesting, though I’ve found the web has eradicated my ability to watch videos over a minute in length, unless they contain squeaking guinea pigs or running bunnies.
How Pixar Almost Lost Toy Story 2 to a Bad Backup. (via) You can nitpick details (rm * isn’t recursive) but it’s funny in a nearly catastrophic disaster kind of way. Also, now is a good time to check your backups.
Here’s a video trailer for that WIZZYWIG comic I mentioned in a previous Lazy Reading.
This post about ROFLCon 3 makes a good point: Much of what we expect to do on the Internet, from installing your own operating system to captioning pictures of kittens, requires a computer. Increased phone and tablet use kills that, cause it’s not convenient. As the article notes by way of Chris Poole, things like Facebook are friend-based, not interest-based. Think about that for a bit. It’s important to me because that’s exactly what this site is – interest-based, rather than a social app.
The truth about system bottlenecks.

Your unrelated link of the week: Captain Forever. A game. Mentioned most recently on Verge, but read Rock, Paper, Shotgun for context.

2012/05/192012/05/18

More on HAMMER2 progress

As noted in a recent commit, it’s possible to set up a HAMMER2 /usr/obj and survive a buildworld. That’s good progress.

Note that this is basic work, so features like multi-master and deduplication are not present yet, and it’s still work in progress, so don’t try HAMMER2 unless you like losing data. Watch the branch for changes, though.

(I’m going with “HAMMER2” for the name.)

2012/05/18

PHP 5.4 status in pkgsrc

Takahiro Kambe is bringing PHP 5.4 into pkgsrc, probably as lang/php54. Follow the whole thread for a discussion of version numbering. As a side effect of this, PHP 5.2 will leave pkgsrc by the next quarterly pkgsrc release. If you’re using that older flavor, you’ll want to upgrade.

2012/05/18

Recent networking updates

Sepherosa Ziehau has been making various updates that conform to standards lately, including “RFC4653 Non-Congestion Robustness (NCR)” and “RFC3517bis“. I’m not familiar with what they do, but you can follow the links and read the RFCs if you are curious.

(Not sure if I got that 3517 one correct…)

2012/05/17

TUI mode added to kgdb

TUI mode is available now for kgdb on DragonFly, thanks to John Marino. It’s apparently a Text User Interface for debugging core files. I haven’t used it, so I’m relying on the testimony of others.

2012/05/17

An Apache 2.4 bug, worked around

Apparently Apache 2.4 has a bug that will cause network stalls when sending data that doesn’t line up with segment size. Sepherosa Ziehau has put in a workaround for the issue. Alternately, you can use www/apache22.

2012/05/16

Hammer 2 progress

Matthew Dillon’s recently added getaddr/setaddr support, dumping, and session encryption, among other things, to Hammer 2. Or is it HAMMER2? I’m not sure.

2012/05/16

BSDTalk 214: Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer

BSDTalk 214 has nearly an hour of conversation with Peter Hansteen and Henning Brauer, all from the recent BSDCan.

2012/05/15

Vendor branch updates: libedit, libncurses, libgmp, zlib, gdb

John Marino has updated libncurses, libedit, gdb, libgmp, and zlib. The release notes are helpfully contained within each commit. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also added terminfo, a future replacement for termcap, if I understand correctly.

2012/05/14

OpenSSL updated two different ways

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in two different places:. The 3.0 release now has OpenSSL 1.0.0j, which fixes several security issues (see link for CVE IDs). DragonFly 3.1 now has OpenSSL 1.0.1c. As for a changelog… this, maybe?

2012/05/14

“Level/low” USB fix

If you are having USB issues on boot with DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau’s sysctl suggestions may help you.

2012/05/132012/05/12

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/13

I’m starting to pack these full enough that I might have to go biweekly.

“My 10 Unix command-line mistakes“. (via) You will have done at least a few of these – see comments on that article for even more. I know I’ve shut down the interface I’m connected on a few times…
BSD vs. Linux. (via) Maybe you know the details, maybe you don’t.
Git now has subtree support. You can now stuff git repositories into other git repositories, but they remain ‘normal’ repos that can be split back off later. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying. Also, the git website has gone through a redesign.
A BSD daemon patch, $3. (via) No Puffy or Fred ones that I’ve seen.
Here’s a puppet fix for DragonFly.
The Grammar of Vim. (via)
Rob Pike vs. Richard Stallman. (via the same place) Not enough drama, guys, come on!
Anatomy of a Scam. I link to it because my employer just received one of the bogus invoices mentioned in the article.
Computing Fossils. (via) If you follow one link from that article, make it this one about a punchcard IBM from 1948, still in use.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wizzywig. A self-contained comic about the early days of phone phreaking and hacking, written and drawn by Ed Piskor. The first two chapters are available as a PDF. Read and if you like it, order the whole thing. Also: Steve and Steve. If you know your history, you’ll get the cartoon.

Ed Piskor is currently cartooning the origin of hip-hop at BoingBoing; it’s a good read.

2012/05/11

BSDTalk 213: Paul Schenkeveld and EuroBSDCon

BSDTalk 213 is out, with 14 minutes of conversation with Paul Schenkeveld about EuroBSDCon. EuroBSDCon is happening in late October, in Poland. Also, the BSDTalk website has a new layout.

2012/05/10

Virtio drivers, an explanation

Venkatesh Srinivas posted an explanation of the virtio update he’s working on. I linked to the work before, but not his explanation, which goes into the ‘vm_balloon’ device.

2012/05/10

Update, Asus G2K users

Sascha Wildner’s posted an update to the acpi_asus(4) module, so it’s worth updating if you have an appropriate Asus machine and are running DragonFly-current.

2012/05/08

Pkgsrc doing better on DragonFly

Thanks to the efforts of John Marino and others, pkgsrc is having possibly the highest success rate ever of successful package software builds. If only I could get a pkgsrc-2012Q1 build to complete and upload…

2012/05/08

Something new under the sun

You’d think everything that could be done with grep has already been done, but no: grep, which is an externally-produced program, has been updated in DragonFly to version 2.12 by John Marino.

2012/05/07

Recent syncs from FreeBSD and back again

A few recent updates imported to DragonFly from FreeBSD: Francois Tigeot updated amdsbwd(4), an AMD south bridge watchdog. Sascha Wildner updated arcmsr(4), the Areca RAID controller driver, and Peter Avalos updated pw(8).

In the other direction, FreeBSD now has GNU hash support for rtld, based on John Marino’s work in DragonFly.

2012/05/062012/05/04

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/06

Drowning in links this week. Is that so bad? No.

I pity people that had to make illustrations about abstract concepts like the Internet, especially in the 1990s.
Slashdot jumps the shark. I’m not really knocking what they are adding – I could use it for work – but Slashdot has gone corporate, in the bland sense of the word. There’s no clear voice behind what they talk about. Even if you don’t like what they are posting, there’s no longer a specific author to disagree with. Younger folks may shrug and say “So what?”, but Slashdot used to be nearly the only decent source for nerdity online.
A sensible discussion of open source and how it relates to obsolescence and access.
Jan Schaumann’s NYCBUG presentation in mp3 form: “The Useless Use of *“
Winning entries in the 2011 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (via)
Hyperrogue III (Zeno Rogue). (via) It’s a roguelike, with vi-based directional controls and a non-Euclidian hyperbolic plane world, or at least that’s what the description says. It might compile on DragonFly.
“Why don’t more developers contribute to open source?“
Spam-merican Apparel (via) Spambots and T-shirts; that combination seems to be a natural growth of the internet.
XFCE 4.8 is on the way in pkgsrc. I know this will please some people.
The smallest (ELF) Hello World possible. (via profmakx onEFNet #dragonflybsd)
A SSD roundup. I have one in my work laptop right now and it makes a huge difference.
DuckDuckHack. (via) Quick, someone make a plugin for pkgsrc packages.

Your unrelated links of the week: Turntablism. I was talking about assembled music last week, and this is a whole area to itself. Watch Kid Koala turn a few seconds of trumpet playing into an entire blues progression.

2012/05/052012/05/04

BSD Magazine for May is out

BSD Magazine for May is out, with the theme of BSD security, though of course there’s a lot more than that topic in the free PDF.