If you enjoy the Digest and want to get me to my goal of a free sandwich, I have a Patreon account. Merry Christmas/happy holidays! Normal article posting resumes tomorrow, of course.
DragonFly 5.4.1 is out, just in time for Christmas. My users@ post describes upgrading, as do the 5.4 release notes. The changes in this version are in the tag commit, which can be summed up as “keyboard fix, dhcpcd support, HAMMER2 improvement”.
Images are available for download at various mirrors, too. If you’ve recently upgraded to 5.4, it’s the normal build process.
Merry almost Christmas! I hope you like reading, because I’m linking to some large collections of text.
- No Starch Press “Hacking for the Holidays” Humble Bundle. If Lazy Reading isn’t enough text for you, this will get you much, much more.
- From Hi-Fi to CLI. One of the authors of VisiCalc, blogging. He’s done a lot of writing in the last few decades. (indirectly via)
- Unfortunately with Mastodon, there’s no way (that I know of) to link to this stream of “edvent calendar” posts with various ed(1) tips, so I’m sending you to the main aggregation and you’ll have to scroll back.
- Author Robin Sloan is reading a translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight live on YouTube at 3 PM Eastern time today.
- A rediscovered mainframe game from 1974 might be the first text adventure. A comment on the source link mentions MULTICS games are available now.
- Control Keys. (via)
- A State of Sin. CERN has an artist in residence program?
- Searching the Creative Internet. I have the same problem; so much crap to swim in to get to the real joy.
- Related: Blogging and me. (via)
- Rocky Bergen’s Retro Computer Papercraft.
- Pro Office Calculator Is A Totally Normal Calculator.
- r/UnixArt.
- Small stupid things that make up my dev environment. (via)
- My small vim and tmux flow cheatsheet. (via)
- Magic Printer Cartridge Paintbrush.
- Why I’m usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us.
- nest, Xephyr, ChromeOS, synergy, and syncing some clipboards.
- Unix Folklore: curiosities from inside the Unix Room at Bell Labs. (via)
- Working around an irritating recent XTerm change in behavior.
- Publicly accessible .ENV files.
- Star Control II. A deep dive into a great game – that you can play now.
I had a lot of tabs to close, if you can’t tell.
- ClonOS 18.12 BETA1. I didn’t know this existed.
- Next NYCBUG meeting: January 2, with a presentation on OpenBSD from Brian Callahan.
- FOSSJobs. I don’t like the acronym, but I’m not going to complain if it gets someone good work. (via)
- Running NetBSD on DEC VAX on SIMH on Raspberry Pi. Video. (via)
- The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD. (Via many places) I don’t like the notion that the BSD implementation of ZFS is now going to be at the very best, only equal to what’s on Linux. That makes it no longer a compelling choice.
- OpenBSD song 6.2: A 3 line diff. (via)
- OpenRC on FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeNAS 11.2 out. (via)
- Related: December FreeNAS Plugins Updates.
- SoloBSD 12-STABLE.
- Stable release: HardenedBSD-stable 12-STABLE v1200058. (via)
- OpenBSD Errata: December 22nd, 2018 (pcbopts). (via)
- Grafana + InfluxDB fun on DragonFly BSD. Okay okay not other BSD.
- Problem booting after upgrading to [DragonFly] 5.4. The story has a happy ending.
- The Super Capsicumizer 9000. (via)
- What are you using for a simple GUI TextEdit/Notepad? The usual suspects of nvi/emacs show up, but there’s a lot more options listed.
- Reducing the delta with upstream version of sanitizers. (via)
- Python Development on BSD.
- Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD. (via)
- Torchlight 2 on NetBSD *almost* works!
- NetBSD desktop pt.5: automounting with Berkeley am-utils. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/12/14, Valuable News – 2018/12/21.
- Standards. “There is no standard version of the tar program.” Linked with early BSD history, of course. (via)
- telnet, still being a problem. (via)
- protectli router.
- de facto vs de jure maintenance.
- The NetBSD support update before the LLVM-8.0 branching point. (via)
Podcast for the weekend: garbage[46].
I like seeing someone’s install notes – in this case, DragonFly, followed by XFCE and MATE. You can tell what someone considers the most important packages, cause they always come first. There’s video too. (via)
BSD Now episode 277 touches on a bunch of things like updating FreeBSD from 11 to 12, and Knuth history, but it links to some helpful directions for using nmap, which I think is one of those basic tools that should be in everyone’s arsenal, along with wireshark.
As planned, there will be a 5.4. 1 release for DragonFly. Matthew Dillon’s work on HAMMER2 will be in there, as will be a fix for keyboard attachment and updates from Aaron LI on dhcpcd support. I will tag and build this weekend, so it’ll be just in time for Christmas.
I’m not planning a holiday gift guide this year, though they are fun to do. You can always check previous ones; I try to link to stores rather than individual items.
- Six Ways to Level Up Your nmap Game. (via)
- Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune. The first real RTS.
- Choosing error codes based on a really nice
#definedoesn’t necessarily lead to a readable message to the user. - Xformer 10: The Atari 800 emulator has gotten a huge update. That’s a big monitor. A really really big monitor.
- HTTPS in the real world. (via via)
- Wget is not welcome here any more (sort of). I was bit recently by wget in a different way; currently using httrack for the same task based on advice from EFNet #dragonflybsd.
- Fun tip #2: Display trailing spaces using ed and Fun tip #3: Split a line using ed.
- Classic computer images for sale though it looks like only a C64 and Spectrum image are available.
- Kubernetes being hijacked worldwide.
- You Can’t Opt Out of the Patent System. That’s Why Patent Pandas Was Created!
- Announcing Yggdrasil Network v0.3. I am not sure of the use, but I am interested by the implementation. (via)
I think/hope I cleared my backlog of BSD links.
- FreeBSD Graphics Blog – Getting Started With drm-kmod. (via)
- Berkeley smorgasbord. (via)
- Amazon Web Service EC2?a1???????NetBSD/aarch64???????. Probably need to be able to render/read Japanese for that link to work out. (via)
- Today I (re-)learned that
top‘s output can be quietly system dependent. - pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p1 now available.
- unbound(8): DNSSEC validation enabled in default configuration.
- NetHack, OpenBSD, curses, tty. Curses as in the terminal interface, not as in Sword of Monster Calling -1.
- Configuration deployment made easy with drist.
- SoloBSD 11.2-STABLE-1206 is out.
- mports updates, mport package manager configuration feature added, and MidnightBSD security advisory site.
- Valuable News – 2018/11/24, Valuable News – 2018/12/01, and Valuable News – 2018/12/08.
- FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 Available. No, wait, FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE out.
- pkgs.org – packages for as many systems as possible, including FreeBSD and NetBSD. (via)
- GOG Winter Sale – OpenBSD Highlights. (via)
- Cirrus CI support and FreeBSD.
- OPNsense 18.7.9 released.
- OpenSMTPD proc filters & fc-rDNS. (via)
- Otto Moerbeek on the Virtues of OpenBSD malloc(3). I need to keep a better eye on bsd.network; I can’t collate it like RSS. Or can I?
- A proposal for a new RPKI validator: OpenBSD rpki-client(1). (via)
- OpenBGPD – Adding Diversity to the Route Server Landscape. (via)
- FreeNAS 11.2 new features.
- NetBSD desktop pt.4: The X Display Manager (XDM). (via)
- PINEBOOK on FreeBSD soon. Joining OpenBSD and NetBSD. (via)
The newest BSD Now covers the 12.0 release of FreeBSD, handily talks about setting up Synth, and links to an interview of the fellow behind GhostBSD.
Matthew Dillon’s been working on “reliable on-media topology” for HAMMER2. If you had a crash at just the right time with HAMMER2, you wouldn’t lose data but you might have to do some manual cleanup. (Don’t ask me the steps; never happened to me.) With these changes, that doesn’t happen any more. It’s present now in -master and will be in what should be DragonFly 5.4.1 by the end of the year. He has a post to users@ that goes into better detail. If you want way too much detail, you can check the commits.
Three related notes: snapshots are now faster, the HAMMER2 design document has been updated to the tune of 400+ new lines, and yes, you can encrypt your root HAMMER2 filesystem, and have been able to for a while.
BSD Now 275 went up a bit late, so I’m also a bit late posting about it – this past week’s episode includes among other things, a UNIX ownership history, and gopher details.
I have stuff to post, but moving DragonFly to 5.4, php to 7.2, postgres to 9.5, WordPress to 5.0, etc. Regular Digest transmissions should resume tomorrow.
Involuntary vi theme this week. Or ssh! I have lots of links.
- Old mp3 players skins, a baroque mess. (via)
- Buying a Commodore Amiga 30 years later. (via)
- Paleotronic’s 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year One: 1980. It continues. (via)
- What makes BeOS and Haiku unique. Linking for nostalgia. (via)
- Why, oh WHY, do those #? nutheads use vi? (via)
- vi, my favorite config-less editor. I had to switch to vi away from vim just to get it to stop paying attention to where I clicked in a terminal window and changing the insertion point. (via)
- Turn Vim into Excel: Tips for Editing Tabular Data. (via)
- Open Source is Not About You. (via)
- 2018 IFComp Winners. (via)
- UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8. Maddening. (via)
- Controlling the Spice, Part 2: Cryo’s Dune.
- Experiences with the Cray X/MP (2000). (via)
- Retirement video for the Philco 212 Mainframe Computer. (via)
- And now for some keyboards that are completely different.
- redo, buildroot, and serializing parallel logs.
- The New Illustrated TLS Connection. (via)
- The needs of Version Control Systems conflict with capturing all metadata.
- How not to reconfigure your sshd.
- Safely allow commands through ssh.
- OpenSSH 7.9’s new key revocation support is welcome but can’t be a full fix.
- Up-to-date O’Reilly covers.
- Running a Gopher Server in 2018. (via)
Once again playing catchup – but we all benefit from the abundance.
- Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD. (via)
- Firefox’s middle-click behavior on HTML links on Linux. Should apply to BSD too.
- BSD vs. Linux. Old, but the source link has links to more discussion if that interests you.
- A proposal for a new RPKI validator: OpenBSD rpki-client(1). (via)
- NetBSD on AWS EC2 a1.medium (ARM). (via)
- The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management. (via)
- NetBSD Advent Calendar 2018. (via)
- Why BSD/OS is the best candidate for being the only tested legally open UNIX. (via)
- NetBSD and support for two finger scroll emulation. (via)
- Wherefore FreeBSD?
- Securing home. (via)
- The History of Unix, Rob Pike. I find this comment entertaining. (via)
- Showing a Gigabit OpenBSD firewall some Monitoring Love. (via)
- Portability of tar features. Linked because BSD tar is a thing. (via)
If you are going to MeatBSD, the reservations have to be in by Saturday. (Which is why I am posting it now instead of on Saturday for In Other BSDs.)
I didn’t get a chance to mention this before release: script(1) has had a refresh, now sharing more options with the FreeBSD version. The update is in DragonFly-master and in the 5.4 release.
NYCBUG’s holiday party is tomorrow at Suspenders. Go, if you are near New York City, and talk about what you’d like to see in a presentation. Chances are good someone there is familiar with the topic.
DragonFly 5.4.0 has been released. This release bring a new compiler (gcc 8.0), asymmetric NUMA support, and a number of new and updated drivers for virtual machine devices and network.
My users@ post has the details on upgrading, as do the release notes. Note there’s a step in there to update initrd, which has been available for the last few releases, though I’ve never mentioned it. It’s probably a good idea, since that builds a mini “rescue” system, in case disaster strikes.