I usually get all happy when I see sharing happen across BSDs, and note it here. Here’s an unexpected one: between DragonFly and Haiku.
Unofficial theme: DOOM
- Plaintext parts of email are fading away (in spam and non-spam).
- Solving murder with Prolog. (via)
- Fancy Vim Plugins. This is the first time I’ve seen a focus on the visual effect of the plugins rather than the underlying task. Something you wouldn’t expect for a terminal-style editor – and a good idea! (via)
- Reflections on DOOM’s Development. (via)
- DOOMBA. (via)
- How DOOM fire was done. (via)
- Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES. (via)
- A Most Unusual Osborne 1. (via)
- Why it’s time to reappraise the humble Choose Your Own Adventure book. (via)
- Comparing Architectures: VAX, Alpha, Itanium and X86-64. (via)
- The old guard of Mac indy apps has thrived for more than 25 years. I link that because I’ve used several of the programs named, and they are excellent, excellent examples of doing something well. (via)
- XScreenSaver 5.41.
- These products seem designed to confuse.
- Most people don’t realize how much wifi pollution there can be. (via)
- Christian Gingras: The Man Who Fixed Robotron. (via)
- How Atari created the iconic Star Wars arcade game. The cabinet design was as important an element as the game itself, I think. (via)
- Potholes to avoid when migrating to IPv6. (via)
- some images i saved to my laptop in 2018. (via)
I like when I can get Net, Free, and Open items all in the same week.
- Is any C code from 1970s Unix still used today in macOS or BSD?
- razer blade stealth. The BSD part is at the end.
- Let’s try on OpenBSD: NeuroVoider.
- Is the BSD community dedicated to free software? Sealioning, maybe.
- Using the Open Suse build service to build for FreeBSD?
- Installing OpenBSD over FreeBSD.
- SMB/CIFS on FreeBSD.
- KDE4 on FreeBSD, post-mortem.
- toying with wireguard on openbsd
- How I did start using FreeBSD. (via)
- Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc, a Proposal. (via)
- pkgsrc-2018Q4 branch announcement.
- NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support.
- Hyper-V and GhostBSD – lockup.
- Removing ROP Gadgets from OpenBSD. The source link also links to the slides, from EuroBSDCon 2018, and I don’t think I linked them before.
- Modern KDE on FreeBSD. (via)
- Welcome to New Subscribers and Goals for 2019. r/openbsd_gaming.
As you may have guessed, this week’s BSD Now talks about the change of ZFS code origin in FreeBSD. There’s of course other things linked, including this tattoo.
On your next DragonFly upgrade, watch the end of your ‘make upgrade’ output. You may have some deprecated files, especially if your system has been upgraded through several releases.
= You have 11 now deprecated files.
= Once you are sure that none of your third party (ports or local)
= software are still using them, rerun with REMOVE_DEPRECATED set.
The now-deprecated files will be listed just before this warning. They aren’t removed automatically in case there’s installed software still linking to them. If you are running only dports software, and are up to date with all of it, you are probably fine to remove these files:
make -DREMOVE_DEPRECATED upgrade
If you have software you compiled yourself some time ago, it may have linked to these old files. One way to search for that would be to use find to find all executable files that are in particular directories, and then use ldd to see what shared libraries are used by each executable:
find /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin -type f -perm +a+x -print -exec ldd {} \;
… and then grep for the names of the deprecated files. You’ll get a bunch of “not a dynamic executable” errors when you do this because it’s a rough example I did for this post, but you can always pipe the stdout of the command to a file and review later. If you do turn up any executables linked to the deprecated files – recompile!
(If you have a better find string or strategy, please comment.)
Eerielinux has a new Ravenports article: Ravenports explained: Why not just join XYZ? I am linking it now because it’s DragonFly related, but it does touch on all the BSDs. It reviews the reasons for Ravenports – and its competitive advantages, if you look at it a certain way. It’s a followup to the Ravenports update and review linked here previously.

NYCBUG’s January meeting kicks off the new year, with an OpenBSD presentation by Brian Callahan on January 2nd. That’s this Wednesday, right after New Year’s Day. At the time I’m writing this, I don’t have the meeting agenda, but don’t let that stop you from attending, if you are near. Update: Brian told me directly what he is presenting.
Last of the year!
- The Internet of Unprofitable Things. Making mistakes permanent in hardware. (via)
- Why Mastodon is defying the “critical mass”.
- How People Used to Download Games From the Radio. (via)
- Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora. Don’t support dead ends.
- On the attempts to resurrect Space Cadet Pinball.
- xclave: Hardware Testing in Mass Production, Made Easier.
- A Short History of Computer-Generated Visual Effects.
- Some new-to-me features in POSIX (or Single Unix Specification) Bourne shells.
- Cygwin and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, when to use one and not the other. (via)
- xterm full reverse.
- RSync the old is still new…
- A Visual Defragmenter for the Commodore 64. Fun to watch, oddly. (via)
- Git Your SQL Together (with a Query Library). The “SQL Truths” section is correct. (via)
- How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar. Goes with the “no standard for tar” link last week. This bug could be in other tar versions… or none at all.
- EmuTOS, a free operating system for Atari computers. (via)
- Creating a (Non-Trivial) Lisp Game in 2018. Not the first language for game development. (via)
- Deorbital’s best games of 2018 named by Dante Douglas, Wasim Salman, David Shimomura, Amr Al-Aaser, Yussef Cole, and Shonté Daniels.
- The Very Slow Movie Player. (via)
A big reading week. Enjoy!
- BSD for old phones?
- Berkeley smorgasbord. (via)
- KLEAK: Practical Kernel Memory Disclosure Detection. (PDF, via)
- GhostBSD 18.01 Disk encryption?
- Request advice for controller/gamepads (Fnaify games: Axiom Verge, Chasm, Rogue Legacy).
- unix50.org. Celebrating UNIX historical systems by running them. (via)
- FreeBSD vs Linux: 20 Things To Know About Both The System. The article assumes, not surprisingly given the site, that Linux is the standard and that FreeBSD is a variant, when it’s really the other way around. (via)
- NetBSD/amd64-current Amazon Web Service EC2 c5. If you can’t read Japanese, the terminal command may help. I can’t tell. (via)
- January to September 2018 FreeBSD Status Report.
- The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts. (PDF, via)
- Valuable News – 2018/12/28.
- The many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2.
- A Survey of $RANDOM. (via)
- DragonFly 5.4 launch on Hacker News. Linked for the discussion, though the quality of the HN conversation is still declining. (i.e. lobste.rs is best.)
- I got a 750 MHz 64-bit HP/PA-RISC c3700 Visualize Workstation for X-mas! Put here because I think it was a BSD-heritage Unix.
BSD Now 278 has an interview of Marshall Kirk McKusick, from BSDCan 2018. If you aren’t familiar with him, he’s been involved with BSD possibly longer than you’ve been alive, and you’re probably using code he wrote, one way or another.
This should, I hope, affect no-one except people running DragonFly mirrors: I moved all the DragonFly 3.x release ISOs into a different directory than the normal master download location. This should shrink mirror size.
The 35th Chaos Communication Congress starts today. (I linked to the multi-day schedule.) It’s one of the few places you can see hacking, from the ground up. So, even if you aren’t near it, you can still see it, live.
Ravenports has been updated to have DragonFly 5.4 packages, if you are using it. (note typo if copying from that email) The eerielinux site also has what I am calling a review but is more of a followup report, after extended usage of Ravenports on multiple platforms. See the initial review, too.
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)