I’m a bit late on this, but: OpenPAM in DragonFly got an update to the “Resedacea” version. That most recent version lists only bugfixes, though I don’t know the age of the version we’re coming from and whether there were some intermediate upgrades in there.
A little while back I linked to an excellent deep dive into Ravenports, and added my own bit of statistical guessing at popular packages. John Marino wants to know what packages people find most useful/most required. If you have opinions, and I’m sure you do, post something on the Ravenports Google Groups page.
If you are saying to yourself “Gee, what packages did I install and what came in as a dependency?”, here’s an easy way to find out:
pkg query -a '%n %a' | grep 0 | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | less
This lists all “vital” packages, which usually means ones installed with intent, rather than automatically. This might be a useful thing to post for Ravenports…
History for a theme, I guess? It’s a random week.
- 80s video game commercials, a hour of video. (via)
- Don’t do this either.
- When generating a random password, the result must still be a valid string.
- Hackaday Prize, now open.
- New apps for MS/DOS.
- Omnicalculator, every type of online calculator you can think of. (via)
- Browsh, a text-based web browser. Uses FireFox under the hood, so all you need to transmit locally is text. (via)
- WordTsar, a modern Wordstar clone. (via).
- How to handle emoji (in code). (via)
- Related: There’s more to HTML escaping than &, <, >, and “ (via)
- A few things I know about LISP Machines. (via)
- Digital life simplification. Not saying all these things are good ideas; some are relative luxuries. (via)
Your Cyriak video of the month: Indigestion.
A few of the links are not directly BSD-ish, but related.
- Adventures in Open Source. Interesting for the fixes, and for just hearing how tools are being used – I will look up syncthing as an easier-to-fiddle-with replacement for sftp.
- Version Control Before Git with CVS. Not that long ago for BSD projects, depending where you look. (via)
- Ghost in the Shell – Part 2.
- “Slightly older Thinkpads“, same answer always.
- “SDF is a great UNIX shell provider running on NetBSD“. Not new, but worth repeating. (via)
- The Battle of the Schedulers: FreeBSD ULE vs. Linux CFS [pdf]. (via)
- OpenBSD gains Wi-Fi “auto-join” Plenty of comments in the source link.
- Valuable News – 2018/07/15.
- pkgsrcCon 2018 report & videos. Slides linked too. (via)
- A plan for open source software maintainers.
Aaron LI has been making a significant number of changes to the tap(4) and tun(4) interfaces, which he recently summarized. As his summary notes, you can now create and destroy tun devices. This will be very useful for some IPv6 and probably also VPN users. There’s some new sysctls, and corresponding man page updates.
BSDNow 255 doesn’t have an interview, and it doesn’t have interrogative punctuation in the title, either. My typographic issues aside, it covers zero-days, KDE, CI, new Core team for FreeBSD, and more.
Tonight’s SemiBUG meeting is piggybacking on an Azure User’s Group meeting, same general location. (This is why) Go, if you are near.
Remember the upgrade for dragonflybsd.org machines? It completed, and it’s interesting to see that SSDs have become so easily available that “spinning rust” hard disk drives are only still useful for bulk storage, and even then probably not for much longer.
Another neat side effect: disk usage on developer system leaf.dragonflybsd.org was cut in half, thanks to HAMMER2 dedup/compression. It’s a ‘free’ half-terabyte.
Oddball things week, this week.
- My favorite apps on F-Droid. All open-source, reviewed.(via)
- Commodore 64 BASIC inside your USB Connector. (via)
- Slack client for Commodore 64 (2016) (via)
- Bud Uglly Design. Goes with Smelvetica last week. (Thanks, Chuck Fry)
- “Now you have ???????? problems” Somewhat evil.
- n-gate Hackernews summaries are snarky-great, especially the last one here. (via)
- Portal Point Generator, a power source for use in Antarctica, or wherever.
- 1,600 pages on the history of computing.
- 2018 IEEE Chip Hall of Fame inductees. Stories for each model. (via)
- Excel Unusual. Animated Excel spreadsheets. Somewhat bonkers. (via)
- BASIC Engine. (also via)
- Terminal Whisperer and Command Line Curiosities, videos both via.
- Fractal Curve Generator.
- Animating “This Is America” on vintage Mac hardware. I did CAD work on similar hardware, years ago. It was slooooooow. (via)
- @Play 86: Interview with Dr. Thomas Biskup, Creator of ADOM.
Some overflow, and thank goodness cause I don’t have a day without work this week.
- Fixing bufferbloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer. (via)
- Designing the software specification [for 386BSD] (via)
- A question about BSD kernel syscalls/abi.
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2018Q2 release. (via)
- pkgsrcCon 2018 in Berlin – Videos. (via)
- A FreeBSD sysadmin job posting.
- NetBSD 8.0RC2 is out.
- [NetBSD] Kernel Address Sanitizer, Part 2. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/07/08.
- Introduce ‘auto-join’ to the [OpenBSD] wifi 802.11 stack. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 14 – Configuration – Tint2.
- pkgsrc-2018Q2 packages for illumos now available. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas got interviewed. Have you seen his Patreon video yet? (linked last week) It’s fun.
- Jupiter Broadcasting: Tech Talk Today 281. An interview of Allan Jude from BSDNow.
- Allan also shows up on podcast TechSNAP Episode 373: FreeBSD Already Does That.
- Need ZFS Config Advice.
BSD 254 has no interview but covers lots, including mostly-new-to-me BareOS. Also fun, this washing machine tidbit in their Beastie Bits.
Aaron LI continues to add to initrd(7): it now has scp, grep, diff, telnet, and 70 (!) more tools, bringing the total to over 200. That’s a lot for a “minimal” rescue image.
Various machines in dragonflybsd.org are getting hardware upgrades this week. They aren’t time-consuming, so I daresay it won’t have much effect on uptime.
50% history, 50% new things that I love about the Internet.
- WELCOME TO ARMAGEDDON! An in-depth exploration of Armageddon MUD, from one of my favorite magazines.
- Gladys Project – Creating an open-source home assistant. (via)
- Today in Computational Necromancy: MOST-POSITIVE-BIGNUM, redux.
- 1990, meet 2018: How far does 20MHz of Macintosh IIsi power go today? (via)
- The Influence of the UNIX® Operating System on the Development of Two Video Games. (PDF, via)
- zevv/bucklespring: emulate the sound of a Model M keyboard. (via)
- Hell is other programmers.
- Did blogs ruin the web? Or did the web ruin blogs?
- There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are.
- Jackson and Gregg on optimization.
Lots of NetBSD links this week relative to usual.
Update: how did I miss this? PkgSrcCon 2018 is happening now in Berlin, and there’s a livestream. (via)
- BSD firewalls pfSense vs OPNsense: technical comparison. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/06/30.
- 8x slower SCP uploads to OpenBSD (vs FreeBSD).
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 12 – Configuration – Openbox.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 13 – Configuration – Dzen2. I didn’t know what Dzen was; a configurable status bar.
- Audio improvements for NetBSD 8.1. (via)
- Cinnamon 3.8.2 now available on pkgsrc/wip. A new (to me) desktop. (via)
- New FreeBSD Core Team Elected.
- OPNSense 18.1.11 released.
- MKSANITIZER – bug detector software integration with the NetBSD userland. (via)
- NetBSD 8.0 Release Candidate 2. (via)
- [Question/Poll] – Does your work use BSD? What for?
- databasing and FreeNAS?
- How to deploy an OpenBSD VM in Amsterdam. (via)
- Bringup is Hard. The ‘What not to do’ section is quite correct. (PDF, via)
BSDNow 253: no interview, but it covers a range of topics I’d be proud to fit in an Other BSDs post. Of special interest (to me) this week: talking about fanless systems, cause it’s hot in North America, and Pinebooks, cause I still have a small computer fetish.
The article I linked yesterday about Ravenports got me wondering about what package are most popular. avalon.dragonflybsd.org is the default binary package archive for pkg, and it has httpd logs back to 2013, so I collated some information.
I read out a list of packages, and weighed them according to how recently they were downloaded. I also mushed together all the py/ruby/p5/php numbered packages, and excluded lib*.
After all that… there’s a lot of noise. One install of any desktop environment pulls in hundreds of packages automatically, so it’s hard to tell what’s installed by a human and what’s installed by dependency. That being said, here’s some highlights. This is me applying an arbitrary value and then arbitrarily snipping out a list… but it’s fun to see if nothing else.
18596 python27
13564 xorg-server
13499 perl5
13391 xterm
12098 xorg
8512 cups
8453 bash
8389 ffmpeg
8367 spidermonkey170
7884 python
7432 firefox
6997 sudo
6896 bind-tools
6702 openldap-client
5651 nano
5529 xfce4-conf
5052 xfce
4663 ruby
4447 vim
3133 tmux
2578 chromium
2248 zsh
2175 samba44
2132 python36
2007 mate-desktop
1765 mysql56-client
1699 fluxbox
1690 vim-lite
1517 CoinMP
1407 openjdk8
1395 samba46
1384 lumina
1367 kde
1355 mpg123
1353 spidermonkey24
1340 vlc
1338 thunderbird
1329 wpa_supplicant
1252 firebird25-client
1164 gimp
1103 zip
1083 youtube_dl
1044 php
941 freerdp
931 mercurial
927 lynx
866 evolution
848 gnome3
845 openjdk
842 openbox
842 epiphany
799 nmap
798 go
796 mutt
796 gnuchess
743 apache24
726 rxvt-unicode
722 irssi
652 firefox-esr
652 htop
649 rust
619 smartmontools
575 fvwm
529 windowmaker
477 openvpn
472 synth
451 fish
406 npm
403 inkscape
402 enlightenment
367 firefox-i18n
351 dwm
347 neovim
341 R
339 emacs25
320 emacs
320 unbound
312 tor
310 lua
300 cinnamon
300 wireshark
282 netcat
272 pidgin
258 postfix
258 joe
252 GraphicsMagick
251 dillo
249 icewm
242 mosh
236 rtorrent
225 weechat
219 audacious
218 smtube
216 calibre
190 xmms
187 pdksh
184 redis
184 openssh-portable
183 tk85
173 rdesktop
172 nedit
164 terminator
161 fetchmail
160 KeePassX
156 dnsmasq
eerielinux has written an exploratory article about Ravenports. It’s worth a read; Ravenports has been growing actively. You can install it in parallel with dports on DragonFly, or on a number of other operating systems.
A tip for anyone using public keys in SSH: you can start up your xorg session using ssh-agent and then have all subsequent connections be authorized by the agent, saving you some hassle of password typing, etc. Put this in your ~/.xinitrc :
eval `/usr/bin/ssh-agent -c` (insert line to start up your window manager here) /bin/kill $SSH_AGENT_PID
(Yoinked from Matthew Dillon on IRC) Realistically, you should also lock your terminal or otherwise prevent physical access to any workstation where you do this, since it means immediate SSH access to other systems using your identity, for anyone touching that keyboard.
If you’re using Windows, there’s always Pageant.