In BSDTalk 213, Will Backman talks to a number of people about the FreeBSD Documentation Project. It’s about 14 minutes and it comes from the recent BSDCan 2013 event.
Another week of links completed early. And there’s a lot, so get clicking!
- 1BSD, the installation. Interesting to see the procedure and the tools used.
- Over the Rainbow, polychromatic type from Microsoft. I don’t know if this is as exciting as they seem to think it is.
- Do your own backups. Yeesh, what an unfortunate event. I’m fixing up my backups now, after my own troubles.
- Operating System Development series. Dry but interesting. (via)
- Windowing operating systems are too messy, too restrictive. From 1984. (via)
- Home Automation via the Internet. For those who don’t want to deal with x10.
- Chess implemented in Sed. No en passant? Sheesh, I was on board until that point. (I’m making a joke) (via)
- Managing sshd in Ansible. Ansible’s getting more popular, it seems.
- Remember that PDF compression/scanning error I mentioned a few weeks ago? Xerox has fixed it for their devices, and the patch is available. One of the ways to apply the patch is to print the file to a copier, via LPR/raw. Firmware updates via printing – that seems like a good and bad idea all at the same time.
- JAVASCRIPT MESS. 45 different computers all emulated in Javascript. A Javascript Mac SE, for instance.
- An XKCD cartoon slightly related to the previous link.
- Learn to code. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The remix of this 1997 Kid’s Guide to the Internet – somewhat NSFW, and has all the best moments. More from EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.
I need to update this post during the week as I see stuff, or else I spend an hour rushing to get it all together before Satuday. I need to start watching PC-BSD src changes, too.
- DiscoverBSD has a recent BSD roundup, too.
- EuroBSDCon registration is 20% off but just today.
- Using 6rd in OpenBSD.
- FreeBSD has imported the Radeon KMS driver.
- FreeBSD’s mfiutil has JOBD support.
- FreeBSD has ARMv6/7 superpages support.
- FreeBSD supports the PCI-E SSD in the Macbook Air. (It needs separate support?)
- FreeBSD has updated support for Centrino 2200-N wireless.
- FreeBSD has a speedup in madvise calls.
- FreeBSD is using PCIDs on Intel chips to reduce process switch latency.
- NetBSD has the start of a potential lint replacement, called ‘mint‘.
- NetBSD supports the BCM57762 and BCM57765 chips, for Thunderbolt <-> Ethernet.
- OpenBSD has support for more ciss(4) devices, via FreeBSD.
- OpenBSD has updated to pixman 0.30.2, DejaVu Fonts 2.34, libX11 1.6.1, and xterm 296, and added ipv6-toolkit 1.4.
- pkgsrc nearly has a signed packages mechanism.
I hope I’m catching the interesting stuff; I’m only reading the src changes.
- A talk about pkgsrc at a YAPC conference.
- FreeBSD has improved parallel read performance by changing how locks work.
- FreeBSD has enabled VFP in QEMU. No, I don’t know what that means.
- FreeBSD has upgraded to BIND 9.9.3-P2.
- FreeBSD has imported NetBSD’s libexecinfo-20130822.
- FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s vmx(4) VMWare network driver.
- FreeBSD has upgraded to ACPICA 20130823.
- NetBSD has added ‘multigest’, for calculating multiple digests in parallel.
- NetBSD has updated to Postfix 2.9.7.
- NetBSD now supports the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi controller.
- OpenBSD has updated a number of x* utilities in xenocara, including xserver.
Michael W. Lucas has a short article up about sysrc, a FreeBSD tool for handling rc.conf across multiple machines. This could easily be a cross-BSD tool – hint, hint.
Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, rcrun covers that in DragonFly. Mostly I’d like to see the same interface, then, I guess?
Not just source links, this week:
- OpenBSD no longer has the Y2038 problem.
- A head-mounted augmented reality display using FreeBSD?
- The 2013 EuroBSDCon is going to have a vendor summit (primarily FreeBSD, from the sounds of it).
- There’s a new BSD Certification Group training CD.
- NetBSD now supports the Sitecom N300 wifi adapter.
- Do you have an Amiga that runs NetBSD, and an X-Surf 100 network card? It’s supported.
- nvi now has multi-byte character support, at least on FreeBSD.
- The July FreeBSD Foundation newsletter has a “Strategic Planning” section that I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with. The goals expressed – experience, design, and documentation – are all things that each BSD project can do better than Linux or most any other open source system.
Michael W. Lucas has a review up of Richard Bejtlich’s “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring“. Both of them are long-term BSD users, and Bejtlich, if I remember correctly, was part of the design of Capsicum, the security framework that is serving as a Summer of Code project for DragonFly right now. So it’s worth looking at his book. And/or looking at his blog, for those who want more.
BSDTalk episode 230 is out. It’s 12 minutes of conversation with Burt Kaliski, CTO of Verisign, about the upcoming newest BSD convention, vBSDCon.
Registration is open for vBSDCon, happening in Dulles, Virginia, USA, on October 25th through 27th. There’s some neat-sounding presentations listed.
I think that is the same location where I went to a rather spectacular pre-dotcom-crash presentation from Time Warner/Road Runner back in 1999. The hotel was great; the presenters were befuddled. An internal account manager ran up a $3,000 bar tab in one night on a company credit card… I still have the fancy Guinness glass he bought me. I don’t think this convention will work exactly the same way, but unlike my 1999 trip, the speakers at this one will actually know what they are talking about.
If you missed Michael W. Lucas’s talk about DNSSEC, it’s recorded and available on Youtube. Or buy his book.
Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”
- Perl, the Detroit of scripting languages. The slides are entertaining, but it’s also interesting for the discussion of how to handle a very old code base and a community. (which are BSD issues too) (via)
- Ruins of Forgotten Empires: APL languages. “APL uses one thread per CPU, which is how sane people do things.” (via)
- Remember when we used mega- prefixes to measure disk and memory, and not bandwidth?
- Ian Lance Taylor’s 20-part series on ELF linkers and linking. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- PDF compression formats. Incidentally, here’s an answer on the Xerox number alternation issue, where compression means one number gets misidentified and substituted for another. The Economist has a not-crazy take on it. It’s not a Xerox problem but rather a JBIG2 compression issue. I have a number of Xerox models at work and have not seen this issue, but also haven’t checked for it.
- OSI, the Internet That Wasn’t. People only ever care about levels 1, 2, 3, and 7 in the OSI model. And this joke. (via)
- The Toshiba Libretto. You can get more powerful, smaller computers now, but they’re cheap netbooks and totally uncool.
- A crash course in tmux. (via)
- Whatever room you keep your primary computer in – clean it, please.
- Robots for destroying buildings. This is not some speculative article; these are robots you can buy right now. Screw the flying cars joke everyone makes; the future is now. (via)
- How to shutdown computer under Linux? A rough summary of how Linux can be a moving target for actual usage.
- Vim 7.4 out, mostly so there isn’t so many patches to apply.
- Goto is making a comeback. (via Eric Radman)
Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.
Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.
Wired has an article up about Jordan Hubbard and his move from Apple to iXsystems. It’s not a bad article, though it doesn’t delve into the why of BSD very much. In any case, iXsystems has been really bulking up lately to be more than a generic hardware provider.
Speaking of which, that blade system going in now for dragonflybsd.org was sold by iXsystems.
How many tags can I fit on this post? I think I’ll aim for Saturday for these BSD catchup posts. In theory, I can prep this and the Sunday Lazy Reading posts ahead of time, since they tend to be all-week items, and have the whole weekend covered.
- BeagleBone systems are getting popular.
- Distributed chrooted pkgsrc bulk builds. Very necessary documentation.
- …And a script to do all the setup for those builds.
- The VBSDCon site has more details on the upcoming convention. (via)
- The cxgbe(4) device has hardware dedicated to sniffing packets?
- FreeBSD has switched to the BSD-licensed version of patch.
- FreeBSD has an updated ACPI implementation.
- FreeBSD is importing OpenBSD’s rsu(4) wireless Realtek driver. Needs firmware.
- What’s new in pkgsrc-2013Q2. With screenshots!
- NetBSD now supports 2 new Centrino Wireless-N devices.
- NetBSD now has BIND 9.9.3-p2
- PHP 5.5 has hit pkgsrc.
Here’s what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:
- pkgsrc now has Ruby 2.0.
- NetBSD now has wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and dhcpcd 6.0.3.
- NetBSD supports Nanjing QinHeng Electronics devices via puc(4). No idea what that is.
- NetBSD also supports Intel 8 Series SMBus devices, which I mention just because finding the right drivers for SMBus devices always frustrated me on Windows.
- NetBSD’s hostname has some new options.
- FreeBSD supports Coleto Creek devices: SATA, SMBus, and Watchdog. Not sure if that’s a brand name or a special type of construction. Also, AR934x and the Qualcomm Atheros DB120 development board, and the Broadcom BCM5725 network controller.
- OpenBSD now has sshd supporting encrypted host keys. I can’t find an open mail archive with OpenBSD source-changes as an archived list, so I don’t seem to be able to link to it directly.
I’m going to have to set a specific day of the week aside for these.
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the listed theme is “Security and Cryptography”, but there’s plenty else.
BSDTalk 228 has a nearly half-hour chat with Michael W. Lucas at BSDCan 2013.
While these aren’t his BSD books, Michael W. Lucas has an interesting post up about the sales on his two recent books, SSH Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery. I’m always interested in seeing how self-publishing models work, whether it’s software or books or music. He points out that the point of his DNSSEC book is to see if a very difficult subject can be covered in a book like that – which it is. There’s very few published books that go that in-depth.
(I’m hoping for a whole “Mastery” series covering topics other writers don’t, especially in a BSD-friendly way.)
Supposedly it’s FreeBSD 9.0 under the hood on the new Playstation 4 systems. What does this mean for FreeBSD, or driver support, or BSD in general, or what you can run on that hardware? Possibly nothing other than a vague sense of superiority.
On the other hand, this BoingBoing article makes a good point about commodity hardware and its immediate utility. It’s an effective network storage device and it doesn’t even mention FreeNAS.
Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why. I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project. I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.
I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done. I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”. All the BSDs could use that. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
There’s already been some previous conversation about how much longer to support the i386 platform for DragonFly. It looks like PC-BSD will be the first ‘flavor’ of BSD to make the jump. Support for PC-BSD on i386 will be dropped after release 9.2. That includes ‘TrueOS‘, the version of PC-BSD for servers, which I did not know about until just now.