FOSDEM is happening this weekend in Brussels, Belgium. Among the other talks there, OpenBSD developer Matthieu Herrb will be talking about X.org on non-Linux systems. That’s I think meaning “BSD”. (via)
Michael W. Lucas is working on a DNSSEC book that he’s self-publishing, similar to SSH Mastery. He’s making an early draft available for purchase, at a discount. You get access to the updates, so you effectively get the book for less, plus you can offer feedback before the publishing date.
This is a familiar concept for software, where early purchasers get access to a ‘beta’ version of software for testing… It’ll be interesting to see how it works for a book.
Will Backman has a new BSDTalk episode up, with a bit of Peter Salus from BSDCan 2011 and a bit of Raspberry Pi on FreeBSD.
We need more fiddling-with-BSD-on-hardware stuff out there. That would be a good thing for Youtube – hint, hint.
Here’s an unsolicited testimonial for a BSD-based company. My employer recently bought some of the assets of another company, in another state. I showed up not sure exactly what I’d encounter, since the facility had never had anything better than out-of-state IT support via phone, and there had been very little time to plan.
The facility had 3 different network gateway devices from varying manufacturers, all old, and mostly dead. The one working ancient Linksys small business gateway wasn’t physically able to work the way I wanted for extending our corporate network. So, in a mild panic, I grabbed one of the defunct machines there and installed pfSense – a FreeBSD-based firewall/gateway solution, for those who aren’t familiar with it. This is not unlike Michael W. Lucas’s BSD Origin Story.
It worked wonderfully. It was very easy to configure. I had exactly one problem: certain protocols like RDP would drop every few minutes. I bought the basic support tier for pfSense – and had a working answer immediately. Even with the support purchase, this has been cheaper and less work than purchasing the Cisco equipment my workplace normally uses.
Peter Avalos has updated m4 for DragonFly. This will bring us a little more in sync with the other BSDs. Also, John Marino has updated flex, which is apparently 17 years old? Meaning it hasn’t been updated in DragonFly ever, and then not in FreeBSD before that, for a long time. Looking at the timeline on the flex web page appears to match.
If you have a BSD Certification, and it’s nearing the end of its 5-year term, the BSD Certification Group has published the guidelines for re-certification. Has it really been 5 years since the first certifications happened? Geez.
I found this off of the NYCBUG mailing list, so hat tip to them.
It’s a very short week this week. I was on the road for work, so I didn’t see anywhere as much of the Internet as I may have liked. Count my dports writeup yesterday as part of this and it averages out to a good amount of reading.
- Favorite Linux Commands. Not all of them are Linux/bash specific. (via)
- Advanced Vim Registers. Or buffers, or clipboards, if you want to get messy with terms. (via)
- “I hate BSD so much!”, he yelled at his spittle-flecked monitor.
- TOME, a roguelike. Read through the comments for discussion of many other roguelike games.
Your unrelated link of the week: New Tokyo Ondo. via Jesse Moynihan, whose Forming comic on that site is an epic read. Epic, as in it’s actually telling a NSFW world creation story.
January’s issue of BSD Magazine has something I didn’t expect: an article on panoramic photography on BSD – among other material.
BSDCan 2013 is looking for papers, all due by the 19th. I mentioned it before, but a reminder went out and Michael W. Lucas wrote up a lengthy explanation of how and why you should present that paper.
Are you anywhere near Italy? BSD-Day is happening April 6th, 2013, in Naples, Italy, and it would be nice to have some DragonFly representation. (seen on #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
As seen on OpenBSD Journal, the videos for EuroBSDCon 2012 are online. There’s a lot of sessions there, so set aside some time.
Will you be near Berlin, Germany, in March? The pkgsrccon 2013 technical conference will be held there. Julian Djamil Fagir posted details about the event. The conference is free; you pay for your food and drink. If you’re interested in presenting, you need to contact them before March 8th.
The Open Graphics Project, which is building a completely open video card, needs a wiki maintainer. It’s a volunteer effort. If you were perhaps thinking you wanted to step up to a more complex project but didn’t want to just be writing code, here is a perfect opportunity.
(Not too different from maintaining a project work blog, after all, and I know that’s rewarding.)
Right in time for the end of the year, BSDTalk 221 is out, with Michael Dexter interviewing Matthieu Herrb at EuroBSDCon 2012 for 11 minutes about Xenocara.
BSDCan 2013, which is being held in Ottawa May 17th-18th, has a call for papers out. You’ve got until January 19th to submit, so just about a month.
BSD Magazine for December is out, offering the usual mix of articles in a free PDF. There’s several Postgres articles in this one.
Whomever submitted this story to Slashdot really doesn’t like FreeBSD; they’re describing FreeBSD’s annual end-of-year fund drive as failed. The month-long drive is only about a week old and has already picked up donations at a faster rate than any previous year’s donation drive, but apparently the poster – and Slashdot’s editors – can’t be bothered to do math. While we’re on the topic, donate to the FreeBSD Foundation; they do good things.
(There’s DragonFly too, though we’re not as ambitious or officially 501(c)(3) non-profit.)
It’s the end of the year, so it’s time for the FreeBSD Foundation’s end of year campaign.
NYCBUG is joining up with a whole bunch of other software user groups (Linux, Lisp, Puppet, etc.) for a holiday party on December 11th. This may not do you much good unless you live within a few hour’s travel, but I like seeing that sort of cross-group get-togethers, with no sponsor other than the desire to talk and drink.
Dan Langille runs BSDCan and PGCon. He also went to EuroBSDCon and described how he put together these conferences. The PDF containing his presentation slides makes a good checklist of what you might need for your own event, even if it’s not on the scale of his conventions.