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Here, there, everywhere for mdocml

Franco Fichtner recently received commit rights for DragonFly.  This is so he could import mdocml, a OpenBSD-originating replacement for groff and man page display.  Mdocml has been mentioned before on the Digest, and there’s a downloadable book.  (See the more-interesting-than-it-sounds History of UNIX Manpages there too, but I digress.)

One advantage of using mdocml, as I understand it, is that groff is no longer required to view man pages.  The only thing left in DragonFly that required a C++ compiler was groff.  So, rebuilding could be a bit faster, and a bit less complicated.

Here’s the part that makes me happy: Changes made in DragonFly promptly made it back into NetBSD’s mdocml.   Other changes rolled from DragonFly back into OpenBSD, too, and mdocml is in FreeBSD 10, though I don’t have a src change to point at right now.  It all circled back around to DragonFly, too.  It’s really neat to have a BSD-grown cross-BSD product.

(Incidentally, if you have a Thinkpad and keyboard issues, Franco has a patch for you to try.)

 

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In Other BSDs for 2013/10/05

Less straight source links this week.

Related to DragonFly: Patrick Welche updated glib2 in pkgsrc, and is interested in hearing how it works for DragonFly users.  If you have pkgsrc on your system and it’s not a quarterly release, try building t.

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In Other BSDs for 2013/09/28

This week was relatively quiet, but also had the most cross-BSD work I’ve seen in a while.  Look at the links and you’ll see.

Here’s more on Unbound, since it seems to be a trend.

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In Other BSDs for 2013/09/21

Finally, a quieter week.

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In Other BSDs for 2013/09/14

Barely getting this done in time for Saturday…

 

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In Other BSDs for 2013/09/07

There’s been a lot of commit activity across the BSDs, but my list doesn’t seem to reflect that.  A lot of incremental work, I suppose.

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In Other BSDs: 2013/08/31

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.

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In Other BSDs: 2013/08/24

I hope I’m catching the interesting stuff; I’m only reading the src changes.

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In Other BSDs for 2013/08/10

Definitely Saturdays for this summary.  In other BSDs this week:

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In Other BSDs summary

Here’s what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:

I’m going to have to set a specific day of the week aside for these.

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BSD, Playstation 4, and disk storage

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.

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DNSSEC Mastery in print, and Absolute FreeBSD 3 status

Michael W. Lucas has two bits of mostly-BSD-centric publishing news.  One is that a physical version of his DNSSEC Mastery book is now available through Amazon.

The other bit is that, having just released an Absolute OpenBSD update, his Absolute FreeBSD book will not see an update… until the FreeBSD installer gets more coherent.

(If you manage DNS in any fashion, buy DNSSEC Mastery.)

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Lazy Reading for 2013/04/21

I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades.  Time to move to 64-bit!  Anyway, lots of links this week.  These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…

  • For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
  • Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies.  I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future.  (via several places)
  • Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies.  It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing.  (via)
  • Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend.  This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well.  My favorite was always the BeOS set.
  • On benchmarks.  It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke.  (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”.    The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly.  See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
  • Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone.  Exactly two years before I was born!   At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy.  There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz.  It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future.  I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone.  More Spacewar links here.
  • Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP.  “Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.”  (via)
  • Ancient computers in use today.  I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before,  but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new.  Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware.  (via)
  • Yahoo Chat!  A Eulogy.  The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message.  (via)
  • The $12 Gongkai Phone.  Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license.  (via)
  • The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance.  Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
  • A Complete History of Breakout.  It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK.  It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles.  (via)
  • Ack 2.0 is out.  It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
  • Space Claw, Flickr via BBS.  You’ll need telnet.   (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out.  If you liked those links, you know what to do next.

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mfi(4) users and foreign configs

If you have a mfi(4) device – in other words, a LSI MegaRAID SAS driver – you can now see/import/clear/etc. foreign configurations, thanks to this commit from Sascha Wildner, tested by Francois Tigeot, and originally from FreeBSD.

For the confused, ‘foreign’ means any disk hooked to a RAID controller that isn’t part of a configuration the RAID device already knows about.  A replacement disk, or more worryingly, a good disk gone bad/unrecognizable.  (I’ve had both.)