Noticed in the most recent time zone data update for DragonFly: some people keep Mars time.
Happy Easter! It means chocolate for me.
- Everything is Made up and the Points Don’t Matter. Substitute “open source work” for “design” in this story. (via)
- The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty. Quoted from the article: They would roll their eyes a bit, then hasten to add, as more than one did, “But he’s right about most things.” (via)
- COMPUTERS IN OUR LIVES.
- Where we went wrong, or, The one thing Philip Greenspun got right (in 1997).
- A Round Pie in a Square Box. I admit I read it at first just because it mentioned pie, but it is an interesting history. (via)
- istruecryptauditedyet.com. (via)
- How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT. I shall now be annoying: Should have used pfSense, and it’s not a doubling of speed, it’s a doubling of capacity. Any connection on either link is still limited to the speed of that link. (via)
- Oblique Strategies, the website. The Wikipedia entry on Oblique Strategies will tell you what that is, though I could have sworn I talked about it before. (via)
- How a bad RJ45 termination can ruin a cable. First time I’ve seen a check other than “It lights up the tester; must be fine.” (via)
- Some slick awk built-ins.
- Origins of the tilde.
- My Quantified Email Self Experiment: A failure. (via)
- free-for-dev, a list of ‘as-a-service’ items offered free, for development or whatever. (via)
- /dev/notrandom, an April Fools item I actually liked. (via)
- MISTAKES WERE MADE: COMPUTER HISTORY, DECOMPILED. April 17th in NYC.
- Vintage Computer Festival East, happening same day in New Jersey.
- The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing. At Bard College now.
- (Last 3 links all via SIGCIS, an excellent resource.)
- Creating a BBS in 2015. (via)
- Dueling Unixes and the Unix Wars [pdf]. (via)
- Is BSD UNIX?
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Jason Shiga’s comics. It’s an article about the comics, not the comics themselves, so go to his site next. (via)
Also unrelated: tea is one of the topics I link here, and alert reader Jeff Ramnani pointed out Strand Tea as a good source. I also saw Deep Mills referenced in the UK. Anyone else have a favorite online vendor?
This week’s BSDNow has the usual roundup of news, including some… suspicious items, plus an interview of Kamila Soucková about conferences and Google Summer of Code. They note this Hammer2 proposal.
John Marino’s written an extensive page about wireless and DragonFly, on dragonflybsd.org.
If you’re looking to change your DragonFly system’s keymapping to support a non-US character set, use this users@ post from Adolf Augustin as a cheat sheet to make all the right changes.
Matthew Dillon answered some mailing list questions on how clustering and data copies will work in HAMMER2 – no due date, of course, because this is very complex. If you’re really into it, there’s always watching the recent commits.
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly. Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?” There’s also locking(9).
The other day, I updated some packages using pkg. The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6. I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies. I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version. pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately. I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned. pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes. This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.
I’ve tagged version 4.0.5 of DragonFly, and it’s available at your nearest mirror. This revision is mostly to incorporate the newest OpenSSL security bump.
OpenSSL has yet another security update, and Sascha Wildner has added it to DragonFly. It probably justifies a 4.0.5 release, so I’ll be working on that.
As a side effect of the new ipfw3 import, the sshlockout script included with DragonFly now has -pf and -ipfw options.
Some recent users threads pointed at SSD wear stats, along with what Matthew Dillon has seen on dragonflybsd.org machines, and good filesystem books.
Next time you’re building or installing world on your DragonFly system (running master), your computer will do a better job letting you know the status.
If you have a HDMI-connected monitor, but no sound, this trick about increasing available memory may help.
Hey, look what I have! There’s a pfSense pair of classes available to take. I went through them and found them worthwhile. pfSense is easy enough to use that a dedicated person can puzzle through most of the settings, eventually, but I don’t have “eventually”, and I want to encourage BSD products in my workplace… so here we are.
DragonFly 4.0 has had a minor point release, to 4.0.4. There was a bug in the initial install where the rescue image installed on disk would be incorrect. This was fixed after the first time a build/installworld was done, but might as well have it start out right. There’s some other small fixes, and the release commit will show you the summary. Download from your nearest mirror or update normally.
John Marino has removed Sendmail from DragonFly (as part of the base system), and replaced it with DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent. If you just need delivery to local users, DMA will do the trick.
The announcement message covers what you need to do to deal with it (potentially nothing), and there’s more in-depth documentation to cover how to switch if you need more full-featured software.
Michael W. Lucas’s Tarsnap Mastery book is out, in electronic form. While not a strictly BSD news items, it’s a service built on BSD, so worth looking at if you care about that – or about encryption.
If you are on DragonFly-master and you upgraded during select hours on the 25th of February, you may have been bit by a makefile error. The fix, as listed in that link, is simple:
cp /usr/src/share/mk/sys.mk /usr/share/mk
If you are not on -master or you did not upgrade in that timeframe: never mind.
Michael Neumann has switched out pkgsrc packages for dports packages for building DragonFly with a GUI. There’s no built image to download right now, but I’m optimistic the next release will have it. You can build it now on a DragonFly system using src/nrelease. With all this video work going in lately, it will give us something to show.