If you happen to have an APU2, here’s some tips on the boot process.
pf table size check and change
Did you know there’s a default size limit to pf’s routing table? I did not, but it makes sense that there is one. If for some reason you bump into this limit (difficult for home use, I’d think), here’s how you change it.
Tianocore update
If you have UEFI hardware, there’s been an update in DragonFly of the TianoCore EDK II headers. If you are like me, you will find the tianocore.org site helps to understand what this is for.
A tip for UEFI installs
karu.pruun posted an answer on how to get DragonFly onto your GPT/EFI drive.
ssh-copy-id now included
The ssh-copy-id utility is now included in DragonFly 5.8 and in -current. Useful for your next machine setup.
jails and loopback IPs
Jails on DragonFly can now route to loopback addresses (i.e. 127.0.0.1). Because of this, they can work like shared IPs and the jail can connect to the host.
I think this means that you no longer have to bind jail services to specific IPs as you did previously. Don’t quote me on that; I’ve run few jails in my life.
Update: I should have linked this too: the sysctl jail.defaults.allow_listen_override that makes it easier in the host system too.
Lazy Reading for 2020/03/15
Again, dumping out all the links I can in case you are stuck at home.
- Secure erase. I have done this yes.
- “Encrypted email is LARP security”
- 4 Columns. Linked for the interface and how it’s tied to the content.
- Best Ever Spooky House Adventures.
- On The Metal, a technical podcast described as a garbage replacement, though without the BSD content.
- Void: Terminal-based personal organizer. Looking at the resources listed at the end of the README is also instructive. (via)
- Is Myst still one of the worst games ever?
- The Best Fountain Pens Under 100 Dollars. The TWSBI 580 is my favorite.
- 4 Plain Text resource links.
- Teletext: the Boring talk.
- Variables, Pointers, and Indirection in Arduino C. (via)
- You are a raccoon. Descend into a dungeon, looking for lost books. (via)
- Removing characters with tr.
- CSS didn’t decouple content from presentation.
- A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NEXTSTEP Workstation. (via)
- Terminal Vision. Terminal == Serious Computer. (via)
- Obscure features of JPEG. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the week: Hannibal Rex – The One Hundred & Forty Faces Of?.?.?. Has the same drive as early Mix Master Mike, to my ear. (via)
Setting UTF-8 in the shell
Linked cause I always forget the right shell command for UTF-8, to reduce the amount of ???? ??? ??? ??????? ??.
Font installation in DragonFly
I imagine this may work for any BSD, really. Aaron Li has the instructions, which may be especially useful for non-English readers.
Lazy Reading for 2019/12/29
There’s several accidental themes fighting it out this week.
- Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog. Seriously.
- Blogging Less in the 2020s. Social media demands your complete attention to “succeed”.
- Why NUKEMAP isn’t on Google Maps anymore. The problem of depending on external services that can be turned off or changed.
- This Page is Designed to Last. I have this worry about the Digest. (via)
- Working on our Thoughts, a publish-in-multiple-formats (website, book, etc) method. (via)
- Back In Time For Xmas. Linked for the picture of fiber wrapped around a large auger; the stuff of nightmares for anyone responsible for network infrastructure.
- Public Sans, a typeface from the U.S. Government. (via)
- PinePhone review.
- Plasma Mobile as Daily Driver on PinePhone. (via)
- Anyone Can Build This Open Source, DRM-Free Kindle Alternative. That is kinda linkbaity but what the heck. (via)
- Inkplate 6, crowdfunded, via comments on the previous source.
- reMarkable: the perfect tablet for academics. (via)
- 2019 Retrospective. Interactive Fiction. (via)
- Miller, a command line tool for tabular data. (via)
- The tyranny of ideas. (via I lost it, sorry)
- The Blue Tape List. When I do this at a new job, I call it the Crazy List. You have only the first 6 months at a new job before everything that struck you as crazy becomes accepted, and you won’t be able to see the problem any more. (via)
- In Memoriam of Chuck Peddle. He created the 6502, which powered it seems like almost every home computer. (via)
- Tiny Tiny RSS + Readability == The best way to read RSS feed. I use Tiny Tiny RSS and had no idea how nice the Readability plugin is. (via)
- Filenames and paths should be a unique type and not a form of strings. Ugh but convincing argument.
- Separate or merge audio and video using ffmpeg and Crop a video using ffmpeg. Linked cause you’ll need it sooner or later.
- The man who made Wolfenstein. One of the few commercially purchased Apple ][ games I ever had – and still have. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the week: Cosey Fanni Tutti ?– Tutti. Found via Ted Gioia’s Best 100 Albums of 2019, which was discovered via Conversations with Tyler. There, now you definitely have enough to listen to until 2020.
Binary packages and the DragonFly installer
I thought this would happen: the nrelease(7) process can use binary packages to build DragonFly. (For the dports packages, not the base system.) This is very interesting to me, but also useful for anyone who wants to build a custom DragonFly; something I think more people could do.
Reminder: set hostname
You should set hostname in /etc/rc.conf. I am mentioning this now because not doing it kept me from running X apps from a DragonFly system on a Windows 10 system with vcxsrv, and I wasted half an hour of my life figuring that out. Apparently this is a lesson I need to keep relearning.
Lazy Reading for 2019/09/08
This week is a nice mix between useful and entertaining.
- Oregon Trail, the cabinet game. (via)
- Cover story: The curious case of a shared database. (via)
- The Art of Warez. (via)
- The humane way to take control of your phone. (via)
- A terminal user interface for Mastodon. (via)
- Write Fuzzable Code.
- At least one Vim trick you might not know.
- Reliable after 50 years: The Apollo Guidance Computer’s switching power supplies.
- GPG2 cheatsheet.
- Workarounds for semantic problems and More workarounds for semantic problems.
- Found in previous link: this is working Perl and PostScript at the same time.
- A List of My Twenty Favorite Works of Interactive Fiction.
- One byte used to cost a dollar.
- The “Tonya Harding Solution” to computer benchmarks.
- The History of Tetris Randomizers. (via)
Scrolling in X
I’ve seen a similar config other places, but it never hurts to note: scrolling in X requires just a few xorg config lines.
Synaptics touchpad notes
pkg and pkg-static
If you upgrade DragonFly and one of the shared libraries used by pkg gets updated, you can’t run pkg until you get files, but pkg is the program you use to bring in new files. This chicken-and-egg problem is solved with pkg-static, a version of pkg built without shared libraries.
You may have noticed some format flip-flopping between pkg and pkg-static if you had to run it after the most recent DragonFly upgrade; that is fixed. There’s a larger issue of certificate installation identified there; I don’t know a solution to it, but I do want to mention this for next time pkg breaks for someone – pkg-static will work as backup, including to bring in a new version of pkg.
A ps tip
If you want to see all running threads on your system, grouped by process, with who ran it and how much memory it’s taking, it’s easy: ps -alxRH.
I mention this because it’s easier to remember ‘alxRH’ than it is to find all the right options in the ps man page.
A small rconfig update
Aaron LI’s fixed a bug in rconfig tag names. This is minor, but I think rconfig(8) is a very powerful and underappreciated utility, so I point it out whenever possible.
First time dbus reminder
I’ve mentioned dbus and DragonFly a few times; here’s one of those “you will eventually do this” tidbits: if for some reason you are installing it for the first time, remember to start it with the rc script.
An easier upgrade on DragonFly
You’re probably used to the ‘make buildworld; make buildkernel; make installkernel; etc etc’ dance on each upgrade at this point. ‘Tse’ has created a script that rolls that all up into a single action.