Unrelated to BSD: GPS rollover is happening a few days from now. This affects most people very little, and a few people a lot, but I mention it also to make you think about the systems that underpin our technology.
Need more BUGs
Stop ifconfig module loading
Thanks to Aaron LI, you can now (actually, since December) run ifconfig without involuntarily loading associated kernel modules, with the -n option. See his commit message for an example.
Serial detection in the installer
I’m finally cleaning out some things I never got to post when new: last October, the DragonFly installer gained the ability to ask for terminal type, when used over a serial cable. Thanks to Diederik de Groot for that one.
(A rare combination… but when you need it, you won’t have an alternative.)
For the mount_smbfs users on DragonFly
Two minor things that were keeping me from mounting Windows shares on boot of my DragonFly system: the right location for nsmb.conf and using proper capitalization. I’m writing it here to save someone else 10 minutes of search.
A necessary protocol change
‘mazocomp’ has updated the DragonFly mirrors list to include HTTPS links where appropriate, which would be most everywhere. An excellent idea.
While I’m talking about mirrors, there’s some new DPorts pkg mirrors too.
Memory fixes, UEFI booting fixes
If you have a lot of RAM on your DragonFly system, there’s a patch that you may find useful. If you weren’t able to install that system, well, there’s another potential fix out there.
Lazy Reading for 2019/01/20
One advantage of having a link ‘backlog’ is that I can pick and choose a bit, to present grouped items.
- LiteCLI: A user-friendly command line client for SQLite. (via)
- A holiday gift woodworking project using Clojure. (via)
- 2019 IGF nominees: something notable.
- 2019 IGF nominees: mixed reactions.
- 2019 IGF nominees: my favorites.
- Privacy Engineer job at Wikimedia.
- Rand Intelligent Terminal Agent (RITA): Design Philosophy. (PDF, via)
- Book review: Retro debugging. (via)
- The ‘Say Thanks’ Project. Can’t help thinking of T.Hanks. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Rise and Demise of RSS. Not as common nowadays, but invaluable for these weekend Digest articles. (via)
- Nethack beaten in 7 minutes, 15 seconds realtime. One comment notes that you can, within game rules, die before you start playing. (via)
- Text Games to Watch for in 2019.
- In honor of Donald Knuth’s 81 birthday Stanford uploaded 111 lectures on Youtube. (via)
- Facebook is the new crapware. (via)
- 404 Page Not Found: The internet feeds on its own dying dreams. (via)
- Computers in Kids’ Bedrooms. (via)
- Snowflake Archeology: Early computer animation (1960s) for the DEC PDP-1. (via)
- Online Text Tools. For when you don’t have a shell handy.
- Sinographs for “tea”.
- Misadventures in process containment. Interesting for the history.
- Dawn of the Second Epoch. Coming sooner than Y2038, possibly.
- UNIX in pictures. (via)
- Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time. In-depth article, not just a polemic, getting into how Solid works. (via)
Cleanly adding sysctl entries on DragonFly
If you’d like to set a particular sysctl(8), you enter it into /etc/sysctl.conf. A common mistake is to copy the command line and put “sysctl foo=bar” in sysctl.conf instead of “foo=bar”. This used to cause a warning, but it still bit people, as it would cause a long stream of error messages during boot – with no clear reason, as the kernel tried to understand the command. Now, that typo is handled automatically.
Power notes, booting notes
Two links I yoinked from conversation in EFNet #dragonflybsd: there’s a “powersave” power management page on dragonflybsd.org that for some reason wasn’t linked in the main documentation page. I fixed that, and you may want to look at it and change your mwait settings, or look at the corepower(4) module. (From ivadasz’s comments; thanks!)
There’s also an older page on DragonFly and grub2 that may be interesting to anyone looking to boot. (From aly’s comments; thanks!)
File deprecation and DragonFly upgrades
On your next DragonFly upgrade, watch the end of your ‘make upgrade’ output. You may have some deprecated files, especially if your system has been upgraded through several releases.
= You have 11 now deprecated files.
= Once you are sure that none of your third party (ports or local)
= software are still using them, rerun with REMOVE_DEPRECATED set.
The now-deprecated files will be listed just before this warning. They aren’t removed automatically in case there’s installed software still linking to them. If you are running only dports software, and are up to date with all of it, you are probably fine to remove these files:
make -DREMOVE_DEPRECATED upgrade
If you have software you compiled yourself some time ago, it may have linked to these old files. One way to search for that would be to use find to find all executable files that are in particular directories, and then use ldd to see what shared libraries are used by each executable:
find /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin -type f -perm +a+x -print -exec ldd {} \;
… and then grep for the names of the deprecated files. You’ll get a bunch of “not a dynamic executable” errors when you do this because it’s a rough example I did for this post, but you can always pipe the stdout of the command to a file and review later. If you do turn up any executables linked to the deprecated files – recompile!
(If you have a better find string or strategy, please comment.)
Why Ravenports?
Eerielinux has a new Ravenports article: Ravenports explained: Why not just join XYZ? I am linking it now because it’s DragonFly related, but it does touch on all the BSDs. It reviews the reasons for Ravenports – and its competitive advantages, if you look at it a certain way. It’s a followup to the Ravenports update and review linked here previously.
35th CCC today, streaming
The 35th Chaos Communication Congress starts today. (I linked to the multi-day schedule.) It’s one of the few places you can see hacking, from the ground up. So, even if you aren’t near it, you can still see it, live.
Lazy Reading for 2018/12/23
Merry almost Christmas! I hope you like reading, because I’m linking to some large collections of text.
- No Starch Press “Hacking for the Holidays” Humble Bundle. If Lazy Reading isn’t enough text for you, this will get you much, much more.
- From Hi-Fi to CLI. One of the authors of VisiCalc, blogging. He’s done a lot of writing in the last few decades. (indirectly via)
- Unfortunately with Mastodon, there’s no way (that I know of) to link to this stream of “edvent calendar” posts with various ed(1) tips, so I’m sending you to the main aggregation and you’ll have to scroll back.
- Author Robin Sloan is reading a translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight live on YouTube at 3 PM Eastern time today.
- A rediscovered mainframe game from 1974 might be the first text adventure. A comment on the source link mentions MULTICS games are available now.
- Control Keys. (via)
- A State of Sin. CERN has an artist in residence program?
- Searching the Creative Internet. I have the same problem; so much crap to swim in to get to the real joy.
- Related: Blogging and me. (via)
- Rocky Bergen’s Retro Computer Papercraft.
- Pro Office Calculator Is A Totally Normal Calculator.
- r/UnixArt.
- Small stupid things that make up my dev environment. (via)
- My small vim and tmux flow cheatsheet. (via)
- Magic Printer Cartridge Paintbrush.
- Why I’m usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us.
- nest, Xephyr, ChromeOS, synergy, and syncing some clipboards.
- Unix Folklore: curiosities from inside the Unix Room at Bell Labs. (via)
- Working around an irritating recent XTerm change in behavior.
- Publicly accessible .ENV files.
- Star Control II. A deep dive into a great game – that you can play now.
BSD Now 277: Nmap level up
BSD Now episode 277 touches on a bunch of things like updating FreeBSD from 11 to 12, and Knuth history, but it links to some helpful directions for using nmap, which I think is one of those basic tools that should be in everyone’s arsenal, along with wireshark.
Lazy Reading for 2018/12/02
It’s a classic Lazy Reading this week – some deep dives, some history, some stuff that will take a while to explore. Enjoy!
- CGSociety, computer rendering showplace. Makes me think of the old Bud Plant Catalog. (via)
- Underrated websites. You may come back to this. (via)
- The recent ACM/IEEE Super Computing conference reassembled a Cray 1, serial number 1.
- Right to Repair takes a step forward. (via)
- The Twenty-Five-Year Journey of Magic: The Gathering. (via, via)
- Tiling Window Managers, a video. (via)
- What’s hiding in your PDF? A PDF used to just be encapsulated PostScript, really. It’s been stretched much, much farther. (also via)
- Sourdough culture components worldwide, mapped. (via)
- peek-for-tmux – the most smallest useful tmux trick you’ll use. Peek into a text file at the command line, but keep the prompt accessible. (via)
- eDEX-UI, futuristic interface. (via)
- Lessons on exec from 4:40PM on a Friday.
- Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine. Sort of an alien architecture to me at this point, years later. (via)
- The story of the ZX81, in tweets. (via I lost it, sorry)
- The special effects for the computer display in “Escape From New York”. (via)
- Why Chips Die. Proportionally related to user need, of course. (via)
DragonFly, terminfo, and tmux
I’m actually surprised this wasn’t already there: Aaron Li added terminfo entries for tmux and tmux-256color into DragonFly’s terminfo(5) file. I’ve been using tmux without issue for some time on DragonFly… but I may not be exercising it as hard as I could.
In Other BSDs for 2018/11/17
Still lots of BSD stuff happening.
- DWM on FreeBSD, monocle not showing up.
- Play Stardew Valley on OpenBSD.
- Project Trident RC3 available. (via)
- NetBSD 8.0 ? dmesg?????? / KOF2018-NetBSD. Yeah, I know it’s all question marks. Something in my publishing chain doesn’t understand all character sets. (via)
- FreeBSD 12.0-b4 available.
- Capsicum.
- FreeNAS.
- Polish BSD User Group OpenBSD Gaming talk (slides, PDF, Polish) (via)
- Linux and FreeBSD networking. (via)
- The Source History of Cat. (via)
- FreeBSD 10.4 EOL.
- Valuable News – 2018/11/11. You can tell my backlog size from this.
- ZFS Boot Environments Reloaded at NLUUG Autumn Conference 2018.
- OpenBSD in Stereo with Linux VFIO.
- Play “Crazy Train” through your APU2 speaker. This prompted the “Someday you will need this” tag for this post.
- pfSense with a hardware identifier.
- The Tor Project needs a data architect.
- Assembly language on OpenBSD amd64+arm64. (via)
Web browsers on DragonFly
For better or worse, there’s different browser options out there, especially for non-mainstream platforms. You know what I mean. DragonFly developer tuxillo has put together a helpful page listing options and how to get them to build.
Hammer2 reminder: bulkfree makes some noise
For future edification: If you have HAMMER2 installed, the bulkfree operation will create console/dmesg activity even when nothing is wrong, to show operations are happening.