Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
If your DragonFly machine is using CARP, and you don’t want CARP messing with your default routes, the sysctl net.inet.carp.setrou
This week’s Lazy Reading came together in perhaps 10 minutes.
- Mouse cursor disappears when my refrigerator turns off. (via)
- Roll20.net. Role-playing game tools. (via)
- choose boring bugs.
- tilted abstractions. I feel this way about many web frameworks.
- You can register your child’s name in any language providing you use any Unicode character.
- Unix as IDE. (via)
- Cisco config -> HTML converter.
- Mapping colors. This could be very useful. (via)
- gruvbox. (also via)
- vim.sensible. (via)
- History of Xenix – Microsoft’s Forgotten Unix-Based Operating System. (via)
- Internet Security Exposure 2016. I like the map, of course.
Your unrelated music video of the week: Danny Brown – When It Rain. The music may not be what you are used to, but I like how “damaged VHS tape” is being used as a visual design choice. (via)
I manage to avoid a topic this week, really. That’s good!
- #! /usr/bin/env considered harmful
- The
#!magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours. (via) - The Future of Procedural Generation. For games.
- So many cow jokes. (via)
- Munchausen Numbers and How to Find Them. (via)
- Showing The Weather In Tmux. (via)
- The Festival Floppies. Anything named “Dinosorceror” must be good. (via)
- A Very Long Post On How to Become a Creator. The last paragraph in Advice #1 is the important bit.
- Dither me this.
- Oh shit, git! (via)
Tomohiro Kusumi is thinking about porting it. Follow the whole thread for details.
I may have mentioned this in part before, but Matthew Dillon has a brief script to reload pf when an interface IP changes. I’m linking it here in case it’s useful in the future.
Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.
Off-the-beaten-path links this week. Strap in!
- The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99. (via)
- Magnetic core memory reborn. (via)
- Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance – Bunnie Huang.
- Why I’m Suing the US Government – also Bunnie Huang.
- Old, special phone numbers. I’ve used 800-444-4444 a lot when tracing lines.
- The Wanton Role-Playing (WaRP) and Mini-Six game systems. (via)
- Brief interviews with very small publishers. (via)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. (via)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers. (via previous and here)
- A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute. A PDF, and infinitely useful. (via)
- I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But I Miss My CDs. (via I lost it, sorry)
- This used to be Ethernet. (via)
- turn up the hope (report from the HOPE convention from Ted Unangst)
- VimGIFs. (via)
- HyperTerm, an open-source in-browser terminal emulator. (via)
Your unrelated animated GIF of the week: Permanent Wink.
A useful tip: if your DragonFly machine isn’t usually on 24/7 (e.g. a laptop, not a server), you should move your Hammer cleanup from 3 AM to sometime when the computer is normally on.
karu.pruun shares a story of manually installing DragonFly on a UEFI-booting machine. In this case, it’s a Macbook, though there’s other non-fruit UEFI machines out there?
That’s one tip per subject, really. If you need to set up a ‘video’ group for xorg, here’s the one-liner to do so. If PulseAudio annoys you, which is not uncommon, ‘chmod -x /usr/local/bin/pulseaudio’ and it’ll go away.
This is limited to some users of specific Intel video chipsets, but: if you get odd screen artifacts in X, the ‘vesa’ driver may work just fine for you. Or turn acceleration off. Or set ‘drm.i915.enable_execlists=0’ according to zrj on #dragonflybsd.
(Updated to reflect all the answers in the thread and elsewhere.)
If you didn’t already know about it, you will find this useful: DragonFly has a tuning(7) man page, about getting the best performance from your system. Matthew Dillon recently updated the man page with some tips about SSD setup.
There are USB devices out there that are sort of like a mouse, as in they work as a pointing device, but they don’t show up as a mouse device. For example, the PowerMate USB Multimedia Controller. It’s possible to pipe the events from this or similar ‘weird’ devices to sysmouse, and use it the way you’d expect, with this fix from user tautology.
Did you know there’s a rescue image, created with crunchgen, in DragonFly? If your system can boot to single-user mode, you can use it to at least manipulate data on disk – it includes mined as a simple small editor. (Since vi assumes /usr is mountable.) This rescue image now includes undo, so you can back out changes on a Hammer volume.
If you get “libGL error: failed to open drm device: Permission denied” when using direct rendering, make sure to add your user id to the ‘video’ group.
DragonFly versions of TeX have been available for some time now. However, Nelson Beebe, who is part of the TeX project, is having trouble building some related binaries – asymptote and clisp. He could use help from anyone interested, to match up with this summer’s release of TeX 2016.
If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.