UNIXish – DragonFly BSD Digest

For fun: I found a terminal only 2 years younger than me. If you look very closely at this ADM-3A, you will see the prompt is for DragonFly. I need to retr0bright this thing.

2020/02/152020/02/15

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/15

UNIX history as an accidental theme this week.

Update: NetBSD 9.0 is released.

Are there analogues to libxo out there?
Unix Heritage Wiki. (via)
Rigs of rods: physic vehicles simulator. (OpenBSD gaming)
PF dynamic IP lists. I have the same question.
Six FreeBSD terminal games. Probably other BSDs too. (via)
UNIX Review Early 80’s Ad.
Cycling / bike trips and opensource.
Rob Landley about the /usr split. (via)
awesome cli apps: A curated list of command line apps. Look for them in ports. (via)
Using PKGSRC on Manjaro Linux aarch64 Pinebook-pro. (via)
FreeNAS versus Unraid – Grudge Match. (via)
Dependencies and maintainers. Tehcnically BSD related.

2019/12/25

How many levels of plug-in can you find?

It’s probably going to be quiet for at least a few days because of the Christmas holiday, though I’ll of course have the normal weekend features up.

In the meantime, here’s something to ponder: this post about tmux and plugins for it led me to thinking about plugins in general. The pkg system is sort of a plugin scheme for BSDs, much like apt for Debian, yum, etc. Each language has its own libraries to load and plugins to manage past that, like Perl’s CPAN. Nowadays, applications have their own plugins. For instance, a system with WordPress installed with PHP installed with PHP plugins required with WordPress plugins that also require given PHP libraries. WordPress manages keeping itself and its plugins up to date, but not the underlying PHP installation. You can get something similar with Perl along with the Perl-specific package updates, through cpanm. Or, npm, which seems to be its own world of constant flux.

How many levels could this go? Like running multiple emulators within each other, how many levels of plugin could you achieve? There’s probably a series of levels proceeding from tedious to barely maintainable to ridiculous.

2019/11/092019/11/07

In Other BSDs for 2019/11/09

Aaaand back to normal.

FreeBSD 12.1 is released.
ChiBUG is meeting November 12th. I’ll post a reminder.
U2F support in OpenSSH HEAD. Excellent news. (via)
What can software authors do to help Linux distributions and BSDs package their software?
Linux VS open source UNIX. (via)
Stabilization of the ptrace(2) threads continued.
Valuable News – 2019/11/04.
EuroBSDCon 2019 videos available. OpenBSD oriented, but there’s a full playlist for the conference.
OPNsense 19.7.6 released.
New openbsdstore available with 6.6 T-shirts. More wearable than CDs.
Will the Real UNIX Please Stand Up? An abbreviated but decent history.
FuryBSD 12.0-XFCE-11-06-2019-01 released.
asr has been renamed to stub in unwind.conf(5).
Linux Professional Institute Releases BSD Specialist Certification – re BSD Certification Group.
My peertube OpenBSD gaming channel. Peertube is getting popular.
Dead Cells running on OpenBSD.
MidnightBSD 1.2 now available.

2019/11/022019/11/01

In Other BSDs for 2019/11/02

I still haven’t caught up, natch, but not going to miss this week!

Humble Book Bundle: Linux & BSD Bookshelf by No Starch Press. Includes books I’ve linked before; you get a lot of material for only $15.
NYCBUG is having an installfest this Wednesday, 11/6. Go just to see what oddball hardware someone drags out.
The Call for Participation for the FOSDEM 2020 BSD devroom is up. You’ve got about 3 weeks to get your proposal in.
FreeBSD 2019Q2 status report.
FreeBSD 11.2 EOL as of a few days ago.
RPI/Pinebook and BSD compatibility, a current status.
Semibug topics for next year. Keep going through the thread; A HAMMER2 talk would be nice.
Speaking of Semibug, the November 19th meeting may be moved. I’ll post when I hear of the final spot, too.
bzflag, runs on any BSD, still active.
Anyone use FreeNAS for file server?
Arm to Deliver CHERI-based Prototype to Tackle Security Threats. Related to CHERIBSD. (via)
Valuable News – 2019/10/28.
How to fuck up software releases. Linked cause the DragonFly release document is essentially a list of ways to keep me from repeating the mistakes I made on the last release.
Stabilization of the ptrace(2) threads.
EuroBSDCon 2019, Norway – video. (via)
Unix: A History and a Memoir. (via)

2019/09/142019/09/13

In Other BSDs for 2019/09/14

Still a backlog, no matter how much I link.

HAMBSD. (via)
vBSDCon 2019 trip report from iXSystems.
Sponsorships open for SNMP Mastery. A summary post, too.
Agenda for the next SEMIBUG meeting on the 17th.
Using FreeBSD with Ports (2/2): Tool-assisted updating.
Cool, but obscure X11 tools. More suggestions in the source link.
soso: A Simple Unix-like Operating System. For comparison. (via)
More on FreeBSD Refcount Overflows. (via)
Rumpkernel assisted fuzzing of the NetBSD file system kernel code in userland. (via)
Why (and how) we use OpenBSD at VidiGuard. (via)
TrueNAS 11.2 and FreeNAS 11.2-U5 now available.
scripts for monitoring vulns in FreeBSD jails.
Valuable News – 2019/09/09.
OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (7th Gen).
[ports] rss2email update, save config before updating.
DoH disabled by default in Firefox. You should do this everywhere.

2019/08/172019/08/10

In Other BSDs for 2019/08/17

This is a somewhat pre-made post coming off a week on the road, so I packed it chock-full.

The UNIX Philosophy in 2019. (via)
Converse to previous: Brian Will – Replacing the Unix tradition.
Summer Sun and microsystems.
How does a “real” Unix system feel compared to *BSDs and Linux?
GSoC 2019 Report Update: Incorporating the memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme into NetBSD.
Valuable News – 2019/08/05.
Removal of route-collector mode in bgpd(8).
tpmr(4) driver added to -current.
OPNsense 19.7.2 released.
Linux kernel’s inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure. Linked cause you know what performs well under memory restriction? Any BSD. (via)
Devine Lu Linvega’s Uses This entry. Interesting to see his workstation details because his workstation is 2 machines, with Plan 9 variations, and segregated on work vs. distraction. (and sometimes FreeBSD.)
NetBSD light weight theme.
Wanting to install Trident to boot from my USB stick…
LibreSSL 3.0.0 Released. (via)
Play Windows Games On FreeBSD. Encapsulating setup. (via)

2019/07/072019/07/06

Lazy Reading for 2019/07/07

No unplanned theme evolved this week, but that’s OK.

Inside the Race To (finally) Bring Pinball Into the Internet Age. (via)
A Fun Saturday Survey: UNIX Pronunciation.
Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer. (via)
Learning Synths. (via)
Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Sixteen – The Tide Turns.
Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Seventeen – Ape Expectations.
XScreenSaver 5.43 is out.
evangelion UI. (via)
At one point, Nashville had two time zones, simultaneously, based on political affiliation. (read contents of patch)
More Wumpus history.
ROMchip, a journal of game histories. (via)
The Past, Present, and Future of AI Art. (lost the source, sorry)
[Full-time] Operations Engineer at Internet Archive. A worthwhile job.
How I dropped Dropbox. Worthwhile for thinking about pulling out of any service.
How NTP Works. (via)
Fractal drawing tools. Tools to draw fractals, not tools made of fractals.

Your listening link of the week: Kerrang’s 50 best metal bands of the last decade. You (may have) heard it here first on #1. (via)

2019/06/162019/06/14

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/16

Inadvertent theme this week: games. Yet somehow I didn’t include a roguelike? Dang.

Why USB plugs aren’t/weren’t reversible.
10 Awesome Ways to Upcycle Old Devices With a Raspberry Pi. Some nice connecting of analog controls on these projects. (via)
A bug so cool that the development team was reluctant to fix it.
Open Source Game Clones. I seem to link to this every two years or so. Still iffy on it. (via)
Notes on recent games: nifty little experiments.
The fate of an archive. Linked cause I still have a pile of CRO2 bootleg music cassettes that I don’t think exist digitally, anywhere.
The Church of the Subgenius’s Salvation Pack is the best $35 I ever spent.
The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons. (via)
A Gopher server in sh. (via)
Textreme. The Most! Exciting! Text! Editor! EVER! (via)
tokyo60 keyboards. (via)
HHKB layouts, related to the last link.
Tokyo Mechanical Keyboard Meetup Vol.6. (via)
Day of the Tentacle, a history.
A Very Brief History of Gamebooks (up to 1979).
Screenshots from developers & Unix people (2002). Also, the 2015 followup. It may surprise nobody that the average answer is “bunch of terminals and a web browser”. (via)
Advent of Computing: Episode 5 Notes – How much has UNIX changed? (via)

2019/05/052019/05/03

Lazy Reading for 2019/05/05

I’m really loading up with links this weekend; make some time to read today.

The Unitech UNIX posters. (via)
Floating point precision as physical control. I linked to the underlying story before, but I like the idea that compilers should have Winamp-style skins.
Illustrations of Imaginary Cyberpunk Gadgets. (via)
Mythological Monsters. Try bookfinder.com or isbn.nu if you’re searching for old books; Amazon bought all the others.
A-EON Talks About The Future of The Amiga Platform.
Hull: An alternative to shell that I’ll never have time to implement . I appreciate the honesty in the title. (via)
Why You Can’t Trust Network Time. It’s a self-advertising story, but not invalid. There’s interesting details in the source link comments.
The WIRED Guide to Open Source Software. Unfortunately glosses over BSD. (via)
How I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape. (via)
Cidco MailStation as a Z80 Development Platform.
Richard Garriott de Cayeux; creates Ultima, becomes a robot.
The Beginner’s Vim Cheat Sheet. (via)
Intermediate Vim. (via)
…and in the end there will be the command line. (via)
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019. (via)
Real and Strange ICD-10 Codes. (via)

2019/04/202019/04/19

In Other BSDs for 2019/04/20

Nicely mixed topics this week.

It’s several years old, but worth viewing: .ike’s presentation of “Shell Fu” from NYCBUG, as video. Also: May event speaker needed. (via)
The FreeBSD-12 support model.
“OpenVMS vs. Unix” (antagonists or sisters?).
Previous link via Nixers Newsletter 121.
Back in the Day: UNIX, Minix and Linux. The author rewrote wump(6) for 4.3 BSD.
Looking for a worm and encrypted storage solution. FreeNAS + Greentec.
OpenSSH 8.0 released. (via)
Create a dedicated user for ssh tunneling only. OpenBSD as the example platform.
Deploying munin-node with drist. Probably could be done on any BSD.
Valuable News – 2019/04/15.
Next Polish BSD user group meeting: April 25th. I’ll post a reminder.
Moving your IMAP server to a third party: FastMail. FastMail is a mail host I’ve heard recommendations for multiple times.
GhostBSD 19.04 Now Available. (via)
docbook2mdoc-1.0.0 released.
t2k19 Hackathon Report: On rsync, ssh, and ports cruft.
t2k19 Hackathon Report: unwinding in Taipei.
Setting up a new Dovecot server on FreeBSD with an OSX mail.app client.
Announcing the pkgsrc-2019Q1 release.
BSD Link Roundup 4.12.
battery consuming battery software.

2019/03/242019/03/22

Lazy Reading for 2019/03/24

Lots of link clustering this week.

Porting PuTTY to Windows on Arm, related to PuTTY 0.71 released. (via and via)
Also: Pretty PuTTY – Better PuTTY Settings. (via)
A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster. I am not sure what this really gets you in practice, but it’s neat to see Plan 9 used like Plan 9 – meaning, across multiple machines. (via)
A dedicated tablet for running 80s SGI demos! The Alice 4. (via)
Repacking Social Media Into 1980s Nostalgia. (via)
Before Adventure, Part 1: Hide and Seek (1972) and Before Adventure, Part 2: Mugwump, Hurkle, Snark (1973). Surely you have heard those words before.
Also Before Adventure, Part 3: Caves (1973). “Visualize you are living in 1973, where there are almost no computer games at all…” Eeek!
How I’m able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim. A crash course in using the heck out of Vim snippets. (Thanks, Heiko Kuhrt)
bpkg is a bash package manager. Everything gets its own package manager now. (via)
The Chinese ThinkPad rebuilding industry – I’ve mentioned it before. (via)
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Programmer migration patterns. ‘And I would have had to add a fifth category of programmer specialization, “configuring emacs.”‘
Timeline of events with the Domain Name System. (via)
The types of attachments we see in malware email (March 2019 edition) and What sorts of good email attachments our users get (March 2019 edition).
Do do this at home, home automation evolution.

2019/03/162019/03/15

In Other BSDs for 2019/03/16

There’s a number of long-running BSD series out there nowadays, some of which I’m linking to here. That’s a nice change.

FreeBSD Desktop – Part 15 – Configuration – Fonts & Frameworks. (via)
Nixers Newsletter 117.
“Just picked this up today!” (a SPARC laptop)
package of the moment: tview and tcell. For terminal interface building.
Add a TLS layer to your Gopher server.
Tribblix, a Illumos… derivative? I didn’t know about it until now. It’s retro.
TextSuggest, an accessibility tool, ported to OpenBSD.
Peculiarities about Unix’s statfs() or statvfs() API.
OpenSSH, PAM and user names.
OPNsense 19.1.4 released.
End-of-February Update. BSD book progress.
Well, it’s been a while – falling in love with OpenBSD again.
mandoc-1.14.5 released.
Ghost in the Shell – Part 4.
Valuable News – 2019/03/11.
Slay the Spire with libGDX fork & GOG Midweek Sale.

2019/02/102019/02/09

Lazy Reading for 2019/02/10

No theme this week!

Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway.
Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld. (Part 1, if you want making-of.
The new Kermit Project. (via)
Transfer your files with Kermit. Maybe should be an ‘In Other BSDs’ item.
Modern LZ Compression. (via)
A small notebook for a system administrator. Individually valuable components without worry for the whole. (via)
“Blogging is now an elder game“. (via)
How I Got My Attention Back. (via)
A little appreciation for Vim’s ‘g’ command.
HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points. (via)
Pocket guide to UNIX, still relevant after 35 years. (via)
Perl 11. A talk about Perl and RPerl, which I hadn’t heard of.

2019/02/022019/02/01

In Other BSDs for 2019/02/02

Inadvertent theme: release news.

Our Software Dependency Problem. Hard thinking about something many, many people don’t think hard enough about. This talks about software, but it’s directly analogous to ports/dports/pkgsrc. I’m leading with this even though it’s not directly about BSD, cause it affects anyone using a packaging system.
I mentioned it before, but FOSDEM 2019, happening right now in Brussels, has a BSD Devroom with a lot of things happening in it; you could spend your entire Saturday in there.
And something that has me quite excited: The Pinebook Pro, among other hardware announcements for FOSDEM. BSD is being mentioned right there as something to install on it, rather than as an aftermarket hack like with Chromebooks – heartwarming, I tell you. (via)
Unix flowers. Look for birthtoken while you are at it. (via)
FreeNAS has Plugins? A casual look at it seems to push some features into pfSense territory.
Next NYC*BUG: 2/6.
OPNsense 19.1-RC1 released. Wait, 19.1 is out.
join-ing any open wifi network is now possible.
FreeBSD Training @ SCaLE 17x (March 8, 2019) (via)
NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor. (via)
ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE (first public release). (via)
Valuable News – 2019/01/18 and Valuable News – 2019/01/25 and Valuable News – 2019/02/01.
HardenedBSD 2018Q4 Status Report. (via)
Florian Obser on unwind(8).
MightnightBSD Roadmap.
SoloBSD 19.01-STABLE.
fnaify 1.2 released.
At The Gates, 4x strategy game running on BSD. (via)

2019/01/202019/01/17

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)