UNIXish – DragonFly BSD Digest

2021/03/02

New games on DragonFly

New to DragonFly, but not new to games. Aarom LI has added several old–school BSD games back to DragonFly mostly via NetBSD. It’s ching(6), gomoku(6), monop(6), and cgram(6).

2021/01/312021/01/30

Lazy Reading for 2021/01/31

Accidental theme of UNIX-ish history this week.

Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it, internationalization edition. But are they clacky?
mouSTer Is a Universal USB-Mouse Adapter for Retro Computers. (via)
Examining a technology sample kit: IBM components from 1948 to 1986.
Folklore Generator. (via)
Things I’ve learned about A/UX. I think not a BSD so it goes here.
XTerm does graphics! (sort of). (via)
50 Years of Text Games: 1974: Super Star Trek.
Also from 1974: Moon Rocket Landing, for a calculator.
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is still developed and modern in 2021. Nostalgia for some readers. (via)
OpenVMS CDE Desktop Remote X session GUI. Linked cause it’s unexpected. (via)
Ben Zotto reconstructs a corrupted Apple II game he made in elementary school. Neat but multi-tweet stories on Twitter are just an easy way to lose information. (via)
The select command.
The Retro Mobile Gaming Database. (via)
The Subcreation Theory of J.R.R. Tolkien. (via)

Your unrelated music of the week: The Most Noble Adventures of Erebor’s Finest Son, In His Quest To Butcher Orcs And Save The World. “Metal, minus those boring verses, choruses and solos, thus leaving only the most metal of song components; riffs and slams.” It’s bebop in metal form, and if you understand that joke you are a music nerd and it’s wonderful. (via)

2021/01/27

nanosleep and POSIX

POSIX is a sort of standard for UNIX maintained by the IEEE. Most UNIX-ish systems implement it to some extent, though I am not sure to what degree. There’s an open source version of the standard, and Aaron LI made nanosleep match up.

2021/01/232021/01/21

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/23

It’s the week of Very Long and Excited Page Titles that Give Me Long Link Lines.

FreeBSD Xfce4 on VMware Installation Guide. (via)
HardenedBSD 2020/12 Status Report. (via)
Creating Comfy FreeBSD Jails Using Standard Tools. (via)
Just realized this… Dennis Ritchie is the true innovator! Posted for the single comment.
Unix time is in its fourth quarter.
BSD license violations. (read down)
Exploring Swap on FreeBSD. (via)
Tiny PDP11 – Intro. BSD 2.11, VT102, cutest ever. (via)
Heidi Stettner had a dog named Biff, and that’s why mail notification exists.
Star Wars PDP-11/45. Not sure if it’s BSD or not. (via)
Accented characters using a US keyboard layout on OpenBSD.
OpenRadiant (3D modeller) – Binary distribution advice.
FreeBSD Desktop – Part 22 – Configuration – Aero Snap Extended.
Block spammers/abusive IPs with Pf-badhost in OpenBSD.
At a look at helloSystem 0.3.0 – Full on Mac-a-licious!
Minecraft ? 1.13 working on OpenBSD.
Valuable News – 2021/01/18.

2021/01/15

Chat without servers

I always thought IRC was pretty decentralized, but I didn’t realize talk(1) was designed to work machine-to-machine. That means in theory that if you have a talk(1) binary on your machine, you could chat directly to anyone else with the same binary, even on a different platform. Since 4.3BSD! Anyway, I only realized this because of this recent bugfix thanks to Dan Cross.

2021/01/092021/01/07

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/09

This bulked up fast this week.

2021/01/022020/12/31

In Other BSDs for 2021/01/02

I am happy to be in the new year.

Most important this week: Chatting About TLS and Orcs, an online NYCBUG speaker event with Michael W. Lucas. RSVP so you can see.
On the way to the first thousand BSD-powered computers in the hardware database.
BSD Games for Linux. (via)
Trying OpenZFS 2 on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE.
Starting with FreeBSD jails.
A potted history of UNIX, just up to BSD. (via)
The FreeBSD 92. Nakatomi Socrates BSD Easter Egg. Followup from last week’s link. (Thanks, D. Ebdrup.)
The world’s chunkiest card reader.
Valuable News – 2020/12/28.
Use Android USB Tethering to Get Internet on FreeBSD. (via)
It feels like the broad Unix API is being used less these days.
A Big Sur look for WindowMaker on OpenBSD.

2020/11/072020/11/05

In Other BSDs for 2020/11/07

Virtual BUG meetings could be fun (see links); I’d like to attend even if it’s not local. If I can put aside time…

2020/08/082020/08/05

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/08

Fun variety this week.

2020/08/012020/07/30

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/01

That last link is around the corner from me.

2020/07/252020/07/23

In Other BSDs for 2020/07/25

Lots of old BSD this week.

Traditional Unix Toolchains. (via)
2.11BSD Original Tapes Recreation. Patch level 0. (via)
Related: Adding Networking to 2.11BSD pl 195.
Related if you want to do this yourself: SIMH Setup for 2.11BSD pl 0 Project.
How to do Pull-ups to pkgsrc-stable.
MidnightBSD 1.2.3 tagged.
Enable Duo 2FA for SSH on MidnightBSD. Useful for any BSD.
ZFS High Availability Filesystem With minio on FreeBSD. (via)
Valuable News – 2020/07/20.
April to June 2020 Status Report for FreeBSD.
I’m back into the grind of FreeBSD’s wireless stack and 802.11ac and Fixing up ath_rate_sample to actually work well with 11n.

2020/03/072020/03/06

In Other BSDs for 2020/03/07

I have not yet even gone through my BSD RSS feeds for some days and I already have plenty of links for you.

Test your TOR.
Census Program II, an evaluation of open-source software dependencies. Linux-specific, but applies to ports and BSD. (via)
Arena Unix II swim cap.
OpenBSD versus Prometheus (and Go).
Unix’s /usr split and standards (and practice) and The /bin versus /usr split and diskless workstations. Dates back to early BSD history.
tinyc.games. Should work on BSD? (via)
POWER to the People – Making FreeBSD First Class Citizen on POWER. (via)
FreeBSD Finally Removes GCC 4.2.1 from Base System after 13 Years. (via)
Release of pkg 1.13 for FreeBSD. (via)
Xorg 1.20.7 on HardenedBSD Comes with IE/RELRO+BIND_NOW/CFI/SafeStack Protections. (via)
Open source licenses: 2019 year in review. (via)
Eternal Terminal. (via)

2020/03/062020/03/06

Looking for the oldest terminal

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.