I am late in mentioning this, because it was added just before the DragonFly 4.8 branch: there’s a new ‘efisetup(8)‘ script added to DragonFly. Use to to perform a complete a UEFI-bootable installation to a given disk.
I’m very UNIXy this week.
- Have You Played… Event[0]? Sounds like a simulation of IRC.
- TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO GOOD, REALLY BAD HEAVY METAL ALBUM COVERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. (via)
- The Best Metal on Bandcamp: March 2017. A palate cleanser from the last link.
- Google Open Source Docs. Everyone releases their code, but not their methodology, which is arguably as important. (via)
- Windows disk-loading/code-swapping. I remember this from Apple ][ days; there is no modern equivalent that I can think of.
- The creator of Dwarf Fortress doesn’t really like to play games like Dwarf Fortress. (via)
- Research UNIX V8, V9 and V10 made public by Alcatel-Lucent. (via)
- Related: What’s the earliest UNIX (or unix-like) OS that is both easily available and can run on x86?
- How to learn Unix/Linux and Lesser known but still handy Linux commands. Essentially command line tool education.
- Zero Terminal. Another item for my teeny computer fetish. (via)
Your useful tip of the week: Setting the root login’s ‘full name’ to identify the machine that sent email. This makes so much sense. (via)
Odd batch of links this week.
- Not ‘other BSD’, but I didn’t have another good place for it: DragonFly 4.8 release discussion.
- LionBSD. Security-oriented FreeBSD packaging, at first look. (via)
- Changing Send/Receive Bandwidth on FreeBSD.
- Setting the Record Straight: containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs. (via)
- The FreeBSD phone link from BSDNow, earlier this week, led me to these two other projects: FreeBSD Robot + Teensy 3.1 and MiniBSD laptop computer.
- *BSD for Dell XPS 13 (9350)
- OPNsense 17.1.4 released.
- vmm(4)/vmd(8) support for seabios and linux guests.
- “Httpd and Relayd Mastery” off to copyedit.
- NetBSD and Summer of Code, FreeBSD and Summer of Code. Deadline is in a few days!
- Upcoming NYCBUG events – next meeting is this Wednesday.
Your BSD-related fiction book of the week (year? decade?) :’git commit murder‘ is out, set at a (fictional) BSD convention.
Now that we’re past the DragonFly 4.8 release, Francois Tigeot has added an update to the i915 driver, bringing it to match what’s in the Linux 4.7.10 kernel. He also committed Peeter Must’s port of the vga_switcheroo module.
This week’s BSDNow has no interview, but covers most every BSD to some extent, and talks about something I find super-interesting: a BSD phone.
KnoxBUG is meeting tonight – there’s no speaker scheduled, so it will be open discussion.
DragonFly 4.8 is officially released! Download from your nearest mirror, where it should appear in the next 24 hours. If you’re upgrading your existing install, you can use the generic instructions in the release notes or in my users@ email; whichever you click first. Don’t forget to ‘pkg upgrade’!
Old-school UNIX and games this week.
- Managing an open source project. (via)
- There was a Coke machine connected to the ARPANET in the 70’s. The local version of this has a Beastie on the front. (via)
- Swan – GNU/Cygwin Xfce Desktop. At first glance, “XFCE for Windows” is a much more clear title. Plus the inevitable bash shell, which seems to be a good enough simulation of Unix for most people. (via)
- Making Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with 253 cooks and no head chef.
- OCR typography, a more extensive subject than I expected.
- Sunsetting SixXS. Time for service providers to put up.
- No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter. I hate modal popups. (via)
- Xfce bug: “default desktop screen causes damage to monitor” Cat problem, and not the one in /bin. (via)
- Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg. (via)
- A Second Life for very old C programs. (via)
More thinking topics than version changes this week, which is interesting.
- Comprehensive and biased comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. It’s the PDF transcript from the FOSDEM 2017 “My BSD sucks less than yours” presentation, linked previously. (via)
- OPNsense 17.1.3 released.
- Ask HN: Why is BSD becoming more popular in embedded devices? Lots of half-informed theorizing there.
- The BSD family tree. Not new, but the discussion at the source link is more to look at, along with other links.
- Upgrading notes for pfSense 2.3.x users, where 2.3.x < 2.3.3.
- tech@openbsd.org: regarding OpenSSL Licence change. Nothing goes well with OpenSSL. Hey, it rhymes! (via)
- golang now has native support for OpenBSD’s pledge(2).
- “And then the murders began.” – applied to tech BSD books.
- TrueNAS and ZFS terms and explanations.
An article about a semctl(2) bug on DragonFly, “Make DragonFlyBSD great again!“, has popped up a few times, in comments here, some online forums, and in IRC. I’m linking to it so that I can also say: read all the way to the end and notice the date. The bug was fixed more than 6 months ago. This is not a current security problem, but a (enjoyable) description of how someone in Poland documented it.
Nobody reads anything but headlines, geez.
BSDNow 186 gets back into the convention grind after last week’s news about new roles: coverage of the recent AsiaBSDCon, and an interview of Philipp Buehler.
The last time SSH was updated in DragonFly, a DragonFly-specific customization, “PasswordAuthentication No”, was reverted to the default. This meant password logins through SSH worked on DragonFly – which is normal for perhaps every other UNIX-ish operating system, but DragonFly has traditionally defaulted to requiring a key out-of-the-box.
It has been fixed, and you can change the setting back. This only affected DragonFly-master from August through March. 4.6 users are unaffected.
Michael W. Lucas will be presenting at SemiBUG tomorrow, talking about the OpenBSD web stack.
Technical details week for Lazy Reading.
- Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams talks about simulating the most complex magic system ever. (via)
- mdp – A command-line based markdown presentation tool.
"ffscreencastis a shell wrapper forffmpegthat allows fool-proof screen recording via the command line.” (via)- 802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks.
- What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer. (via)
- CIA’s vim user tips published by WikiLeaks. (via)
- How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons.
- Today in OBEY.
- Windowmaker 0.95.8 released. I still like it after all this time. (via)
- A game where Character Creation is the Whole Game.
- Build your first PC in PC Building Simulator’s demo. Bizarre, but somehow makes sense.
- Names that Make Computers Go Crazy. (via)
- Discussion of analog timing sources on NANOG. Interesting precisely because it’s not Internet-visible, not directly.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Haha, one of the world’s best tea houses is in my town. It’s Leaf Tea Bar, and Niraj is one of the nicest guys. His prices are reasonable for the quality of the tea, too.
Your related bug link of the week: Teeth of the DragonFly. (via)
Much better than last week, but there wasn’t any hurricane-force winds this week – which helps.
- Complexity and Strategy. Talks about Microsoft products, but think about this in terms of any long-lived operating system code base – e.g. any BSD, or specifically OpenBSD given their correctness goals. (via)
- Freenas 10 (now called Freenas Corral) released – the press release.
- pfSense OpenVPN unattended deploy options?
- Intel’s ACPICA is now available under a BSD license. Doing the right thing.
- New mandoc -mdoc -T markdown converter
- time scrolling. Remapping keyboard/mouse events in X.
- /usr/bin/time: not the command you think you know. Linked here because the example is from a BSD environment. (via)
- NetBSD 7.1 released.
- iXsystems Attends AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- “What exactly is BSD?“
- openbsd changes of note 6, openbsd changes of note 7
- EuroBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- vBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- Relayd and the Next Tech Book. Related to the next link,
- Get your name in “Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition”
BSDNow 185 has existing host Kris Moore performing his last episode (because $dayjob) and Benedict Reuschling coming in to replace him. Allan Jude is unchanged, of course. As they correctly point out, 185 weeks of on-time video content is a tremendous achievement so far. This week’s episode is 55 minutes of talking with the old and the new staff.
Sepherosa Ziehau went to AsiaBSDCon 2017 and gave a talk on his work with DragonFly’s networking. He’s published a report of his trip, which comes with a link to his paper, his presentation, and pictures of who he met.
Note that the PDF and the Powerpoint slides links are different; one is the paper, one is the talk. The Powerpoint slides contain the benchmarks linked here in comments, previously.
Matthew Dillon picked up a number of different NVMe SSD drives, and tested them. He wrote up the entire test, but the immediate summary is: buy Samsung.
I always attributed speed issues to writing transaction history, but: Matthew Dillon discovered HAMMER was repeating itself when writing to disk. Fixing that issue doubled write speed. This fix is in 4.6 and the upcoming release.