This is another one of those events that’s coming up too soon to wait on my normal BSD Saturday summary post. FOSDEM 2017 is looking for ‘BSD devroom’ talks, with the suggested length being 45 minutes. The deadline is December 10th, in 3 days. Submit a proposal if you will be there.
This is a minor thing, but I bet someone will find it useful: Chromium in dports has been patched to remove the forced dependency on dbus, which will be useful to anyone using DragonFly and a ‘lighter’ window manager. You still need to specify this preference in your make.conf to have it happen.
Matthew Dillon has made a number of locking improvements, that speeds up performance on systems with multiple processor. Here’s his commit with some numbers. Note that he’s testing with these built-in utilities. This probably helps multiple cores too, and some attention is shown to Hammer, too.
Dig up more on James Burke (linked below) if you can, and if you have the time. His Connections show was a delight.
- “This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Design” This clickbaity title is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley journalism… but I digress. (via)
- QoS when there is no congestion. (via)
- “Blame is apportioned appropriately.”
- James Burke and Connections kickstarted app. (via)
- “Weird, fun, wonderful, or useful automated phone numbers to call?” 1-800-444-4444 I use often at work, with a recorded message from a company that ceased to exist years ago. (via)
- Monads: Programmer’s Definition (via I think)
- The BASIC Issue with Retro Computers
- Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
- A vi-centric family tree of editors (2000) (via)
- Making umask work for you
- No more Solaris 12. A rumor. (via)
I have a pretty significant backlog of links for this week – to the point I had to open a separate browser window to sort out open tabs.
- TMUX Config Help on FreeBSD
- FreeBSD Foundation Contributions, Fundraising, and More
- Donating to the OpenBSD Foundation
- The Insecurity of OpenBSD. The article is from 2010 so reading comments at the source link may be better.
- BSD now 169: Scheduling your NetBSD, plus a comment. A followup to the second-most-recent BSDNow.
- Apple Releases macOS 10.12 Sierra Open Source Darwin Code. I don’t cover enough of the BSD side of MacOS, but it’s hard to separate from the Mac part.
- “Does OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD ship with binary blobs?” A perennial religious issue.
- Kristaps Dzonsons on pledge(2)
- TrueOS Pico – FreeBSD ARM/RPi Thin Clients (via)
- openbsd changes of note 2
OPNsense 16.7.9 releasedOPNsense 16.7.10 released See my note about backlog.- LiteBSD Brings 4.4BSD to PIC32 (via)
- Start the holidays off with FreeNAS 10 BETA 2!
- EuroBSDcon 2016 Presentation Slides (via)
- OpenBSD on PC Engines APU2 (via)
- The Saga of Concurrent DNS in Python, and the Defeat of the Wicked Mutex Troll (via)
If you are moving to the newest 1.8 version of Go, the language, you need to be on at least the last release of DragonFly 4.4, or 4.6. You’ve probably upgraded by now anyway, or at least I hope you have.
The cohabiting part of this week’s BSDNow is about someone running FreeBSD and Gentoo on the same ZFS drive. No interview but lots of material from the recent EuroBSDCon and MeetBSD conventions.
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.
Tennessee area BSD user group KnoxBUG is meeting tomorrow, and Warren Block will be the guest speaker. He’ll be talking about documentation. Going by the linked announcement, there will be both prizes and blame, so something for everyone!
It’s a Cyber Monday deal, so I can’t wait until the normal weekend roundup: BSD Magazine is offering their Devops with Chef on FreeBSD course for 30% off today only.
A lot of this I picked up in previous weeks, knowing that the U.S Thanksgiving holiday was going to either dry up all links or give me a crapload.
- Junkbot competition results. (via)
- It Came From Bell Labs – Story of the Plan 9 operating system. (via)
- Modelling data structures as files and directories on disk.
- Compromising a Linux desktop using… 6502 processor opcodes on the NES?! (via)
- Who Will Command The Robot Armies? Starts describing awful things I knew about and then charges to a new level of awful, like this. (via)
- Jason Scott on porting VLC to the browser. (via)
- The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile. (via)
- Comments on the previous link led me to the fun-looking Pyra handheld.
- The end of the general purpose operating system. Or the start of a new application development category? I think this is a view that changes depending on what technology you are invested in.
- Hold down RET for 70 seconds to get a root shell.
- 30 days in a terminal: Day 0 — The adventure begins. Spoiler: it doesn’t work out. (via)
- Were your grandparents hacking in 1963? (via)
- IFComp crowns its first non-parser game.
- The current Humble Book Bundle is a lot of classic/useful Unix books. DRM-free, pay very little. Worth it for any two of the books involved. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Secret World of Stuff. (via)
I use italics a lot this week.
- Reddit advertising of “PAM Mastery”.
- Related: Michael W. Lucas talks about open source and fiction. Best pull quote: “imagine if I wrote a piece of fiction claiming that OpenBSD was contemplating a switch to GPLv3?“
- $ git commit murder is an excellent title, by the way.
- Also also: PAM Mastery is out for purchase.
- Debian considers merging /usr. For contrast to BSD. (via)
- Pinky Bar. An ecumenical status bar, which I didn’t realize I needed until I saw it. I like that the author specifically notes BSD in describing what to use. (via)
- FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2016 slides – all of them. There’s a lot of material here.
- In-kernel audio mixing ahead. (NetBSD)
- OpenBSD Foundation Welcomes First Iridium Donor: Smartisan. That’s a lot of money.
- OpenBSD on AWS : An Unexpected Journey. (via)
DragonFly has had binutils 2.24 and 2.25 both available for some time. 2.24 has been taken out and replaced by binutils 2.27, thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas.
The 2.25 version was and still is installed by default. If you want to try out 2.27 instead, WORLD_BINUTILSVER=binutils227 is what you need. I didn’t test that, of course. The binutils changelog will tell you what’s different in 2.27.
Even the U.S. holiday doesn’t stop the regular posting of BSDNow episodes. #169 is up now. I like the Let’s Encrypt vs. the FreeBSD cluster story, cause that’s an interesting and intricate problem.
UEFI, which I casually sum up as the replacement for BIOS, has been seeing some support in DragonFly, but not within the installer. Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner has ported over FreeBSD’s EFI ABI support, which I think means support for various EFI applications and features. I haven’t booted a machine using UEFI in any significant way, so I don’t have a good explanation – but I am sure this is useful for people with new hardware.
Update: some explanation plus a note that it’s experimental and you could brick your machine.
It took me three edits of this post to spell “Salvador” correctly.
- Dick Tracy Wrist-Mounted Lisp Machine. It segues into a link to Atari 2600 keyboard controllers, which look painful.
- Cataclysm DDA, a new dark future roguelike.
- After 20 years, the Toasters have returned. (via)
- A short history of shareware.
- “Guys it’s 2016, why are we still using mailing lists (listserv)?” No, forums are not a good replacement.
- A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand. (via)
- Manifesto for Responsible Software Development. (via)
- Related: Facebook: Still Literally The Worst. Related to that: irony.
- How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud. (via)
- 29 Bullets, about PowerPoint as a concept.
- Lost Car Key Puzzle. (via)
- The speed of light is unlikely to improve: consequences.
- i enter the web design class
Your unrelated food link of the week: Salvador Dali wrote a cookbook. (It’s getting reprinted.)
A much more well-rounded crop of BSD links this week.
- FreeBSD status report for 2016Q3.
- “Import (finally!) Tor Browser 6.0.5.” An obvious matchup. (via)
- “FreeBSD Flavors. Do We Need Them?“
- Next SemiBUG meeting: December 20th.
- “How to remote connect to BSD server behind double NAT?”
- Review of NAS4Free 10.3.0.3. I forgot about this… fork? (via)
- pycapsicum – sandbox your Python code on FreeBSD. (via)
- Iocage – A FreeBSD jail manager. (via)
- “What’s your favorite BSD jail administration software?“
- Build a FreeBSD 11.0-release Openstack Image with bsd-cloudinit. (via)
- OPNsense 16.7.8 released.
- b2k16 hackathon report: Landry Breuil, Jeremy Evans, Daniel Jakots.
- l2k16 hackathon report: LibreSSL manuals now in mdoc(7).
- openbsd changes of note
- Learning more about the NetBSD scheduler (… than I wanted to know)
- MeetBSD 2016 Report: Michael Dexter.
This week’s BSDNow episode is almost all FreeBSD, all the time. No interview subject this week. I’m going by the written summary because the video is showing as private… but maybe I’m catching it just before posting?
There’s a new version of re(4), the driver for Realtek network cards. Sepherosa Ziehau put it together for testing. He has it on a separate branch, so give it a try if you have appropriate hardware. This will hopefully fix some of that hardware’s quirkiness.