Imre Vadász has put together an initial port of Wayland / Weston for DragonFly. You can look at his pull request for dports to see how to install, though I’d imagine this is only for people who like to experiment at this point. It’s still work in progress, as is Wayland itself.
Tomohiro Kusumi has added a dm-delay target, which means you can simulate poor disk performance, without having to have poor disks. His commit message includes some benchmarks that shows it doing a good job creating a bad job.
You will probably be able to guess some of my thinking processes this week based on these links.
- “If you work for Facebook, quit.“
- Related: Facebook “Shadow Profiles”. A DragonFlyBSD “fan group” spontaneously appeared on Facebook at one point, but didn’t actually exist – they auto-create Facebook pages for other people’s work, but don’t make it clear that the actual owner isn’t involved.
- Building an Analog Computer. (via)
- The Joy of Non-Smoking Breaks. Has anyone read “the Healthy Programmer”, mentioned in the text?
- Zipf’s Law, which I didn’t know existed.
- SP800-199, “Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6” from NIST. Very complete. (via)
- In defense of client certificates.
- Coding like it’s 1999. (via)
- Haunted by Data. More Maciej Ceglowski. (via)
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Health benefits of tea. Not the original title; I made it less clickbaity. (via)
I didn’t get to run through as much of the source commits as normal this week, but there’s still plenty to read.
- Why do you use *BSD?
- Service to read BSD 4.2 UNIX reel tape to file?
- vnStat, a network monitoring tool.
- Is OpenSMTPD worthy of OpenBSD inclusion? (via)
- Assigning programs to specific video ports.
- Recent OpenSMTPD errata and you
- The Rise and Fall of the Operating System. Talks about rump kernels, developed on NetBSD, I think. (via)
- junk filled files.
- EuroBSDCon 2015 OpenBSD Presentations Online.
- An interview of Jeff Rizzo about NetBSD 7. (via)
- What to expect in NetBSD 7.
- NetBSD-7.0 developer interview: Leonardo Taccari (via)
- FreeBSD using radius for login (via)
- What does the OpenBSD crowd think of Intel SGX? (via)
- Closing a door, via many places, which had a link to this BSD-related note.
- Verisign youtube channel has vBSDcon videos (via)
The Tanzanian Digital Library Initiative is using DragonFly (and FreeBSD) as part of their library setup, and Michael Wilson, the project coordinator sent a note to users@ describing this. They are looking to spread through the continent, so get in contact if you want to be part of the project.
BSDNow 110 is now available. It’s back to the text summary format, so I can tell you easily that it includes an interview with Benno Rice, about Isilon and their interactions with FreeBSD.
There’s a new version of the Intel video driver in dports – xf86-video-intel-2.99.2015.09.09. If you update to this and you experience an xorg-server crash, Matthew Dillon found that changing the acceleration method from SNA to XAA fixes the problem. Don’t change it unless you actually see the problem, of course.
NYCBUG is having “true(1) and false(1), The Classical Code Reading Group of Stockholm, NYC*BUG Mix Tape Edition” happen this Wednesday the 7th. You may remember a similar event at the end of August. This will be led by George Brocklehurst from the original event, with NYCBUG members present. If you missed the previous one, try this out – by all accounts, these code readings are inordinately fun.
Completely unrelated: I rebuilt a baking (Hoosier) cabinet over the past few months, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.
- The $9 computer is shipping today. Well, some days ago by when you read this. (via)
- What Happens Next Will Amaze You. Maciej Ceglowski’s talks are always excellent. (via)
- Vim Creep. (via)
- Hacking Graphing Calculators. “As powerful as Game Boys, and mostly used for the same reason”.
- ASCII to My Heart. (via)
- Awesome Open Source Documents. (via)
- Roundup: Retro computers in your browser. (via)
- Breakouts, 36 Breakout variants. This will keep you busy for a while. See previous Breakout links here. (via)
- The price of the Internet of Things will be a vague dread of a malicious world. (via)
- The History of the Design of Unix’s Find Command. The comments at the source of the link are interesting.
- A vim Tutorial and Primer. Again, the comments at the source of the link are possibly a better read.
- 18 cardinal rules of systems administration.
- 30 years a sysadmin. Same author as previous article.
- Brian Kernighan interview. Steve Jobs is getting treated like a saint; BWK is barely known. They both helped the same number of people, but Steve Jobs made more money. (via)
- Content Addressable Memory intro. Why routers are both underpowered and faster than general hardware at some tasks. (via)
- Your phone’s homescreen is dead. The gradual removal of user-initiated actions in computing. (via)
- Why have digital books stopped evolving? Lack of competition, I’d say. (via)
- aRrgh: a newcomer’s (angry) guide to R. (via)
- Predicting and controlling NetHack’s randomness. (via)
There’s lots to read through this week – just for BSD! I’ll have even more tomorrow.
- FreeBSD cloud use cases?
- Nvidia and X.
- The September issue of BSD Magazine is out.
- Reporting bugs and the BSD community.
- (Net)BSD newbie, some questions
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/09/28.
- Faces of FreeBSD: Allan Jude. You may have already seen that face on BSDNow.
- OPNsense 15.7.15 Released.
- FreeNAS: A Worst Practices Guide.
- A status report on Michael W. Lucas’s two upcoming FreeBSD Mastery books, plus his other work.
- tame testing.
- More l2k15 Hackathon reports.
- NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer and pkgsrc. They even document it.
- Rebase when pushing to pkgsrc-wip’s new Git home.
- pkgsrc-2015Q3 is released.
- DTrace in NetBSD, though only simple scripts work right now.
- NetBSD gains PCI Extended Configuration Space support.
- Home server advice often boils down to “how are your backups?“
- OpenBSD parts in Toyota Highlander.
- Teaching to contribute to BSD. (from a just-run class)
The package x11-themes/dragonfly-wallpapers exists, thanks to John Marino, and gives you DragonFly-themed backgrounds in KDE. Or probably any other window manager, if you install it and point your wm at the directory.
Update: John Marino helpfully posted a link to the images. It’s not yet built as a binary, but it’s not exactly time-consuming to build from source.
BSDNow 109 is up at the Jupiter Broadcasting site, though not yet at the bsdnow.tv domain. This week’s interview is with Warner Losh, which is where the ‘imp’ reference comes from.
MIDI support has been (re) added in DragonFly, if I read this recent commit correctly. You may have supported hardware and not even realize it.
BSDTalk 257 is 15 minutes of conversation with Christos Zoulas, available now.
For some reason, I had this complete days ago, and I’ve already started on next week’s links.
- The Apple II by Stephen Wozniak, a PDF. The initial color range makes me nostalgic. (via)
- Why Commodore disk drives were so slow. (via previous link)
- Know where you stand: the `pwd` program. A code reading, September 28th, in New York City. (via)
- In the same vein as Endless Sky from a few weeks ago, here’s mention of Dune Legacy, a remake of Dune II, the earliest RTS – or at least the base model. Following links there brought me to Dune Dynasty, Dune 2: The Golden Path, and OpenRA, all of which are cross platform and also may run on a BSD – F/DF ports exist for OpenRA and F/DF/O for Legacy. (You understand my shorthand there, don’t you?)
- The sad state of web app deployment. (via)
- Facebook has decided it is time I had a baby. Have you ever avoided a search term because you knew that the advertising you’d see for the next few days/weeks would echo it back to you? (also via)
- DigiPal, which sounds like a strangely named PDA, is a digital palaeography site focusing on medieval handwriting in England just before the Norman invasion. I find this interesting because I’ve been listening to this History of England podcast. (via)
- The US Long-haul Fiber Map. Also seen as “How many people can go offline at once, because of a misdirected backhoe?” (via)
- Similar: Undersea cable maps, or “How many people can go offline at once, because of a dragged anchor?” (via)
- Software Defined Networks – Four Years Later. YouTube recording, from RIPE 70. (via)
- Just some quick points about DHCP.
- New Forum – Version 7 UNIX. (via)
- Hacker News and Subreddit simulators. Startlingly accurate for being fancy Markov generators… which says something about the real content. (via)
- rough idling.
- pigshell.
Your unrelated video link of the week: The Wizard of Speed and Time – Mike Jittlov (1988).
This took some catching up.
- MidnightBSD 0.7 is out. (via)
- OPNsense 15.7.14 Released.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/09/21.
- New email gateway release 3.4 “rocky”, based on FreeBSD 10.2. (via)
- FreeBSD on recent Lenovo Thinkpad W541. (via)
- *BSD and thinkpads. (via)
- Broadwell support in OpenBSD.
- LibreSSL 2.3.0 Released.
- Two OpenBSD hackathon summaries.
- “sid is a Static Intrusion Detection and integrity checking system” for NetBSD.
- sesutil additions on FreeBSD.
- rmt over ssh on OpenBSD.
- BSD 2.11, I assume emulated?
- Network drivers are a cross-pollination success story for BSD.
- New source/port change summaries for OpenBSD, on GMane.
- “Cheap hardware for router, perhaps fileserver?“
There’s been a lot of improvements to DragonFly and graphics support recently, and Francois Tigeot gave a talk at the 2015 X.Org Developer’s Conference outlining just how much has changed. He’s posted the slides.
BSDNow 108 is up at the Jupiter Broadcasting site, though not listed ont he episodes page. It has an interview with Andrew Pantyukhin, and I haven’t watched it yet to find out what else.
It has finally happened: There’s no more IPv4 addresses left to allocate, at least for ARIN – and that’s going to affect most people reading this. Ask your ISP for IPv6 access. The next step is being forced to implement either wonky 6to4 mappings, or just plain IPv6 networks.
If you happen to still be running DragonFly 4.0 – that’s two releases ago and not supported – you may be noticing less ports are building. There’s been enough significant changes in DragonFly since that release that it’s reducing the number of buildable ports.
DragonFly 4.0 to 4.2 is not a difficult jump, so jump when you can. The converse of this, of course, is that there’s even more building on 4.2 and DragonFly-current.