There’s yet another security problem with OpenSSL, and it’s been updated in DragonFly. I’ll probably roll 4.2.2 this weekend so that it’s in the release image.
Some time ago, I acquired a Chromebook with the help of all you kind readers. Here’s a mini-report on how DragonFly works as a desktop.
The hardware: what I have is an Acer c720 Chromebook. The C720p is the touchscreen model, and is equally well-supported by DragonFly. A larger-capacity M.2 SSD (which is relatively easy to install) is the only real need, as the installed one is only 16G. It’s easy enough to see what the laptops look like; it’s nothing fancy but it’s suitably light.
The software: There’s a wide-ranging and complete install/tweak guide for the c720 and c720p on the DragonFly site. Note that it goes down to the point of even changing the keymap for the special keys on the keyboard.
Things I don’t like:
- The mousepad needs a physical click, not a tap, which decreases accuracy.
- There’s only 2G of RAM, and not expandable. You will notice this if you tend to open a lot of tabs when web browsing.
- I’ve had mousepad trouble, but I’m the only one reporting it, so I think it’s just bad hardware luck on my part.
Things I do like:
- pkg is a godsend, making installation and upgrades almost effortless. I’ve gone binary-only so far.
- Many things Just Work – for example, the xfce4 battery plugin.
- xscreensaver works great; even the 3D modules. I don’t know why it entertains me so.
- I haven’t run the battery out to make sure, but it looks like it would last a few hours. Suspend/hibernate are not supported, but low power modes are.
- There’s a lot of multi-touch shortcuts built into the touchpad.
It’s an excellent BSD laptop, for light use, at low cost. The next step up would be into Thinkpad territory, which raises the cost or increases the age – and may not be as consistently supported.
Something I’ve wanted for a long time: DragonFly stickers. Or ‘decals’, if you want to sound fancier. Markus Pfeiffer has them set up on Stickermule.
I just created an account there, and apparently I can supply a referral link which gets you and me both a $10 credit, if you use that. It’ll make you sign up, then you’ll probably have to go back in with the direct link for the DragonFly sticker.
I don’t know why I’ve been finding so many roguelike links lately, but it’s to our benefit.
- The Open Container Project. No mention of a BSD. I don’t know if that’s necessarily bad.
- Random Numbers in the original Doom. Is that true? That seems a bit crazy. (via)
- The NANOG65 call for presentations is out.
- More falsehoods programmers believe about time. A followup to a previous link.
- @Play 82: The Talks of the International Roguelike Developers Conference US, 2015. Some fascinating links/talks on video there.
- Stick to 64-bit counters.
- LIFE IS TERRIBLE: LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WEB – James Mickens. I don’t think I saw/linked to this one before. Why is a Microsoft researcher one of the funniest nerd people online? (via)
- The first port of UNIX. (PDF, via)
- Vim Colors (via)
- Releasing a Commercial ASCII Roguelike, a Post-Mortem. (via)
- Cold brew tea.
- From TextMate to Vim. (via)
- Shortest network cable evar. I once had a coworker confuse inches (“) and feet (‘) when ordering, so we ended up with a box of 200 6-inch Ethernet cables. (via)
Insert fireworks graphic here.
- OpenBSD from a veteran Linux user perspective. (via)
- Call for Testing: Valgrind on OpenBSD.
- 10.2-PRE-RELEASE and 11.0-CURRENT Images Available for Testing. (PC-BSD)
- BSDCan 2015 trip reports: Zbigniew Bodek and Vsevolod Stakhov.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/29.
- DistroWatch Weekly talks about running FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi 2 computer. (via)
- BSD Magazine: “Web server security”.
- FreeNAS 10: A developer’s perspective.
- NetBSD on NVIDIA Jetson TK1 (Tegra K1)
- New binary releases for NetBSD on Raspberry Pi
- BSD dmesg collection service
- OPNSense 15.7 is released.
- finding bugs in tarsnap
- FreeBSD gets a graphical front-end for pkg-ng. (probably works for DragonFly dpkg too) (via)
- User account administration for Linux/BSD
- moving from Linux to BSD and the Acer C720. I already replied all over that.
BSDNow 096 has the usual new links, even more BSDCan 2015 video links, and an interview with Jun Ebihara about some of NetBSD’s lesser-known architectures.
(I like trying to guess the interview subject from each week’s obscure title; I was going to guess RetroBSD… which would make a good topic to explore.)
There’s a minor update for DragonFly 4.2 – this covers a problem with i915 support, so it’s worth upgrading if you have an Intel video chipset.
NYCBUG is having a chronologically appropriate speaker: Steven Kreuzer, talking about the Precision Time Protocol. It’s 6:45 PM (EDT) tonight, at the Stone Creek Bar & Lounge in New York City.
I’ll quote right from the summary for the 14-minute-long BSDTalk 254: “An interview with Ken Worster who is presenting on topics which include PFSense and FreeNAS in schools at the Technology Teacher ME conference in Bethel Maine.”
DragonFly 4.2 is officially released! You can go to the 4.2 release page for details, go to the mirrors page to download, or read my users@ post for upgrade steps.
Update: news stories and commentary seen on lobste.rs, Hacker News, and linux.fr.
I came up with a whole bunch of links at the last minute despite traveling and being sick. I’m dedicated to your idle reading!
- In defence of curl | sudo bash –. Not really in defense because nobody’s that crazy. (via)
- Leap “smearing”.
- HyperRogue – A non-Euclidean roguelike. (via)
- Hack RUN. A… greenscreenlike?
- 30 years of Amiga. Coming up in about a month. (via)
- “Why Agile, Lean and Six Sigma must die …” (via)
- You probably already saw “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks“, but there’s already a t-shirt. (via)
- Finding the needles.
- If We’ve Won, Why Are We Still Explaining Open Source? (via)
- hhighlighter, syntax coloring for the output of other programs.
- UNIX Recovery Legend. (via) There’s more documents of similar vintage to look at.
- “The Hacker’s Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”. While I hadn’t read this before now, I’ve been doing a similar pattern for some months now, and I’ve lost 30 lbs/13.5 kg.
- The Curta Calculator. A neat bit of machinery that I’ve never seen.
- Retro Thinkpad idea. I would buy this, for the keyboard alone.
Your off-topic link of the week: you have about a week to pay $35 to not die when the Earth is destroyed on July 5th. It’s the 18th time the world has almost ended, so it has to work out one of these times.
More and more BSDCan videos keep showing up. (See the bottoms of individual speaker pages on the BSDCan site.) Here’s the PC-BSD summary.
- A pfSense SG-2440 review at Maximum PC.
- pfSense 2.2.3 is out.
- Puppet and OpenBSD.
- I love cross-pollination.
- There’s a new BSD user group in Vancouver, Canada. “VanBUG”.
- TrueOS/PC-BSD/FreeNAS keep showing as building from the same source tree. That makes sense.
- Ingo Schwarze’s slides (PDF) from his recent CDBUG/NYCBUG presentations. (via)
- NetBSD 7.0_RC1 is out.
- Commit jokes are the best jokes.
- FreeBSD on Azure.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/22.
- BSDCan 2015 trip reports one and two.
- PC-BSD Documentation can now be Translated Using Pootle.
- out with the old, in with the less. Notable link to “Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers“.
BSDNow 95 has an interview with Sean Chittenden of FreeBSD/Groupon, along with the usual roundup of BSD news – and more links to various BSDCan presentations.
If you wanted to try IPFW3 and NAT, nans_nans1 has done the experimentation for you, and wrote down the steps.
Sascha Wildner has been removing the no-longer-needed bits of i386 support in DragonFly. One of the things going away is APM, the 32-bit power management superseded by acpiconf. If you still type ‘apm’ out of habit, it’s aliased so you won’t be surprised.
I had to do this early, too, so the link count is a bit low this week. Sorry!
- From the abacus to smartphone: The evolution of mobile and portable computers, a book by Evan Koblentz. (via)
- A/UX – The Long View. OS X in 1998. I wish I had been able to try this. (via)
- Monsters and Manuals, another RPG thinkblog.
- The NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament. (via)
- Linux is not gnu/linux. Linking because it’s a bit off the deep end. (via)
- Why I dislike systemd. (via)
- OBYaVLENIYA KOMANDA 135 [Command 135 initiated] Numbers stations are one of those deep-dive things. (via)
- Meet Processing, the Lingua Franca of Creative Coding. (via)
- mdast-man: Compile markdown to man pages (roff) So often, the open source solution to something is not to produce more or better quality output, but to instead rearrange the tools for doing so. (via)
I compiled this all bit early, so hopefully nothing exciting happens between now and when it gets posted.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/16.
- YouTube review on “Networking For Systems Administrators”. (BSD-friendly)
- Signify shortcomings.
- BSDCan 2015, a review.
- BSDNow has an already-mentioned BSDCan presentation roundup, and various OpenBSD presentations are showing on the OpenBSD papers page, and there’s a video collection page too. (via)
- Best laptop for FreeBSD or variants? (via)
- Mandoc: becoming the main BSD manual toolbox [pdf] (via)
- PkgsrcCon 2015 is definitely happening.
- We’re about halfway through the pkgsrc-2015Q2 freeze.
- OpenBSD 5.8 has been branched. (Is that the right term?)
- NetBSD has internal storage on the EdgeRouter. OpenBSD can boot there too. Is there something switch like (12+ ports) that boots a BSD? Other than Juniper? (speaking of which, I worked on an EX4300 a few days ago and liked it.)
- Temperature handling in OpenBSD has been much improved.
- FreeBSD on BeagleBone Black units now support HDMI.
Now that DragonFly can (in most cases) offer video outside of X with KMS, not just text, more console options are possible. By default, your accelerated console will scale to 80×25, but you can now tell it how many columns you want and it’ll automatically scale to fit your resolution. Or you can turn it off.
This week’s episode of BSDNow has an interview of Marc Espie of OpenBSD. There’s yet another Linux-user-going-BSD story, and a nice collection of links to presentations from the just-finished BSDCan 2015 event.
You have two options if you live on the eastern side of New York State: CDBUG is having a mandoc presentation from Ingo Schwarze on the 17th (tonight), and then Ingo is heading to NYCBUG’s meeting on the 18th (tomorrow). Note that you must RSVP and bring an ID for the NYCBUG meeting!