Matthew Dillon pulled in a new USB update from FreeBSD to DragonFly. What does it change? I’m not completely sure, but he did it to get apcupsd working, so that may be a hint.
If you have a HDMI-connected monitor, but no sound, this trick about increasing available memory may help.
The newest BSDNow video goes into PC-BSD and booting, and interviews Justin Gibbs about the FreeBSD Foundation.
Hey, look what I have! There’s a pfSense pair of classes available to take. I went through them and found them worthwhile. pfSense is easy enough to use that a dedicated person can puzzle through most of the settings, eventually, but I don’t have “eventually”, and I want to encourage BSD products in my workplace… so here we are.
DragonFly 4.0 has had a minor point release, to 4.0.4. There was a bug in the initial install where the rescue image installed on disk would be incorrect. This was fixed after the first time a build/installworld was done, but might as well have it start out right. There’s some other small fixes, and the release commit will show you the summary. Download from your nearest mirror or update normally.
John Marino has removed Sendmail from DragonFly (as part of the base system), and replaced it with DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent. If you just need delivery to local users, DMA will do the trick.
The announcement message covers what you need to do to deal with it (potentially nothing), and there’s more in-depth documentation to cover how to switch if you need more full-featured software.
This is the Lazy Reading mix I like – some history, some commentary.
- How to make your Unix prompts more useful and interesting.
- An exploration of the mtr utility.
- Sweet 16: The 6502 Dream Machine. (via)
- SMS cards: The technology inside IBM’s 1960s mainframes. (via)
- Vim is a Game. (via)
- DoS by lightbulb. (via)
- Public vs. private cloud.
- Euclid’s algorithm in the Shell. (via)
- The Joys of Unix – Cryptolog in 1978 (via)
- The Web’s Grain.
- The day the rabbits died.
- How many IP addresses can a DNS query return? (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Perfect cup of tea renders all other tea pointless. A sloppy joke, so let me share these recipes for masala chai and hobnobs instead. I’m hungry.
Whee!
- Which would be better as a free desktop; PC-BSD or OpenBSD?
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/03/02.
- M0n0wall alternatives at DiscoverBSD.
- BSD Magazine for February. (I think.)
- A preview of PC-BSD’s upcoming 10.1.2 release.
Michael W. Lucas’s Tarsnap Mastery book is out, in electronic form. While not a strictly BSD news items, it’s a service built on BSD, so worth looking at if you care about that – or about encryption.
The newest BSDNow episode talks with Sean Bruno about poudriere and QEMU. He’s using those tools on FreeBSD, but poudriere is useful for building dports on DragonFly, too. The usual news collection is there, too.
NYCBUG is having a book release event for “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” with George Neville-Neil, one of the authors. It’s happening tomorrow night, at the Stone Creek Bar & Lounge: 140 E 27th St. George Neville-Neil will be talking about DTrace, and there’s copies of the book to buy/win.
The just-posted BSDTalk 251 is 47 minutes long, and comes from vBSDCon 2013, with three people interviewed about Verisign and FreeBSD.
The temperatures climbed up to almost not freezing this week! It feels so warm.
- exa, a modern replacement for ls. I like the website. (via)
- Value of windowing is questioned. (via)
- Good PuTTY defaults for a happy SSH’ing life (via)
- The History of Graphic Design and Computational Form. Long, with many excellent examples. (via)
- Stirring Tea. (via)
- What Blogging Has Become. Think of this site. (via)
- All My Blogs Are Dead. Why I self-host whenever possible. (via)
- Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana. Wrong, in 1995. (via)
- Futures of Text. (via)
- The Sierpinski triangle page to end most Sierpinski triangle pages. (via, including the link text)
- GPG and Me (via many places)
- Trinity, KDE3 continued.
- MATE, Gnome2 continued.
- What laptop to [sic] you use?
- “…then came Cisco, and the rest is history”: a ‘history friendly’ model of the Local Area Networking industry. Why there’s so many “Cisco shops”. (PDF, via)
- Chinese DNS Poisoning. It’s China, which means Chinese Government DNS Poisoning. (more) (via)
- How to be an open source gardener. Excellent, excellent advice. (via)
Your unrelated video link of the week: The Chemistry of Cookies.
Well, this week just sort of took off for BSD links.
- FreeBSD on the POWER8: It’s alive! (via)
- Freenas and ESXI-Vmware snapshots
- PHP 5.3 and Ruby 1.8.7 appear to be on the way out of pkgsrc.
- PC-BSD gains a sort of automatic TOR-mode.
- OpenBSD Foundation 2014/2015 newsletter.
- OpenBSD 5.7 on Minnowboard Max.
- Aww, no more punchcard utilities.
- FreeBSD has some upgrades around tape utilities.
- Installworld… installcloud?
- “If you work for a lottery and you’re using random(3) to select the winning numbers, please let me know.“
- uefisign(8), a UEFI Secure Boot signing utility.
- pkg in pkgsrc. (via)
- “How can I crate a bootable BSD via GNU/Linux?“
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/02/23.
- ZFS, and How to Make a Foot Cannon.
- A week of pkgsrc #7.
- BSDCan proposals and rejections.
- NetBSD on IBM’s SoftLayer and Microsoft’s Azure and more
A late update: NYCBUG’s upcoming meetings and presentations, with the next one on March 4th, this week. If you have a local BSD user group, I would like to know about it!
If you’re monitoring your DragonFly systems with Nagios, here’s a way to check the health of your Hammer mirror-streams. Thanks, Mike!
BSDNow 078 is up with more BSD Foundation interviews. It’s not a sequel, but a switch: the last one was with a FreeBSD Foundation member, and this week’s episode is with Ken Westerback of the OpenBSD Foundation. There’s the normal added news, too, with a description of what’s coming at BSDCan 2015.
If you are on DragonFly-master and you upgraded during select hours on the 25th of February, you may have been bit by a makefile error. The fix, as listed in that link, is simple:
cp /usr/src/share/mk/sys.mk /usr/share/mk
If you are not on -master or you did not upgrade in that timeframe: never mind.
Michael Neumann has switched out pkgsrc packages for dports packages for building DragonFly with a GUI. There’s no built image to download right now, but I’m optimistic the next release will have it. You can build it now on a DragonFly system using src/nrelease. With all this video work going in lately, it will give us something to show.
If you’ve been sitting with a Radeon-based video card and wishing you had all the nice updates i915 users are getting, today is your lucky day. Michael Neumann has brought Radeon support equivalent to Linux 3.9 into DragonFly, and he has a 3.10 branch for testing if you feel adventurous.
Lots of in-depth reading this week. Put on something warm/drink something warm (especially if you are in the northeast US) and start reading.
- Making a C64/C65 compatible computer in an FPGA. (via)
- Joe Chip’s problem was never his door. (via)
- A Whole New World. (via, via)
- CORE 2015, the magazine from the Computer History Museum. (PDF)
- Warren Ellis on the Apple Watch.
- Understanding Code Forking in Open Source Software, a paper. (via)
- Chart of similar operations with sed and awk. (via)
- A Tale of Two Zippers. (via)
- 10 fancy zsh tricks you may not know… and Six hacks for less(1).
- “Why are there so many goddamn package managers?” (via)
- The Last of the Typewriter Men. (via)
- Where to buy amazing tea online. Maybe a bit pretentious.
- It’s a UNIX system. I know this. (via)
Your unrelated quote of the week:
“If we had Smart Dogs right now, they’d have screens instead of ears, and they wouldn’t be able to bark in a somewhat indecipherable but yet still full of meaning way, they’d just have a whole bunch of notification icons that would come out of their butt and would all be red circles with numbers in them.”
Your unrelated link of the week: Drone over Niagara Falls. That’s about 70 miles from here; I’ve been there many times. That may give you an idea of the snow buildup/cold level here recently.