powerd now can be adjusted on DragonFly, for quicker returns to high CPU frequencies, or slower … slowdowns? It’s quickly quick or slowly slow. That’s not the best explanation, but I like rhymes. For a less stupid description, look at the man page, which now includes usage examples.
Francois Tigeot has updated the drm/i915 code again, matching Linux 3.10 for feature level… but it’s a big update. If you are
- Running DragonFly-master
- Using a i915 chipset
- (optional) On a chipset that is not Haswell or Ivy Bridge
… He could use your testing and feedback.
I’m saving up for one of those Acer c720p Chromebooks that people seem to be enjoying. If you have enjoyed the Digest for a long time and want to help, please do. Of course it’s to run DragonFly.
Thanks to the generosity of a bunch of people, I’ll get a C720 and an SSD too. Thank you all very much, people I have never met but would like to shake the hands of.
All over the spectrum this week.
- The Story of the Intel 4004. (via)
- Why Perl Didn’t Win. Some methods that could be useful for the BSDs here. (via)
- uBlock, a less-resource-intensive version of AdBlock. (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Emacs user at work. (via alexh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Librem 15, “A Free/Libre Software Laptop”. Blobless. (via Mike)
- How to cheat at the future. Something I need to address for this very Digest. (via)
- What does {some strange unix command name} stand for? (via)
- Your entire PC in a mouse. (via)
- So I bought a mechanical keyboard.
- Emacs is my new window manager. (via)
- m-x start-them-early.
- Slackbot bot. (via)
- List of Good Free Programming and Data Resources. (via)
- Open Hardware Random Number Generator. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Hemingwrite. Looks like a TRS-80. (via)
- The Emularity.
Your unrelated link of the week: Skymall, 2007.
Short week this week, mostly due to a lack of interesting source changes.
- Learn Unix the Hard Way. Actually OpenBSD and nothing except a table of contents yet. (via)
- How not to upgrade your systems.
- Linux vs. BSD: which should you use? Nothing new discovered here. (via)
- PC-BSD 10.1.1-RC1 Now Available.
- Some upcoming BSD-related books from Michael Lucas.
- NYCBUG events for January and February.
- Extracting pkgsrc packages without packages. (saves time with NFS)
- FreeBSD and Vagrant. (via nycbug-talk mailing list)
- Make PC-BSD work like Windows.
- Lumina 0.8.1 is out.
- urndis(4) is how you tether OpenBSD to a phone; or use it as a hotspot.
- There’s a BSD meetup happening February 19th in Hannover, Germany.
Matthew Dillon purchased some Haswell-based motherboards, and documented his hardware setup, for anyone who is looking to build a decent, new DragonFly system.
ISO/IMG files for DragonFly 4.0.3 have been uploaded and by now should be available on your favorite mirror. You should update for the OpenSSL upgrade. If you already have DragonFly 4.0.x installed, the normal ‘make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade’ cycle should work just fine.
It’s Thursday, and that means a new BSDNow episode. The interview is with David Maxwell, who gave a talk about Unix pipelines at MeetBSD 2014. There’s the usual amount of discussion of recent topics, too, and I see they have a new sponsor.
DragonFly 4.0.3 has been tagged; you can look at the tagging message for details, but the major reason for doing so is to include OpenSSL-1.0.1l. I will have images up soon.
John Marino has written up an extensive how-to for slider, the history tool for Hammer filesystems, including screenshots.
Thanks to Sascha Wildner porting from FreeBSD, mixer(8) now remembers state. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
For whatever reason, I’ve seen several people in the last week or so have mouse problems on install, and they were often solved by running moused. So, there’s your little reminder.
Normally I’d hold this off until the In Other BSDs item on Saturday, but by then it will be too late: There’s a “Building redundant and transparent firewalls with OpenBSD” presentation happening at the Scottish Linux User’s Group meeting, Thursday night in Glasgow, Scotland.
Normally if I talk about a filesystem here, I talk about Hammer, which is not a surprise. However, I often read and review Michael W. Lucas’s BSD-oriented books, and he has written FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials. I’m reviewing it here because it’s obviously BSD-related, and some portions are directly relevant for other BSDs.
Disk setup and layout isn’t something that normally consumes much attention past the initial install – until something goes wrong, or until a system needs a new configuration. Installers tend to hide that initial layout, anyway.
Vendors take advantage of this. Much of the specialized storage vendors out there are selling you a computer with disks in it – something you can build yourself. You don’t (or at least I hope you don’t) buy a firewall when you can do the same with pf or ipfw; the same goes for disk management.
There’s plenty of coverage of GEOM, GELI, GDBE, and the other technologies specific to FreeBSD. I for one did not know how GEOM worked, with its consumer/producer model – and I imagine it’s complex to dive into when you’ve got a broken machine next to you. If you are administering FreeBSD systems, especially ones that deal with dedicated storage, you will find this useful. He doesn’t go into ZFS, but he does hint at a book on it later…
If you’re not a FreeBSD user, there’s also material that’s common to any BSD – an explanation of disk architecture, of UFS, RAID, and SMART. Knowing what SMART is and does is essential, in my opinion. You may be able to cobble this material together from other sources online, but it’s packaged nicely here, with Lucas’s easy writing style.
It’s a self-published book, and as such the download nets you three different formats. It’s currently $10 and DRM-free, directly from the author. You can also order physical versions, if you like paper.
Not sure how I ended up with so many interesting conference links. There’s some substantial reading here too, so clear your schedule.
- A long-overdue update of the Cluetrain Manifesto. (via)
- AWS Tips I Wish I’d Known Before I Started. (via)
- Secure Secure Shell. (via)
- Hacking a Gameboy with a speedrun bot to program new games. It’s hard to wrap my brain around. (via)
- Operating System development in Rust.
- Speaking of which, Rust just reached 1.0A. (via)
- Improving your PuTTY connections.
- The Intel Compute stick looks fun.
- RIPE70 is in Amsterdam in March; the Call for Papers is out.
- NANOG 63 is in Texas at the start of February; registration and the agenda are up.
- Vintage Computer Fest East 10 is in April in New Jersey. It’s hands-on – you get to run the old computers! (via)
- CiE 2015, a cross-disciple conference in late June in Bucharest, also may interest you. (via)
- The Millennial Literalist.
- Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. (via)
- Event Notify Test Runner, or entr. Runs arbitrary commands when a file changes. It was also talked about at the NYCBUG meeting that just happened.
- Moving Beyond TCP/IP.
- This program is the equivalent of ENIAC. Really! They’re both for calculating ballistics. (also via)
- The Tears of Donald Knuth. (via multiple places)
- When The Sky Is Falling. DDOS mitigation, in slides. (via)
- The Morris Worm, as a physical artifact.
Lots of material this week.
- New Update GUI for PC-BSD / Automatic Updates.
- Lumina Desktop 0.8.0 Released.
- (side note) I see these PC-BSD items in src updates, but these published summaries are so complete it’s better to wait and post them instead. Other software orgs, take note.
- A week of pkgsrc, #6.
- Making the switch.
- Configuring X forwarding between BSD and Windows. (via)
- The 4th quarter 2014 FreeBSD report is out.
- Digital Ocean now supports FreeBSD.
- Using TrueOS as a IPFW based home router.
- Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD. (via)
- pfSense University classes are available online.
- Jetpack, a FreeBSD-based app container, i.e. Docker, etc. (via)
- No more install floppies for NetBSD, at least on amd64.
- OpenBSD adds binary patching, at least on amd64.
- Lid suspension is now on by default in OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD on an Intel Galileo.
- Security: OpenBSD vs FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD added Data Center TCP (DCTCP).
- FreeBSD’s new page clustering strategy.
- FreeBSD has a new MINIMAL kernel config.
- FreeBSD has multiboot support for Xen Dom0.
- Yay, cross-pollination!
Can someone with experience on Google Compute Engine try out running DragonFly on it? There’s FreeBSD instructions, so it might work.
DragonFly no longer has SCTP. Nobody minds, I think – I had to look up what it is.
The short answer is ath(4) and iwn(4), via this post. There’s an update coming for the wireless infrastructure in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd (on the FreeBSD side) are working together for improvements.
While I’m mentioning recommendations, the Silicon Image 3132 chipset is apparently excellent for eSATA drives on DragonFly.
As promised last week, the BSDNow show has an interview with Jos Schellevis of OPNSense, along with the normal array of stories and links.