Coretemp is now in the default kernel configs for DragonFly, so you can use coretemp to see your Intel CPU temperature.
If you’re using the i915 driver for xorg, and xorg dies with a “No monitor specified for screen” error, there’s a config change to fix that, or you can just update.
A public service announcement: Check your backup power systems when the weather is bad. It has been so cold that the always-running heater blocks cooked away the coolant in my workplace’s backup generator in between the weekly inspections, and when the power died a few days ago, the generator failed to start. This led to the paradoxical sensor warning: “High coolant temperature” when the outside temperature was below freezing.
- Scott Hanselman wrote “Microsoft killed my Pappy“, where he attributes dislike to Microsoft to being old anger from antitrust suits, etc. Those were more the outcome of frustration over Microsoft quality, as I recall. Microsoft is doing some things right nowadays – generally using open source techniques and sorta working with standards – but then again, so are all the other large tech silos.
- Those who do not know jails are doomed to reinvent them. That’s my description of these container/docker/etc ideas floating around Linux. Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying. (via)
- speaking.io, about public speaking. Posted mostly for my own future edification. (via)
- UNIX: Making better use of the find command.
- More history on stpcpy(3) than you ever knew.
- Unix: How to get along with your coworkers.
- James Iry’s History of Programming Languages. Some the jokes aren’t exactly new, but it made me laugh. (via #dragonflybsd)
- The End of Facebook. I know I should have the Digest on Facebook, but I’m not sure how much of an audience I’d be able to reach without paying to play. (via)
- I Still Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem. I find the lack of adherence to standards – or even agreement on common formats – very frustrating. (via)
- Twitch Plays Pokemon, the explanation.
- A brief history of one-line fixes. Written in honor of Apple’s recent blunder. The conclusion is good, too.
Your unrelated link of the week: Muppets, NYC, and tea. I know it’s an ad, but it fits my interests perfectly.
Another week where I barely need to look up source code commits.
- PC-BSD Weekly Digest 18 and Digest 19.
- OpenBSD’s signify tool has been backported to OpenBSD versions < 5.5.
- Video of an OpenBSD install.
- xorg, unprivileged on OpenBSD. (via)
- This is a good idea: FreeBSD 10’s release.sh mapped out.
- bcrypt() updates in OpenBSD and what it means for you. (also)
- iXSystem’s NYCBSDCon 2014 recap. (via nycbug-talk)
- A description of those expensive/busy WhatsApp FreeBSD servers. (via)
- FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis. (via #nycbug)
- NetBSD is bringing in BIND 9.10.0b1. (a beta?)
- NetBSD is also in the process of moving from gcc 4.5 to 4.8.
- Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord. I still haven’t set up the Netflow system that I want to set up, dangit.
- pkg will require libucl. This affects FreeBSD and will affect DragonFly too.
- OpenBSD has an experimental USB installer. This may be new to the upcoming release – I don’t know.
Let’s see… 3 digits in the episode number, so they’re planning to make at least 973 more BSD-related pun titles. Anyway, BSDNow’s latest episode has an interview with Joe Marcus Clark, along with more material including this item that I missed, of getting some ancient hardware to run OpenBSD.
pfi, the automated installer that nobody knows about, now supports installing an authorized_keys file as part of an install. Credit goes to Alex Hornung for adding the functionality.
Sascha Wildner brought in ACPICA 20140214, and his commit message has a list of the updates.
The DragonFly Mail Agent is being suggested as a possible sendmail replacement for FreeBSD.
I’m helping out at the BSD Events website. If there’s upcoming BSD-linked events, please tell me. Speaking of which: the call for papers for EuroBSDCon 2014 is out, as is the BSDCan 2014 schedule.
I am late posting this: the most recent episode of BSDNow has, along with the regular array of items, an interview of Chris Buechler, of the commercial support company behind pfSense.
DragonFly wasn’t accepted for Summer of Code, which frankly I expected to have happen last year – we’ve been participating every year since 2008. However, FreeBSD and (for the first time) OpenBSD are listed as participating mentoring institutions, so you can still get your BSD/GSoC going.
I’ve tagged version 3.6.1 of DragonFly, and built ISO/img files of it. They should be available by now on mirrors if you need them, or you can just upgrade as normal. See the linked tag commit message for what’s changed.
Pardon me as I wander through a lot of topics.
- Where to keep your pubic hair. I worry about this (syntax, not hair storage) when I’m writing titles here. (via)
- Top 100 most searched for out-of-print books in 2013. This is a UK site, so it’s UK-specific, I assume. I am thinking of it because I saw copies of the entertainingly illustrated “UNIX System Administrator’s Handbook” at NYCBSDCon. I have copies of the 3rd edition; the 4th edition in print now is the “UNIX and Linux…” version, and I don’t know if the illustrations survived. (via)
- Also found while looking at the previous links: UNIX Systems Advanced Administration and Management Handbook. No idea of the contents, since it’s nearly 20 years old, but the cover hints that it might be interesting more for the style of how it was assembled and what it covers, rather than the technical aspects. I am entertained by ‘first edition’ AD&D manuals the same way.
- It’s about time. DDOS attacks and NTP. A summary of the recent trend.
- Ten Things We Forgot to Monitor. The authors very kindly include the scripts they use to monitor these things now. (via)
- Less Commonly Used UNIX Commands. From a variety of places, so only a subset of this list is available on any given system. (via)
- The Death of Xenix. That was Microsoft UNIX, for those who don’t remember. (via)
- Unix: Using pushd and popd for faster navigation. One of those habits I’ve never been able to establish.
- Introducing BPasswd2. By Alex Hornung, one of the DragonFly developers. I’ve been meaning to post this for some time.
- Typeset In The Future, examining typefaces all through a sci-fi movie, down to the buttons. (via)
- World War G. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Top Shelf is now selling their excellent comics without DRM, so they can be stored/read however you like.
Read the first item, if nothing else.
- You may have seen that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B; take a look at the graph here to see that WhatsApp has more than double the user count of Facebook, and then look at these two posts on NYCBUG talk noting that WhatsApp uses FreeBSD to serve all those people.
- DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/17 summary.
- DiscoverBSD has an interview of Kent Riboe, maintainer of BSDEater.org, which appears to be a BSD RSS feed aggregator. I find the last sentence problematic: “…people shouldn’t need to read first half on one site and then click it to read the following part somewhere else.” I’d like people to read my words on my site, at some point, especially given that 75% of the text on bsdeater.org appear to be me.
- GNOME 3 on OpenBSD, on Undeadly. There’s more effort than I realized being put into this.
- How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images. (via)
- Synopsys bought Coverity. Coverity provided free source code analysis for FreeBSD; no idea if that will continue. (via swildner on #dragonflybsd)
- PC-BSD needs testers for a new upgrade method.
- Goodbye nve(4), hello nfe(4).
- FreeBSD has Synchronous Audio Interface (SAI) support. (Freescale-specific)
- NetBSD has imported SQLite 3.8.3.1.
- Some discussion of OpenBSD rootkits, or the lack thereof.
- Power failure resistance.
- LIBC_BUILTINS is no longer used in pkgsrc.
Grep /var/run/dmesg.boot for PMM, and if it turns up, Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch he’d like you to try.
See the announcement, and the commit. I’m not totally sure what this affects.
If you have i915 chipset-based video on DragonFly, and you get a “Output xxx has no Monitor section” complaint in your xorg logs, look at this fix using xrandr.
Here’s two recent changes in DragonFly that may interest you if you have an AMD processor: Compute Units are now supported, thanks to Mihai Carabas, and Imre Vadasz ported over km(4), for temperature monitoring on 14h and 15h CPUs. I’m still not totally clear on what Compute Units are.
I was remiss in not posting this before it happened, but Issac (.ike) Levy of NYCBUG went to Tokyo to talk about the translation efforts for pfSense, on the 17th. He posted a summary of his talk and slides.
Normally I would be posting this in an “In Other BSDs” Saturday item, but the summary page includes links on Open Network Hardware, which .ike and I talked about at NYCBSDCon. I wanted to create a separate post for it, but he’s got all the links piled in with his talk summary already.
The hardware I want to see as a real product is the Intel ONP Switch Reference Design. (PDF) Having a device that looks like a switch but is actually a normal computer with a lot of network ports – that can run BSD – opens up a huge range of network possibilities.