For once, I couldn’t figure out what the name of this week’s BSD Now episode referenced. It’s Data Virtual Address, in ZFS, which gets covered in the show. There’s a specific bit about Go and OpenBSD that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere, too. (see show notes)
If you’ve got a pcm audio device – and you probably do – and a headphone jack – ditto – this thread may help you find the right sysctl to enable it on DragonFly.
rcorder-visualize.sh draws the dependencies for rc scripts using dot. Originally in NetBSD, then in FreeBSD, now in DragonFly.
Again, dumping out all the links I can in case you are stuck at home.
- Secure erase. I have done this yes.
- “Encrypted email is LARP security”
- 4 Columns. Linked for the interface and how it’s tied to the content.
- Best Ever Spooky House Adventures.
- On The Metal, a technical podcast described as a garbage replacement, though without the BSD content.
- Void: Terminal-based personal organizer. Looking at the resources listed at the end of the README is also instructive. (via)
- Is Myst still one of the worst games ever?
- The Best Fountain Pens Under 100 Dollars. The TWSBI 580 is my favorite.
- 4 Plain Text resource links.
- Teletext: the Boring talk.
- Variables, Pointers, and Indirection in Arduino C. (via)
- You are a raccoon. Descend into a dungeon, looking for lost books. (via)
- Removing characters with tr.
- CSS didn’t decouple content from presentation.
- A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NEXTSTEP Workstation. (via)
- Terminal Vision. Terminal == Serious Computer. (via)
- Obscure features of JPEG. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the week: Hannibal Rex – The One Hundred & Forty Faces Of?.?.?. Has the same drive as early Mix Master Mike, to my ear. (via)
Throwing all the links I can out there.
- March/April BUG meetings canceled for NYCBUG and SEMIBUG.
- FreeBSD Journal 2020/01-02. (PDF, via)
- FreeBSD Find Installed Hard Disk Size Information. (via)
- GhostBSD 20.02 Overview. (video, via)
- Introduction to Flua on FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD Loader and Console Future. (via)
- OPNsense 20.1.2 released.
- FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying. TrueNAS 12 will be the One True… NAS
- p2k19 Hackathon Report: Rafael Sadowski on KDE+Qt5 progress, more.
- My infrastructure as of 2019. Not a bad model.
- Valuable News – 2020/03/02 and 2020/03/09.
- OpenBSD Errata: March 13th, 2020 (sosplice). (via)
- OpenBSD Errata: March 10th, 2020 (sysctl). (via)
- New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2020-002.
- Accomplishment of porting ptrace(2) test scenarios.
- Towards backtracing through signal trampolines and fresh libc++.
- How to Set Up Windows SMB Shares on FreeNAS.
- The Expression Amrilato (Renpy compatible).
- Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius (free visual novel on GOG).
- cwm-like Window Manager for NetBSD and FreeBSD?
- Let’s Play on OpenBSD: Northgard.
- Let’s Play on OpenBSD: Dead Cells 1.7.6 with The Bad Seed DLC.
- OpenBSD Full Disk Encryption with CoreBoot and Tianocore Payload.
- Does anyone have KDE on FreeBSD working with multiple monitors?
- Clearing up FreeBSD GCC news.
- FreeBSD 12.1 Nvidia desktop.
BSD Now 341 is about unification, get it? It’s covering the merging of TrueNAS/FreeNAS, along with the usual roundup of news, including POWER9 and FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Go, and so on.
I tagged DragonFly 5.6.3, and built images. You should run 5.8, cause it’s the most recent, but this means there’s an image that captures all the last bugfixes in the 5.6 series. You can see them in the tag message if you are curious.
I moved the 4.x ISO/IMG release files for DragonFly out to an existing “older” directory. If you’re looking for a old release image, it’s available via the web.
Note that it’ll be a few hours until this change filters through to the mirrored directories. The 4.x images are all older than 2 years, so this is of most benefit to mirror sites.
ChiBUG meets tonight, and it’s at the Oak Park Library, not the usual place. Go, if you are near, and especially if you were too far away, before. This spot may be more accessible.
I had so many tabs open they weren’t all showing, so you get a straight dump.
- Haiku Alpha 1: Rebirth of legend. (via)
- Install & Configure BeOS R5.1d Using Oracle VirtualBox. (via)
- Closing Periods on Flickr. Linked cause I do that here. (via)
- Emulation on an iPhone/iPad. Linked just to show how difficult Apple chooses to make this. (via)
- I believe this to possibly be the worst recipe-generating algorithm in existence. (via I lost it, sorry)
- Build a 6502 computer. Video series. (via)
- The eMate 300 Out In Front for “BBS Week V”.
- 7DRL is running now. (via)
- A Text Renaissance.
- My Linux and Vim Notes. Disregard the Linux part.
- Digging up IP addresses with the Linux dig command. Disregard etc.
- A random encounter with a 35 year old file format.
- Fucking laptops. I agree on the x200 series.
- Rotary Cellphone.
- Payphone_Mk_2.
- Lavender, a console font heavily inspired by Sun Gallant and the XNU console font. (via)
- Ice Cream Book reviews. I agree wholeheartedly about Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream.
- My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s. Your reaction to this will vary based on your age.
- Mark 1 FORTH Computer. “This computer has no microprocessor.” (via)
- which led me to the Homebuilt CPU Webring. A Webring! Bizarre computers! Hooray!
- opensource-challenges.
- Gears gears gears animations.
- ‘a dead simple git cheatsheet’. (via)
- Simone.computer. The projects are interesting, the interface itself is interesting. (via)
I have not yet even gone through my BSD RSS feeds for some days and I already have plenty of links for you.
- Test your TOR.
- Census Program II, an evaluation of open-source software dependencies. Linux-specific, but applies to ports and BSD. (via)
- Arena Unix II swim cap.
- OpenBSD versus Prometheus (and Go).
- Unix’s /usr split and standards (and practice) and The /bin versus /usr split and diskless workstations. Dates back to early BSD history.
- tinyc.games. Should work on BSD? (via)
- POWER to the People – Making FreeBSD First Class Citizen on POWER. (via)
- FreeBSD Finally Removes GCC 4.2.1 from Base System after 13 Years. (via)
- Release of pkg 1.13 for FreeBSD. (via)
- Xorg 1.20.7 on HardenedBSD Comes with IE/RELRO+BIND_NOW/CFI/SafeSta
ck Protections. (via) - Eternal Terminal. (via)

BSD Now 340 is up, with dives into different BSD platform tools; very enjoyable if you like digging into how things work, which of course you do if you are reading this.
If you follow the upgrade instructions in my 5.8 update post, there is one ‘gotcha’. If your copy of /usr/src was downloaded using “make src-create-shallow”, you will not have any git history – or any branches other than 5.6.
The easy, cheesy way to fix it is to remove /usr/src, then type “make src-create” in /usr, and proceed from there. There’s probably a way to edit in the other branches, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’m counseling the brute force method for now.
DragonFly 5.8.0 has been released. This version brings dsynth, with matching optimizations to fit dsynth running many parallel builds of ports.
My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading, as do the release notes.
Note that you will get some noise in dmesg until you remove opie from where it’s mentioned in /etc/pam.d/ files. It’s cosmetic unless you use opie, and you probably don’t. I mention it because I noticed it. Check /usr/src/UPDATING after pulling in the 5.8 source to see details of this and other changes.
Dr. Paul Vixie is giving a talk at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, titled “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes“. It’s tomorrow. Go, if you are near; this is one of the people who built basic blocks of the Internet’s infrastructure.
If you are near Stockholm, go to the Stockholm BUG meeting, tomorrow. I’m posting it a bit ahead of time to account for time zone difference.
Tab-clearing links!
- Have You Played… SimCity 2000? Not really about the game, but the music involuntarily associated with it. Elektra:Assassin and MARRS is the same for me.
- Prosthetic synthesizer. (via)
- Cable standards history. More interesting than I make it sound!
- Kermit, a history. Not just a summary; the source documents. (via)
- Old CSS, new CSS. (via)
- Evoboxx, uneasy retro synth. Game of Life as dedicated hardware.
- A love letter to the fantasy airship. (via)
- What is a traditional roguelike? (also via)
- byNWR, streaming restored fringe films, plus a talk about it. (also via)
- Stickers for the RSS massive.
- Rooibos. Technically not tea.
- Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet. And that’s awesome. (via)
- Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses. (via)
- Zip Files: History, Explanation and Implementation. (via)
- The ‘sextortion’ Scams: The Numbers Show That What We Have Is A Failure Of Education. I like the deep dive.
Your unrelated music link of the week: KUTMAH – New Appliance. (via)