This week’s BSDNow, number 318, “The TrueNAS Library“, covers some links I’ve picked up before but also has BSD and presidential library news, an uncommon combo.
You should set hostname in /etc/rc.conf. I am mentioning this now because not doing it kept me from running X apps from a DragonFly system on a Windows 10 system with vcxsrv, and I wasted half an hour of my life figuring that out. Apparently this is a lesson I need to keep relearning.
Plan 9: Not dead, Just Resting, presented by Ori Bernstein, is happening tonight at the ever-mighty NYCBUG. Go, if you are near.
dsynth(1) has a new ‘monitor’ command, which watches log output and tells you what it’s doing. I haven’t tried it yet, so I am only guessing. A screenshot would be nice.
KnoxBUG meets tonight, with home labs being the topic. Go, if you are near.
You may be able to tell one of my link sources changed RSS feeds, so I had some catchup to do this week.
- What is “DCC SEND startkeylogger”? (via)
- Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case. (via)
- Imaging Floppies. (via)
- Just Delete Me. (via)
- ReMarkable review. Has anyone used one of these recently?
- Explanations, about X and beyond. (via)
- Recent News in Narrative Games.
- What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre and When games grow and time passes.
- It’s almost XScreenSaver in clock form.
- Bits vs. Things.
- Gastropod facts. I greatly enjoy this podcast.
- Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer. Worth it for the pictures alone.
- Risky line printer music on a vintage IBM mainframe.
Note there’s several BUG meetings coming up.
- KnoxBUG meets Monday, talking about home labs.
- Pure sh bible. POSIX sh, not bashisms, for once. (via)
- ZFS is not a universal filesystem that is always good for all workloads. Neither is HAMMER. It’s interesting to think of the edge cases.
- Taking NetBSD kernel bug roast to the next level: Kernel Fuzzers (quick A.D. 2019 overview). (via)
- Next NYCBUG meeting: Plan 9: Not dead, Just Resting, with Ori Bernstein. I’ll post a reminder, of course.
- EuroBSDCon 2019.
- 1 day / 1 game : Red Alert with games/openra. It’s a FLV file.
- Playing Ion Fury on OpenBSD. Another FLV link.
- 1 day / 1 game on OpenBSD: Sword of the Stars: The Pit by thfr@.
- fnaify 2.0 out. (via)
- Project Trident 12U7 now available.
- List Block Devices on FreeBSD lsblk(8) Style.
- Valuable News – 2019/09/23.
- OpenBSD at EuroBSDcon 2019.
Your book plug of the week: “Of course, if you don’t want to sponsor a book on SNMP I can’t blame you for that either. It’s a horrible topic that most of us would rather pretend didn’t exist.“
The default variables for jails on DragonFly have changed; obviously this only affects you if you are running jails. Adjust your rc.conf as needed.
It’s Thursday, so BSD Now 317 is posted, with the usual news summary – and a recap of EuroBSDCon 2019.
If you are near Portland, Oregon tonight and like pizza, go. Of course you like pizza!
HAMMER2 is Copy on Write, meaning changes are made to copies of existing data. This means operations are generally atomic and can survive a power outage, etc. (You should read up on it!) However, there’s now a fsck command, useful if you want a report of data validity rather than any manual repair process.
Lots of link diversity this week.
- GPS – A Hollywood Actress, a Player Piano, and Hip-Hop. (via)
- Percy Ludgate, the missing link between Babbage’s machine and everything else.
- The Light Phone 2. I don’t know how good or bad it will be, but with an e-ink screen, the battery life must be spectacular. (via)
- The Gongfather’s Almanac, for Dungeon Crawl Classics. (via)
- 251 words you can spell with a calculator and hex colors that are also words. (both via)
- Instagram Hates The Internet. The company made a conscious decision to break hyperlinking.
- The Turkish lira’s currency code is an unexpected source of problems with computer programmers.
- ASCII table and history. Or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal? (via)
- Batch renaming images, including image resolution, with awk. (I think via)
- Chaosnet for Unix. Pre-Ethernet, for Lisp machines. (via)
- tine – a modern clone of the Amiga ED display editor. (via)
- corpypastas.
- The Vim-Inspired Editor with a Linguistic Twist. Kakoune. (via)
- Syncstop, hardware USB data block.
- The Strange Alchemy of D&D’s Genre Emulation. Note to self: find Jack Vance books.
- What Remains Technical Breakdown. A new NES game, including physical media. (via)
Whee!
- Ori Bernstein will be giving the October talk at NYCBUG.
- EuroBSDCon 2019 is happening right now. It might be streamed, though I haven’t yet found a link for that. (via)
- BSD Pizza Night: –
- Pinebook Pro, coming soon. Good for ARM development, but not a normal workstation. (via)
- The return of
startx(1)for non-root users [with some caveats]. - Setting up a mail server with OpenSMTPD, Dovecot and Rspamd.
- OpenBSD Moonlight game streaming client from a Windows + Nvidia PC.
- 2 more games added to the #PlayOnBSD shopping guide: Sumico and Unexplored.
- Project Trident 12-U6 now available.
- Setting up buildbot in FreeBSD jails. (via)
- Sourcehut makes BSD software better. (via)
- bhyvearm64: CPU and Memory Virtualization on Armv8.0-A. (via)
- UNIX artifacts on the way. Might be BSD? (via)
- Valuable News – 2019/09/16.
- This book is everywhere.
A quick entry: dhcpcd(8) 8.0.6. committed to DragonFly.
This week’s BSD Now has lots of material to work with, but the part they talk about that’s new to me: Homura.
The headline is a little misleading; umtpx has been in DragonFly forever, but now utmp is really retired and programs adjusted to match. The change is not that user-affecting and utmp data is still accessible; this is part of the ABI change alluded to over the past week.
If you are not familiar with utmp(5) and utmpx(5), they are databases in /var that track user logins and system restarts. utmpx is of course better cause it has an X.
I goofed and didn’t post about the SEMIBUG meeting tonight, so it is too late now… but this video was the topic of discussion.
Are you near Chicago? ChiBUG meets tonight. Go, if you are near.
If you are on DragonFly-current, the ABI changes of the past few days are complete and new dports packages are built, so now is a good time to do a complete build and install of world and kernel, and then a pkg update.
5.6 users can keep on keeping on; no breakage there.