NYCBUG is meeting at Suspenders, tomorrow. The announcement has details. Go, if you are near.
Rimvydas Jasinskas has done the tedious but useful work to update a number of utilities in DragonFly to newer vendor versions: LibreSSL 2.9.1, libarchive 3.3.3, xz 5.2.4, ldns 1.7.0, and OpenSSH 8.0p1.
I’ve got some unique links this week.
- “We’ve run the simulation a million million times… and every time, the Dark Lord wins.” Mageframe, a story told by AI (apparently not just another Markov Chain) with your seeded information. Explanation here; I suggest this is art you should participate in.
- Return to Nib’s Knoll. Another early-Internet sense of place, buried away.
- href.cool. Old-style web directory. (via)
- What I’m Thinking About 1995. Makes sense if you listen to the author’s podcast.
- As A Service. “Half a century ago it was called timesharing.”
- Twisty Little Passages, a sorta-RPG, sorta-roguelike … book?
- Fast FVP, the task sorting method.
- 110 days of Early Multics Emacs History. (via)
- Cthulhu Dark, “A Rules-light system For lovecraftian Horror”. I like how compact it is; a 3-page PDF. (via)
- Related: the original Call of Cthulhu rules. I’ve never had to type out Cthulhu before.
- 30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web. (via)
- The Software Arts, an “alternative history of software that places the arts at the very center of software’s evolution.” (via)
- The 25¢ Apple II Real Time Clock. The author shows up in the comments of the source link, 38 years later.
- Espruino ISS Notifier. Yep, it’s a Space Station Detector.
I have an inexplicably short BSD section this week. Post-BSDCan fatigue? I don’t know, but I have lots on the docket for tomorrow, I promise.
- ZFS on APU2; follow the thread for details.
- What are the differences between OpenBSD and Linux? (via)
- Something that Linux distributions should not do when packaging things. Linked because I’ve seen people pick Linux over a BSD because they assume (wrongly!) that a large commercial Linux distribution would have up to date packages.
- For the umpteenth time, help a “*BSD newbie” pick the right operating system.
- vmctl(8): command line syntax changed.
- fnaify 1.3 released – more games are “fnaify & run” now.
- Related: GOG.com Summer Sale – OpenBSD Highlights.
The newest BSD Now (300? wow!) has, among other things, a summary of their recent trip to BSDCan 2019.
Remember the commit that autocreates human-readable disk device names under /dev? (Here’s a reminder.) It’s now in 5.4 – technically, since 5.4.2. Anyway, it will automatically identify the root USB disk when you boot from a USB .img file, so you no longer have to guess which /dev/daX file it was – usually da8 but sometimes you got a surprise instead.
That sounds like a good thing, right? No automatic bugs, just manually placed ones. What it really means is that bugs.dragonflybsd.org no longer autocreates users, cause there was a certain amount of spam coming through freely created accounts there. It may be hard to tell the next step.
Sascha Wildner has committed mandoc(1) to DragonFly to use for man, whatis, apropos, and other functions. One less GNU utility, and also means groff can come out of the base system. That is almost the last C++ code in base… I am not sure what remains.
Because of the ongoing pmap work from Matthew Dillon, building vkernels may not work for a short period in DragonFly-master. “A short period” usually means a few days for this sort of thing.
Update: all better now.
If you have been enjoying the Digest for many years, and you’d like to buy me a nice sandwich, you most certainly can.
Accidental theme of the week: old-school non-UNIX operating systems.
- John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician. You may know his name from Conway’s Game of Life. (via)
- I will probably never give my shell dotfiles the major reform they could use.
- Tarn Adams Uses This. Dwarf Fortress.
- Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Twelve – Pressure Cooker.
- ssh in https. Sneaking ssh in a port where https is already in use; clever.
- Playdate. The online game delivery is the real news; it’s more of an art project platform. (via)
- When you have reached Acme. The minimism of Vim, the overgrowth of Emacs, the brain-melting esotericism of Plan9. (via)
- RETRO: a Modern, Pragmatic Forth Programming Environment. (via)
- Retrocomputing for the masses. ZX80 recreation in the RC2014.
- Serenity OS: A love letter to ’90s user interfaces, with a custom Unix-like core. (via)
- Atari 800 vs. Commodore 64 – The Brief Tale of Two 8-Bit Home Computers. (via)
- Gopher and the Lynx Web. Don’t overcomplicate! (via)
- TempleOS: 1 – Installation. (via)
- OpenVMS/x86_64: VMSI announces first boot of VMS on x86 architecture. (via)
- IBM 360 Model 20 Rescue and Restoration. (via)
- Gallery of Programmer Interfaces. I have not heard of many of these. (via)
Watch for post-BSDCan slides and material and ideas to show up in the next few weeks.
- NetBSD 8.1-RC1 is out.
- BSDCan 2019 papers are showing up, plus this iXsystems recap.
- pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p3 now available.
- WANT TO PLAY A GAME? Ooh, look at the simulated phosphor! (via)
- Valuable News – 2019/05/20.
- How does BSD benefit you personally?
- NetBSD For The ODROID-C2. (via)
- g2k19 hackathon report from Claudio Jeker.
- RunHyve. (via)
- FreeBSD 11.3-b1 is out.
- Automount Synology NFS shares from OpenBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop with MATE. Don’t run the script via fetch like it says. (via)
- OPNsense 19.1.8 released.
- FreeNAS as your server OS. I didn’t know there was a hypervisor option within FreeNAS.
Here’s something that might be useful: an example cleaning file for creating an AWS DragonFly image. Here’s the blob if you want to see what’s in it. I assume you will want to install awscli to use.
BSD Now’s pre-milestone episode has a nice range of topics, along with a note that they are going to an audio-only format – except for the livestream.
I’m jumping ahead in my very full queue of DragonFly items to post to something new: Matthew Dillon has committed extensive work to the virtual memory system in DragonFly. He has a message to users@ that sums it up.
If that’s not enough reading for you, I’ll point at commits where he reports speed improvements, changes to systat(1), or just 2-decade-old copyright items.
DragonFly 5.4.3 is out. My users@ post describes upgrading, as do the 5.4 release notes. This release has a fix for an Intel floating-point bug.
Images are available for download at various mirrors, too. If you’ve recently upgraded to 5.4, it’s the normal build process. There’s a brand new complete build of all packages uploaded, too, so plan on a ‘pkg update’.
Cobbled together early cause I have an unexpectedly busy weekend, so you are getting a straight dump of everything pending I had in RSS, Thursday night.
- How to Shop for a Mechanical Keyboard. (via)
- Coding is for everyone as long as you speak English. (via)
- Oddly shaped notebooks. (via)
- How to Hack an Expensive Camera and Not Get Killed by Your Wife. Years spent exploring one single bit of hardware. (via)
- Why Open Source Firmware is Important for Security. (via)
- Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time. (via)
- NetHack 3.6.2 released. Aww, BeOS support dropped? (via)
- vis – A vi-like editor based on Plan 9’s structural regular expressions. (via)
- Connecting an Amiga to the world in 2019. (via)
- Cooking As A Service.
- Simple way to use ssh tunnels in scripts.
- Library Extension. Useful on a near-daily basis for me.
- Kermit command line to fetch remote files through ssh.
- OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.04 is out. (via)
- Experimental headers are no longer experimental.
- Millions of exposed RDP on the Internet.
I have more links than I expected.
- Brief netbsd.org outages tomorrow.
- SEMIBUG vmm hypervisor demo on the 21st.
- WireGuard on OpenBSD. (via)
- No itch to scratch.
- Simple shared folder with Samba on OpenBSD 6.5.
- Confusion with used/free disk space in ZFS.
- Valuable News – 2019/05/09.
- BSDCan 2019 Auction Items, and next Beaks novel.
- Video of live reading of “FreeBSD Journal” column.
- Overview of ZFS Pools in FreeNAS.
- Intel MDS. A problem not specific to any one BSD, really. (via)
- Bad utmp implementations in Glibc and FreeBSD. (via)
- syzkaller found a bug.
- Keep Crashing Daemons Running on FreeBSD. First three words are a potential band name. (via)
- HumbleBundle Spring Sale – OpenBSD Highlights.