A reminder: If you are near Japan, AsiaBSDCon 2019 is on March 21-24, in Tokyo. Go if you are near.
That somewhat symmetric title is to note a new device feature on DragonFly: if you use disklabel to label a disk, its parts will automatically appear under /dev. So, if you label a disk MYVOLUME, and it has 3 parts, a, b, and d, you will automatically gain a /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.a, /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.b, and a /dev/part-by-label/MYVOLUME.d.
BSD Now 289 is up, titled “Microkernel Failure“. Among other things, the show notes has links to all 18 existing parts of the FreeBSD desktop series that’s been going on for some time.
Thanks to Aaron LI, you can now (actually, since December) run ifconfig without involuntarily loading associated kernel modules, with the -n option. See his commit message for an example.
I’m finally cleaning out some things I never got to post when new: last October, the DragonFly installer gained the ability to ask for terminal type, when used over a serial cable. Thanks to Diederik de Groot for that one.
(A rare combination… but when you need it, you won’t have an alternative.)
The binary package repository for DragonFly-current has been updated with the latest build of all packages, thanks to tuxillo and others on EFNet #dragonflybsd doing a lot of work.
Tuxillo noted: there’s new rust, thunderbird, firefox, nginx, several llvm versions, and a new chrome (version 72). freerdp is temporarily broken; use remmina with the rdp plugin instead. openvpn isn’t upgraded yet cause the build was with libressl, which is a broken combination – it’ll all be built with openssl in a future run.
Another good mix of deep dives / unique links this week. Enjoy!
- Gameboy Emulator for Emacs. (via)
- Systems Software Research is Irrelevant. 2 decades old but relevant. (via)
- What you need may be “pipeline +Unix commands” only. (via)
- Running a Modern Gopher Server. (via)
- Command Line Space Mines Simulator Game ported from BASIC to LDPL. Linked because of the source images. (via)
- chunkwm — a tiling window manager for macOS. (via)
- From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners. (via)
- Teletype Model 33.
- Writing a Book with Unix. (via)
- Seven Unix Commands Every Data Scientist Should Know. (via)
- Random numbers in the 1950s, from ERNIE, to quantum now. (via)
- Stoic Electronics. I love this look, though it has no formal name. (via)
- Related: America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the ’80s. That stuff was expensive and durable. (via)
- Also related: I took this picture myself, while cleaning up a shelf of books in a library at work.
- Browsing a remote git repository.
- Explaining Code using ASCII Art.
Final link of the week: The story that was made for me: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL.
If these aren’t enough links, some of them are links to more links.
- Using MRTG on OpenBSD.Amsterdam. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 14 – Configuration – Tint2.
- LLDB from trunk is running on NetBSD once again!
- Metasploit on OpenBSD. (via)
- Looking at NetBSD from an OpenBSD user perspective. (via)
- 2019 AsiaBSDCon registration is open (plus some NetBSD event info).
- GhostBSD: A Solid Linux-Like Open Source Alternative. A Linux site reviewing.
- Site membership and mailing list subscriptions, managed through shell scripts on OpenBSD.
- Sega Dreamcast running NetBSD, is it useful? (via)
- Nixers Newsletter 116. I keep meaning to link to these, regularly.
- Increasing coverage of signal semantics in regression tests.
- Valuable News – 2019/03/04.
- OPNSense 19.1.3 released.
- a2k19 Hackathon Report: Antoine Jacoutot on ports, syspatch(8), and more.
- Using a Yubikey as smartcard for SSH public key authentication.
- The Joy in Csh & Vi. Indirectly BSD.
A little thing: Matthew Dillon has made changes to vm_page_list_find2() which should improve performance in low-memory situations, though how much I don’t know. Mentioning it, cause every little bit helps – for knowledge and speed.
This week’s BSD Now covers a range of topics that could match what I have in my weekend posts.
If you missed the qmail presentation from last night’s NYCBUG meeting, the slides are available now, and video will be coming soon. (I’ll link to it if I know about it.)
As mentioned last week, there’s a new build of dports for 5.4, now available. No surprise, but a reminder to keep third-party software up to date is never wasted.
NYCBUG’s having a meeting tomorrow night, with Amitai Schleier presenting on qmail. Go, if you are near, or at least read Amitai’s speaker bio.
Because someone decided years and years ago that the CAM structures should be passed through to userland, smartctl, camcontrol, cdrecord, and some other tools will be broken in DragonFly-master for a few days. If you are on -stable (5.4) this won’t affect you.
I’m going to break out the roguelike tag again even if it isn’t a perfect fit.
- Vintage CGI.
- The Gemini palmtop. (via)
- From Vimperator to Tridactyl. (via)
- A Kernel of Failure.
- Drinking coffee with AWK. Accounting through text stream editing. (via)
- Civilisational HTTP Error Codes. (via I lost it, sorry)
- Leon: An open-source personal assistant. Comments at the source link led me to Mycroft again.
- Ringen (1979). Second-oldest non-English text adventure known, preserved because it was brought into a MUD.
- Using Vim to take time-stamped notes. (via)
- How Fair Is My D20? (via)
- Google-free Android Setup. (via)
- Scientology and the Fellowship. I did not know about this Ultima link at all.
- Pi-Hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements. (via)
- Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement of Curiosity episode seven – The Battle of Carambola Ridge.
- How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal. (via)
- Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks. (via)
I didn’t even realize Summer of Code was upon us again.
- Hello world, no root. (NetBSD on Nintendo64). (via)
- Google Summer of Code 2019 participants: FreeBSD, NetBSD.
- Why OpenBSD rocks. (via)
- SecBSD: Unix-like operating system focused on computer security. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 13 – Configuration – Dzen2. I’ve been lax in linking to the previous 12.
- back of the napkin freebsd hardware?
- OPNsense 19.1.2 released.
- [packages] PostgreSQL major update. (OpenBSD)
- The New iXsystems.com Experience.
- ARM’d and dangerous: FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (aarch64).
- Improvements to X86FixupGadgets pass of clang(1). (OpenBSD)
- New VPN FAQ.
- [OpenBSD] 6.5-beta has been tagged.
- BSD Link Roundup 2/21.
- Valuable News – 2019/02/25.
- FuguIta – based on OpenBSD. (via)
Sepherosa Ziehau’s improvements to re(4), bringing it to Realtek’s 1.95 release, have been committed.
(Does Realtek have a public repo for this? A few minutes of Googling did not turn one up for me.)
This week’s BSD Now talks about a number of NetBSD things including rc.d as you might guess, and covers Project Trident. Listen/read in if you are unfamiliar.
Thanks to tuxillo and others, there’s a new build of dports on the way for DragonFly 5.4 that includes packages that weren’t building before – mongodb, kodi, mysql80, and I imagine more that I don’t know about. If the synth build is still running when you read this, you can look at its status page. If it isn’t running, the packages are of course in the normal place and you can use ‘pkg upgrade’ to get them.
Yay, got to use the roguelike tag!
- ARPANET: Celebrating 50 Years Since “LO”. There’s a transcript farther down the page if you don’t want to watch the video; I am always grateful for transcripts. (via)
- THROBAC, a computer using Roman numerals. I had no idea this could exist.(via)
- Aspell to check spelling.
- Drist release with persistent ssh.
- Open protocols can evolve fast if they’re willing to break other people.
- Why I like middle mouse button paste in xterm so much.
- Using
grepwith/dev/null, an old Unix trick. Muscle memory. - Bad PC cases.
- Cygwin 3.0.0-1. (via)
- Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience. I linked to Cogmind 4 years ago, and it has significantly grown since then. Note to self: play. (via)
- Ask laarc: What apps do you love and/or use habitually?
- Ultima VII. Deep dive into a deep game.
- Dwarf Fortress diaries: 3, a gruesome winter, 4 – Messages from Zon, 5 – culture war, dingo war, and 6 – Through the Interesting Door.
- Landley’s Computer History Page. There’s a lot of history there. Plus BSD history! (via)
- Using gmail with mutt. (via)
- Writing a Rust Roguelike for the Desktop and the Web. (via)
- Restoring My 90’s Era 386 (Work in Progress). Back when heatsinks were much less necessary. (via)
- Split keyboards, a five year experience and review. Source comments led me to Keyboardio, which is nice hardware… and can be reprogrammed by the end user! That’s the way it should be.