BSDNow 265 has a con report – the just-finished EuroBSDCon 2018 in Romania, plus the usual roundup of news items. One news item that will be useful someday: how to perform a BIOS update on a non-Windows computer.
If your kernel panics, the current state of memory can show why. That memory dump needs to be saved somewhere. ‘dumpon’ is the command to specify the device that will keep it. If you want to turn it off, you end up using the odd syntax ‘dumpon off’. Thanks to Aaron Li, there’s now a linguistically-sane command: ‘dumpoff’.
As a fix for wpa_supplicant, the upper limit on socket datagrams has been increased. What else does this affect? We’ll find out the hard way, which is why I mention it here.
I still have a backlog. Geez. I’m starting to worry I’m posting too much for anyone to read through.
- After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside. Important to read to see the mind-boggling scale of money flowing into Linux; it’s a corporate UNIX at this point, with priorities determined by a number of major companies. One year of Linus Torvalds’ pay is, I dare say, more than any other entire open source operating system project on the planet has received.
- Related: Something is rotten in the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation gives employees non-disparagement clauses? (via)
- Commodore 64 BASIC inside your USB Connector. (via)
- “the highest throughput of any telecommunications network ever created“
- More terminal font discussion.
- Teacup holster.
- Le Chatelier’s principle.
- Today in History, Brought to You by Unix. Always present on BSD, at least. (via)
- Leaving Apple and Google: /e/ first beta. (via)
- XML, blockchains, and the strange shapes of progress.
- Xonsh: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell. I link mostly because it’s neat to see new shells still getting created. (via)
- Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply. Thyratrons!
- Disk compression history. Read so you recognize the algorithms used.
- Pixeldungeon. A roguelike that runs most anywhere; might run on BSD?
- “There are two immutable truths about all wireless networks:“
- Enclose them all in super clear epoxy! That… is a computer that won’t suffer moisture issues.
Your unrelated dragonfly image this week: Common darter.
Still running on extra links from previous weeks. Usually it takes a larger convention to cause this sort of backlog.
- Exploring NomadBSD – Desktop FreeBSD on a thumb drive. (via)
- Mac-like FreeBSD Laptop. Surprisingly similar, visually. (via) Also some comments here.
- A FreeBSD 11 Desktop How-to. (via)
- “How install a package offline?”
- “Are their any BSD Game stores?”
- The Ultimate OpenBSD Media Server. (via)
- The history of file type information being available in Unix directories.
- Silent Fanless FreeBSD Server – DIY Backup.
- BSD Myths. Not a new list, but still good to know. (via)
- Announcing The HardenedBSD Foundation. (via)
- OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve. (via)
- “My new favorite Telegram Sticker.“
- SoloBSD 11.2-STABLE-0916 Viva Mexico! Edition.
- How does the process title works?
- “CBSD is adding bhyve live migration support.“
- Why Aren’t More Users More Happy With Our VMs? Part 1 and also part 2. (via)
- Uvm: a BSD virtual memory system. (via)
- Diskless MP3 jukebox, running NetBSD/shark.
I tried Hyper-V, and of course, I had to install a virtual DragonFly system. Sascha Wildner very helpfully pointed out that DragonFly on Hyper-V requires a legacy network adapter and a gen-1 image type; both changes you can make during initial setup. I’m noting it here for the benefit of future people walking down the same path.
Note: pick ‘legacy BIOS’ during the actual DragonFly install, too.
BSDNow 264 is available now and has the usual roundup of news, including discussion of Threadripper performance that I’ve avoided.
Chromium, the open sourced base of the Chrome browser, builds on BSDs, including DragonFly. But not without some work.
There’s a SemiBUG meeting at 7 PM tonight. Bring your troubleshooting lightning talks.
For anyone considering the purchase of a Ryzen system given the good benchmarks/power usage, here’s some discussion on users@ about which model is which.
Unofficial history theme this week – but not UNIX-specific, for once.
- Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape. Don’t tell the loaders at my workplace; they are crap. (via)
- Making Ubuntu bug reports seems to be useless (or pointless).
- Hex codes for all emoji. (via)
- Mechanical keyboard / Cherry history.
- Rise of the Stupid Network. (via)
- A software archaeology screwup.
- Dealing with a disclosure embargo in the 1970s. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, as programs. (via)
- Realtime VGA ASCII Art Converter. It’s hardware, so it can work with any VGA output.
- DevTube, developer talks on video. If you can get over universal partially bearded twentysomethings in t-shirts, you can find something useful here. (via)
- Document comments as automatic GitHub issues. It’s not without problem, but this is a good solution to an ugly problem.
- Knityak, computationally generated knitwear. (via)
- Roguelike Universe: Visualising Influence. Neat charts! (via)
- 8 megabytes of RAM in this picture. Also 7 million dollars. (via)
Your unrelated baking video of the week: Round Cake Production with Unifiller Depositors and Decorating Equipment. I’m not recommending this as a food; it’s just somewhat hypnotic to watch the robot production of something you usually imagine as lovingly handcrafted.
Built almost entirely with overflow from more than a week ago.
- GSoC 2018 Reports: Configuration files versioning in pkgsrc, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. (via)
- NextCloud on OpenBSD. (via)
- Anon Games, BSD games available freely through ssh. Or telnet, but don’t do that. (via)
- Let’s Try on OpenBSD: Baldur’s Gate 1 with gemrb and widescreen mod. Video. I link cause it’s interesting to see the setup work before the gameplay.
- Automatic switch wifi/ethernet on OpenBSD.
- Highly Available DHCP Server on FreeBSD. This is the first I’ve heard of Kea, though the article itself is about isc-dhcp.
- OpenBSD on an iBook G4. (via)
- NetBSD: kASan support officially added. kASan == Kernel Address Sanitizer. (via)
- FreeBSD 11.1 EOL.
- Color vt on FreeBSD.
- Syncthing on FreeBSD.
- Need help getting eMac G4 graphics to work.
BSDNow manages to hit a majority of the BSDs this week, talking about Free/Open/Net in various ways. No interview, but lots to hear about.
DragonFly’s root account defaults to tcsh, and that now defaults to autorehash being set on. Useful to remember if you reflexively type ‘rehash’ like I do, and also useful if you come from a shell where ‘rehash’ isn’t needed.
Michael Neumann wrote up his first contribution to Ravenports, some time ago, but I just noticed it now. If you find it inspiring, your next step is Chapter 14: Port Creation Walk-though.
There’s several new mirrors for DragonFly, all listed on the mirrors page thanks to Matthias Schmidt: Checkdomain GmbH, Philipps-University Marburg (both in Germany), and KoDDos (Japan).
I did finally clean out my “to post” email folder, at least.
- History of Gopher. (via)
- Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983. (via)
- textbeat, write music in Vim or other text source. (via)
- 2048 in the terminal. (via)
- Can you use the terminal for everything? A video, and relevant to the previous two links. (via)
- The 30 Best Web Games. I link it to show a sort of technology snapshot from 10-15 years ago. (via)
- Good books for deep hacks. Very In-depth reading.
- The origins of clip art.
- MIT-licensed vector clip art, related. (via)
- The Ethical OS Playbook. It’s “only” a PDF of questions, but definitely good questions to ask. (via)
- Best RSS feed reader apps. Well, services, but not everyone can run Tiny Tiny RSS. Anyway, you should be taking full advantage of RSS. (via)
- You can now pre-order the Edible Games Cookbook even if you weren’t in the Kickstarter.
- Stripping tabs in ‘here’ documents. I wish I had known this years ago.
- The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software.
- Markov chains, explained visually. (via)
- Hidden gems of xterm. (via)
Your unrelated item of the week: Please enjoy this masterclass in comedy timing from a pizza. (via)
I am having trouble keeping up with BSD news items. This is a good problem to have.
- The History of a Security Hole. Cross-BSD. (via)
- hard state soft state confusion. A followup on the previous link.
- NetBSD 7.2 is out. More than one branch is supported, if you find yourself saying “didn’t 8 just release?”
- 2FA with ssh on OpenBSD. Useful; probably can extrapolate out. (via)
- OpenBSD Gaming Resource (2018.08 update). I didn’t realize this was getting regular updates; that’s a good thing. (via)
- HumbleBundle sale. Runs for another 5 days.
- OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go. I appreciate the in-depth hardware listing.
- A look beyond the BSD teacup: OmniOS installation. Try to ignore the meme image linked in that article; it’s an example of BSD culture trying to destroy itself. The article is good for examining OmniOS.
- OPNSense 18.7.1 released.
- OpenBSD-current changes as an RSS feed.
- Valuable News – 2018/08/25 and 2018/09/02.
- New ZFS Boot Environments Tool.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 15 – Configuration – Fonts & Frameworks.
- arm64 gains RETGUARD. OpenBSD architecture.
- Theo on the latest Intel issues. “currently public artifacts”, should give you pause.
- OpenBSD Foundation gets first 2018 Iridium donation! I had not heard of Handshake before.
- Native Encryption for ZFS on FreeBSD CFT. (via)
- OpenSSH 7.8 is out. (via)
I’ve been linking to other parts of this, but now it’s on one page: “Zenripper“, talking about how to overclock/underclock a Threadripper system on DragonFly.
This week’s BSDNow covers a few things I haven’t seen yet – a news update from the FreeBSD Foundation, and a status report on Project Trident.