Shutdowns are a bit faster in DragonFly, thanks to the addition of a QUICKHALT shortcut. How much faster? It depends on what devices you have mounted, I suspect. I haven’t yet updated and tried.
So, you may have noticed that author Michael W. Lucas has been releasing regular books in his “Mastery” series, focusing on various tools. I like linking to his work because he writes inclusively about BSD, even when it isn’t the topic of the book.
He’s on his 13th Mastery book, and it’s April 1st, April Fools Day. Anyone who knows his sense of humor might suspect he would take advantage of this confluence of minor events. He did: he wrote “ed Mastery“.
ed(1), for those unfamiliar, is a text editor that doesn’t show you what you are working on – it was written more than 4 decades ago when you didn’t have a computer screen – just a printer. It’s a limitation that is positively difficult to duplicate today.
It was present in the very first release of UNIX from AT&T – the operating system was written using it! This does, at first, seem like a bit of a joke – people usually only claim to use ed when they want to show how they triumphed over adversity.
This being a book in the Mastery series, however, means that Lucas explores how to use the tool in-depth. His tongue is firmly planted in cheek, meaning he is taking this seriously and not seriously at the same time. The odd thing is that since this is the proto-editor that stands behind sed, vi, nvi, vim, and sorta emacs, a lot of the movement and control commands apply to everything. The regular expressions here are the model all the following editors stick to, by and large.
It’s humor, and the book knows it’s humorous both in topic and content. But it actually works as an explanation of how to work through ed to accomplish goals. I can’t imagine it’s easy to get into a situation where ed would be your only option… but I can see how the tools for shifting data around or automating text changes come right out of these processes.
It’s available now, through the usual sources and DRM-free from the author.
(Obligatory disclosure: Lucas sent me an electronic copy of the book and asked me to talk about it on April Fool’s Day, if I wanted to. I am bad at payola.)
Accidental theme this week: games.
- AI Anecdotes, with highlights. (via)
- The history of documented Unix facilities. (via)
- Web OS, open sourced. Originally what ran on Palm handhelds. I got to try an unreleased Palm phone just before they folded – it was slick. (via)
- The quest to save Stephen Hawking’s voice. He can literally speak from beyond the grave, if you think about it. (via)
- A Look Back at PLATO. (via)
- Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix. (via)
- The Handheld History Collection. (via)
- The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization and Part 2: Playing Civilization and Part 3: Civilization and the Narrative of Progress.
- The making of Dark Castle. That game fascinated me. (via)
- Edible Dice. Yep, can buy them. (via)
- Stop cherry-picking, start merging: Index.
- groups.io. Way, way better than dealing with Yahoo or Google ‘free’ group products, which is an unavoidable feature of many non-tech groups. (via)
Your unrelated cookbook link of the week: “Texture – A hydrocolloid recipe collection”.
Happy Almost Fool’s Easter Day! I have to be at work in a few hours, at 3 AM, so this is all I was able to find in the time I have.
- Re: door opening sensor HW for OpenBSD? (via)
- Userland PCI drivers. NetBSD. (via)
- A nice note about OpenBSD right on the Void Linux page. (see lower left.)
- 40 years BSD Mail – 1978-03-25 – 2018-03-25. (via)
- A Note on SYSVIPC and Jails on FreeBSD. (via)
- Boosting the NetBSD release handling. (via)
- How does DragonflyBSD compare to FreeBSD?
- OpenBSD 6.3 Retro Gaming Station with a microsoft sidewinder gamepad pro. Works great!
- Handling of daemon/gid/uid in application.
- The February 2018 iXSystems newsletter.
- Introduction to email (pt. 1): Email basics.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 1 – Simplified Boot.
- What’s a good BSD to start out with?
BSDNow 239 does not have an interview, but it does talk about using OpenBSD to prevent unwanted traffic out to the internet, plus a ‘poetic license’.
According to Tomohiro Kusumi, libfuse compiles on DragonFly. This is only one-half of the equation, however. Kernel-side FUSE needs to be ported in order to use FUSE-based filesystems, so there’s a project ripe for the taking…
I branched DragonFly 5.2 last night, and built a release candidate, which should be available at most any mirror by now. If no surprises turn up, the release should be this weekend or a little after, because of the holiday.
Jim Keenan is speaking tomorrow at the NYC Perlmongers meeting about testing on non-Linux platforms. i.e. BSD. Go, if you are near.
Welcome the newest committer to DragonFly: Aaron LI!
Oddball links week.
- 10 Vintage Computers. (via)
- New ThinkPad Guts Bring Intel Core I, DDR4, USB 3 to Cult Laptops. I could update my much-loved x220… (via)
- Vim Clutch. I thought I linked to something like this before. (via)
- The KK Computer: A Radical 6502 Redesign. Somewhat insane. (via)
- Molly-guard, a phrase I had never heard before.
- Hypercard Zine. (via)
- Shell readability: strict mode.
- Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System originating in Serbia/Kosovo. (via)
- We all sell out every day, might as well be on the winning team.
- Animations based on Simon Stålenhag paintings! (via)
- 90s Police Car Dashboard Computer now runs XScreenSaver.
- RPG Books as Imagination Training, RPG books as fiction.
- TODO Group Guides. (via)
- Early portable computers.
- Yak Shaving. We’ve all been there.
One of these links is a warning, but you won’t know until it’s too late.
- OPNSense 18.1.5 released.
- Happy 25th birthday NetBSD!
- NetBSD 7.1.2 out.
- Gaming on DFly.
- ed(1) is Turing-Complete. (via)
- Email Configuration for plan9 Acme on OpenBSD. (via)
- Dolch PAC 64.
- “SSH Mastery, 2nd ed” in hardcover.
- An Introduction to Jails and Jail Networking. (via)
- SCaLE 16x: Open is Still the Answer.
- BSDCan 2018 – selected talks. needs more DragonFly
This week’s BSDNow includes an interview with Ryan Zezeski of Illumos, plus lots of other topics, including more on NomadBSD and Lumina.
BSDStats was in DragonFly as a default-to-disabled rc script. It’s been removed. It’s still available, and updatable, in the form of the dport. The bsdstats.org website should have more info about what it does. (though the site appears to be down right now)
Tonight, there’s a QubeOS vs OpenBSD presentation at SemiBUG, plus Michael W. Lucas will be bringing copies of his new SSH Mastery book edition.
If no surprises happen, the release candidate for DragonFly 5.2 will be built this weekend.
Late, odd-day post cause it wasn’t up like normal on Thursday: BSDNow 237 has no interview but a number of recent news items, including details on the Pale Moon / OpenBSD port issues that I was not aware of until now.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In the U.S., we drink green beer and wear kilts, cause nobody’s terribly sure what Irish means within an American context anymore.
- Can you identify this VMS roguelike? (thanks, Erik Blomberg)
- An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector.
- A potential way to have spaces in filenames and not break the Unix command line.
- QueryParser. Well, at least Uber has a positive side effect. (via)
- Sortix. (via)
- Light Phone 2. Linked to mostly because of the e-ink screen. (via)
- futures of distributions, “programmer-archaeologists”. (via)
- Tidelift. Related to the previous link: a sort of umbrella organization to create financial incentives for open source maintenance. (via)
- Looking back on the Jupiter Ace (Forth Minicomputer). (via)
- Unix folklore: using multiple sync commands. (via)
- Actually using ed. (via)
- Pulled from the last item’s source link: people who use acme seem to be devoted to it – even more than vi/emacs users.
- But there’s always ed. (also via)
- While on the editor kick: Spacemacs, an enhanced Emacs.
Your unrelated mollusk-related death metal of the week: Slugdge.
The first news item about pfSense is not necessarily new, but new to me.
- The next major release of pfSense is going to be significantly different. (other info)
- OpenBSD Gaming Resource,
PDFdocument from a previous comment here. - PkgsrcCon 2018. (via)
- What is your experience with Dragonfly as a user desktop?
- speaking at mug.org 10 April 2018.
- FreeBSD to be Featured at SCaLE 16x.
- 8 months with TrueOS. (via)
- This Tuesday at SemiBUG: QubeOS vs OpenBSD.
- NetBSD Spectre/Meltdown summary. (via)
- Not merging stuff from FreeBSD-HEAD into production branches, or “hey FreeBSD-HEAD should just be production”
- Quickly build and test applications across different BSD kernels with tonixxx.
- *BSD projects and Google Summer of Code.
- Broadcom 43xx 1.0 driver for MBP mid 2014.
- OPNsense 18.1.4 released.
Aaron LI wrote a tool to update a running DragonFly system from an existing image – release or snapshot. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s very promising. It’s up on Github so if this gets you excited, you know what to do.
This is a sort of nice non-report report, cause EFI booting just works fine, as you’d hope/expect.