May 2014 – Page 2 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/05/182014/05/18

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/18

Another week, another linkpile. I’d probably have more links if it wasn’t for Lost Alpha coming out.

Novena in the X-Ray. I like being able to see the ferrite cores inside the Ethernet ports.
Hardening Android. It’s a good idea. (via)
How to run the previous command with sudo quickly. Linked more because I never remember CTRL-a as the nondestructive alternative to CTRL-u.
UNIX on the Game Boy Advance. 5th Edition UNIX, too. There’s some good history included. (via)
Have you changed your password lately?
What happened to/with BIND 10? Some good points in that presentation. (via)
One of the better casemods I’ve ever seen.
Wearable NFC. Slightly less invasive version of RFID or magnet implantation. (via)
SIGGRAPH 2014 Technical Papers Preview Trailer. The trailer has some neat stuff in it, and here’s the actual papers. (via)
LibreSSL status report. Notable: a commercial company supports OpenSSL, but the code quality was horrible. Commercial sponsors don’t necessarily make everything better. Michael Lucas has notes too, and there’s video. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Dragonfly (the bug) closeups.

2014/05/172014/05/17

In Other BSDs for 2014/05/17

Some leftovers from last week since I’m catching up, so get ready to read.

What’s wrong with systemd. Matches some of my thoughts – Linux is transitioning from being against the monolith of Microsoft, to assuming a dominant place. (via)
DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/05/12.
PC-BSD Digest 28 has images of the new AppCafe.
PC-BSD Digest 29 summarizes how PBIs are changing (for the better).
NanoBSD and Raspberry Pi. (via)
UNIX: Automating your server inventory (Mostly can apply to BSD systems)
BSD Magazine for April: Free Pascal and other topics.
LibreSSL will be portable. I still want a portable pf.
FreeBSD 8.3 is EOL.
Epoch, an init replacement to avoid systemd, may work on OpenBSD.
DMARC is causing some changes for FreeBSD mailing lists. (hey, this will affect DragonFly, too, maybe.)
The pkgsrc-wip@ mailing lists are now switched to tech-pkg@ for NetBSD.
OpenBSD now stack-shuffles.
FreeBSD has added the mrsas(4) driver. (Why doesn’t it show up in a man page search at the site?)
Sometimes, Google DTRT.
FreeBSD has added the LM75 i2c temp sensor driver.
JabirOS 2.0, a fork from FreeBSD 10.
Michael W. Lucas has some notes from the pre-BSDCan FreeBSD Devsummit.
If you dig into the BSDCan schedule, some of the presentation have slides linked. Undeadly has linked to a number of them directly.

2014/05/162014/05/16

Portmaster tip: you are using the new version

Portmaster, if you install it, tells you to upgrade your packages. If you are on DragonFly, you are already upgraded.

2014/05/162014/05/17

BSDNow: BSDCanned Goods

Episode 037 of BSDNow is coming from the going-on-right-now BSDCan. It’s mostly an interview with Matthew Ahrens.

2014/05/15

ral(4) updates

Sascha Wildner has updated ral(4) with support for RT2700/2800/3090 chipsets. If you have one of these, please try it out – these are untested.

2014/05/13

GSI CPU Autoselection

Sepherosa Ziehau has enabled GSI target CPU auto selection, by default, on x86_64. He says to let him know if there’s problems. I’m not sure what form the problems would take, cause I’m not sure what this does.

2014/05/12

BSDNow 036: Let’s Get RAID

I missed this last week: BSDNow episode 36 is out with an interview of David Chisnall of FreeBSD, plus a RAID tutorial, and other stuff as always.

2014/05/12

Atheros updates for sleep

Matthew Dillon brought in Adrian Chadd’s sleep state changes for the ath(4) driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; you may see reduced power usage if you have the appropriate hardware.

2014/05/12

Updates for libpcap, file

libpcap has been updated in DragonFly by Matthew Dillon, and file has been updated by Peter Avalos.

2014/05/112014/05/10

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/11

I’ve linked to Wizzywig (free complete book PDF at that link before, as a sort of early semi-fictional history of personal computing. I met the author at TCAF this weekend; his Brain Rot comics about the start of hip-hop are enjoyable too. There’s about a zillion more books I wanted to buy at TCAF, too…

Arabic programming language artwork. “At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text.” (via)
How babies are like Unix.
Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator. (via)
How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch. From the man himself. (via)
The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop. Diving into language use and data analysis. (via)
The Quest for Randomness. (via)
Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. An AD&D module and map, illustrated and turned into a complete narrative. (via)
Recreational Mathematics Magazine. Someone will find this deeply satisfying. (via)
Practical Alternatives to systemd?
The operating system: should there be one? (PDF) Smalltalk, lurking. (via)
Found via that previous link: The Interlisp Programming Environment. (PDF) Notice it says ‘environment’, not ‘language’. Lisp implementations seem to be considered both the operating system and the programming language.
Again found via: Go is more UNIX than UNIX.

Your unrelated link of the week: Memorex. As a friend from years ago said, “Eiiiiiiiiighteeeeeees”. (via)

2014/05/102014/05/10

In Other BSDs for 2014/05/10

Short week, cause I’m on the road…

The NetBSD Foundation 2013 Financial Report. (via)
PC-BSD Digest 27 – they’re mushing pkg and PBI management together.
Decent VPS providers with BSD images. There’s more out there than I realized.
FreeBSD Foundation newcons highlight.
DiscoverBSD for 2014/05/05.

2014/05/082014/05/08

Confluence on DragonFly: works, sometimes

I’ve seen Atlassian Confluence, a Java-based wiki program, in a few places. Atlassian apparently offers their software at a discount (free?) to qualified open source projects. I set up Confluence 5.4 on DragonFly as a test run, and it generally worked. That’s great! I tried to set up version 5.5, and it will not start.

May 08, 2014 7:24:41 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase startInternal
SEVERE: A child container failed during start
java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.InternalError: platform not recognized
        at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.report(FutureTask.java:122)

This is annoying. DragonFly (or any BSD) is not supported by Atlassian for Confluence, so it’s not a surprise… but I was so close! Their product has a very nice interface and I was planning to replace Mediawiki at my workplace with it, for some internal documentation. This FreeBSD bug report is the closest fix I can find, but it’s old enough it shouldn’t matter now.

2014/05/06

Book sales today

It’s Day Against DRM, and O’Reilly and No Starch Press are having significant sales on – of course – DRM-free ebooks. That represents a good slice of the BSD-centric books out there.

2014/05/062014/05/01

NYCBUG tomorrow: Bhyve

NYCBUG has a presentation from John Baldwin, happening on the 7th (tomorrow!), all about Bhyve, the BSD hypervisor.

2014/05/05

DragonFly network performance

Wojciech Puchar noted with some surprise that DragonFly uses less CPU than expected for high-packet-rate traffic. This has been going on for a while, and apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has even more improvements planned.

2014/05/052014/05/03

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/04

Busy week, but lots to read.

My brush with Oulipo. Thinking far harder about language patterns than I thought possible.
The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was. Follow the links, and feel disappointment.
BASIC turns 50. I like BASIC – specifically AppleBASIC – in a way only nostalgia can cause. (via)
More secure than telnetmallows. (via)
The Great Works of Software. “…works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.” An accurate description. UNIX is #4. (via)
GitHub monoculture. Git is decentralized, GitHub is not. (via)
Novena’s hackable bezel. A spiffy way to hold a keyboard.
“Here’s my favorite operating systems war story, what’s yours?” Some excellent, old-school war stories in the originating link.

Your unrelated link of the week: Doc Brown on My Proper Tea. Language warning.

2014/05/032014/05/03

In Other BSDs for 2014/05/03

Updated late this week because of circumstances.

Michael W. Lucas is appearing at PenguinCon.
Do you use Kerberos or SRP in libssl? Ted Unangst wants to know. (Thanks, Amit Kulkarni)
Speaking of which, OpenSSH no longer requires OpenSSL.
OpenBSD 5.5 is out.
BSD for embedded devices?
The FreeBSD Foundation has a spring fundraising campaign started.
PC-BSD has a FAQ up for their new Lumina desktop environment.Writing your own desktop environment is a lot of work. Supporting all the Linuxisms in the existing ones is possibly worse…
pkgsrc Perl package status is now automatically generated.
Peek and poke freely on FreeBSD.
PC-BSD’s new AppCafe handles package management – or at least the interface. I haven’t looked hard enough to know if it’s using pkg.
CheriBSD is feeding back.
OpenSSH is getting pulled into parts?
/dev/full is always what it says it is. (related: lindev(4) is gone.)
OpenBSD 5.5 is out. Here’s the signing policy that goes with it.

2014/05/022014/05/02

A recurring DragonFly pattern: hey, this is fast!

The reaction I have heard a number of times from new DragonFly users: hey, this runs really fast, even when I try to load it down!

2014/05/02

Goodbye, ATM

ATM support is gone in DragonFly, and frankly, I’m surprised it was still there.

2014/05/01

BSDTalk 240: George Neville-Neil and time

BSDTalk 240 is 35 minutes with George Neville-Neil talking about NTP and the precision time protocol.