Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent changes to UDP in DragonFly mention some performance gains to sheer packet count.
Markus Pfeiffer has imported FreeBSD’s if_lagg to DragonFly. It’s for talking LACP over multiple network ports, so that the traffic from those multiple ports can be aggregated – if what’s on the other end generally understands LACP. (Failover mode may not count.) Please test if you have that sort of surfeit of network ports.
There’s a few more days of freeze for the pkgsrc-2014Q3 release of pkgsrc. Normally I’d save this for the weekend In Other BSDs, but that’d be too late.
I have an excellent mix of links this week, I think. I like to have multiple links on multiple topics.
- Xenix 1.0, stuck on the 286. The second operating system licensed from Microsoft by IBM, and it was a type of Unix. (via)
- 50 Years of Moog. (via)
- Uselessd. (via)
- The End of Linux. (via)
- Revitalizing the Perl Power Tools. AKA the Unix Revitalization Project. It’s possible to contribute; this is something I’d like to see modernized. (via)
- Culture Stories: Introduction and Milk. I like the “I gave stuff away and eventually everyone did” part of the story. (via)
- mdp, a Markdown-based presentation maker. I like the concept and the animated gif used to demonstrate it.
- Remarkable, a Markdown editor with a WYSIWYD (what you see is what you did) component. Does it run on BSD? Dunno. Markdown is one of those deceptively good ideas that’s becoming accepted in part because it’s unowned.
- Edit: A Relaxing Mix of Vi and Acme. This is going to be the exact blend someone wanted and didn’t know it. (via)
- From Vim to Emacs+Evil chaotic migration guide. It’d be better as “Chaotic Evil”. You know what I’m alluding to, nerd. (via)
- Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car. Is building Faraday cages for your own things going to be a lucrative business 5 years from now? (via)
- Forth Salon. (via)
- The Craft of Text Editing. (via)
- Programming Sucks. (seen many places but this time via)
- Current Status: (via)
Not even trying source links this week; there’s plenty else to link.
- FreeBSD 10.2 Beta 2 is out. (has been out, but this is the announcement.)
- The Open Source Software Engagement Award. An excellent, excellent move by Colin Percival.
- Shuffling Partitions on FreeBSD.
- Outlining Thin Linux. The article linked to described a stripped down Linux that doesn’t have package dependencies just to run. That’s what BSD has been for several decades now…
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/09/22.
- pfSense has reached 2.2-beta.
- “Can you recommend a good laptop that runs BSD well?“
- NetBSD on the Raspberry Pi. (via)
- Bash and PC-BSD.
- The OpenBSD 5.6 theme song.
- EuroBSDCon 2014 is going on right now. (via)
Update: EuroBSDCon is livestreaming! (via)
I had a reminder in my calendar to do it tonight, and thanks to your suggestions, I have a ‘real’ SSL certificate installed. If you want to browse the Digest using https, go for it.
I normally post these on Thursday night, but I didn’t see it in my RSS feed. I think this one feed is behind. In any case, Episode 056 is a lengthy interview with Peter Wemm about the FreeBSD project infrastructure. Allan and Kris are at EuroBSDCon, so I expect there will be some European BSD people getting interviewed in upcoming episodes.
There’s a new bash vulnerability that could be a problem for a network-facing machine that happens to use bash. (See here for test.) As a BSD user, you can feel somewhat smugly superior since the default shell is tcsh and therefore it may not affect you – unless you’ve installed it from dports.
John Marino has already updated dports. A new binary is forthcoming, though you can always rebuild by hand if you don’t want to wait.
Update: oh, wait, not done.
Matthew Dillon hasn’t committed anything to DragonFly in several days… cause he just got married! Congratulations to the newly married couple.
Lots of links this week.
- Device names. (via)
- xscreensaver 5.30 is out, along with a story of how much work jwz put into the first version of Lament.
- One Thing Well mentions toybox, which I think is similar to busybox, but BSD-licensed.
- This hard drive still worked. (via)
- Unix: Scripting with templates.
- Road to Rust 1.0 (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Intel Edison. Processors have become a sort of monoculture in the last 5-10 years; it’s good to see variety coming back at the small scale. (via sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Bézier Clock (via I forget, sorry)
- Bézier Method. (via)
- wasavi, vi in most any web browser text area.
- How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist by Gerard ‘t Hooft. (via)
- Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile. (via)
- HPN-SSH – high performance SSH, as anyone who has scp’d a large file would want. (via)
- Lost Lessons from 8-Big BASIC. BASIC programming was very … immediate.(also via)
- Booting directly into Vim. (via)
- Memory Management Reference. (via)
- ENIACinaction.com, about the first modern computer, in the 1940s. (via SIGCIS)
- The Ig Nobel prizes for 2014 are announced.
- XScreenSaver on YouTube.
- World’s longest traceroutes.
Low on the source links this week, but there’s plenty else.
- TrueOS, CD-sized. Warning: lots of ads on that page. (via)
- FreeBSD with a swap file instead of a swap partition. (via)
- FreeNAS in VMWare Workstation, part 1. Lots of screenshots, little explanation. (via)
- FreeBSD 10.1 Beta 1 is available.
- A summary of the OpenBSD GSoC systemd compatibility program.
- DiscoverBSD news summary for 2014/09/15.
- Minix 3.3, with NetBSD userland and pkgsrc.
- pkgsrc is now frozen in preparation for pkgsrc-2014Q3.
- A pkgsrc pbulk cwrappers test.
- PC-BSD gains pc-sysconfig, a system configuration utility.
- Lumina supports OpenBSD now too.
- FreeBSD has upgraded to OpenPAM “Ourouparia”.
- OpenBSD has dropped sendmail.
- openbsd-misc@ had discussion about low-power servers, with the APU mentioned often. (see below for update)
- From this thread, this javascript program will get you web video instead of Flash on many sites.
- From talk@nycbug, some cheap BSD laptop ideas. (look for “Cheap Laptops…” thread)
Update: from talk@nycbug, George Rosamond gives a nice APU setup summary.
There’s been so much work in DragonFly recently that makes a desktop easier (i915 support, dports, and so on), that I decided to resurrect an older Dell machine and use it as my desktop.
The Dell that I’m using is a leftover from someone else’s workplace; it’s 7 years old, and has “only” 4G of RAM and a Core 2 DuoE6600 CPU in it. It works, however.
Setting up DragonFly and installing xorg and so on is pretty straightforward. Using dports makes it crazy quick to add all the packages. I went for XFCE4 because I could. Starting X gave me some trouble at first; the default config couldn’t find the mouse and would eventually crash.
Running ‘X -configure’ created a xorg.conf file I could edit, and these lines in /etc/rc.conf gave me a working mouse:
moused_enable="YES" moused_type="auto" moused_port="/dev/ums0"
The crashing problem with my radeon-driven video card was fixed by turning off the acceleration – uncommenting this line in xorg.conf did it:
Option "NoAccel"
Video performance isn’t as nice as I would like it with acceleration, but this is an older machine anyway.
I couldn’t get sound working. Francois Tigeot has a branch of DragonFly that contains newer sound drivers brought over from FreeBSD, here:
git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~ftigeot/dragonfly.git (pcm_2014_september branch.)
It doesn’t support device cloning, so I can run Youtube videos and XMMS, but not audio from both at the same time. (for instance; not that you’d want to do this other than by accident)
I installed x11/webfonts, and web pages look a bit better after changing my default font preferences.
And… that’s about it. It’s a working desktop. Digging up a half-height video card that has working acceleration is a next step, but I can’t imagine that’ll be expensive. I wish I had done this a long time ago.
BSDNow 055 has the normal news items, and an interview with Adrian Chadd, who has dome a lot of work on FreeBSD network device drivers (and some coordination with DragonFly, too, thank you Adrian), plus a lengthy news roundup.
Markus Pfeiffer has made it possible to control your laptop’s backlight using ACPI – if you have a i915 chipset and DragonFly. xbacklight does not work, but setting hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness does.
I need to get a legit certificate for this domain. I’ve never done serious https cert shopping – who has, and what’s your opinion of the vendors? (“Not Network Solutions” I can already guess).
I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.
- Wee Ada Lovelace. From a wee series, though this is the only computer-related one.
- Being Productive with Emacs, part 1. (via)
- The guy who didn’t invent email but really wants everyone to think so. (via)
- Git Pretty. It’s a chart! (via)
- How is a binary executable organized? Let’s explore it! Linux binaries, but mostly still applies. (via)
- The network nightmare that ate my week. (via)
- In a weird coincidence, the person who wrote that last link, Garrett Wollman, used to be a FreeBSD core team member and also knows a former coworker of mine, Scott Fybush. No point, just a strange connection when a faceless web page on the Internet resolves into someone you know indirectly through other channels.
- Modernizing “less”. I’d be happier if it improved function, and was sent upstream. (via)
- Breaking Madden: Jadeveon Clowney’s quest for 201 sacks in a game. I’ve posted links to prior gamebreaking attempts by this author before. I like how he’s doing his best to subvert the digital world presented by the game.
- The Semantics of Software. “There are many parts to a praise-worthy open source project”. Read that section especially. (via)
- The math is a bit beyond me, but I’d like to model the wifi signal in my home this way. (via)
- “I want a sensible phone, not a smart phone“. This is why I’m still using a 4-year-old HTC Incredible – though it’s showing its age. (via)
- Sweat the small stuff. I like the attention to detail, and the animated examples of what he’s doing with his software. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941. This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)
I’m doing this little extra feature because I ran into several news items over the past week or so that made me say “what the hell?” out loud to my monitor.
Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager. All? Almost all? Linux distributions use gparted, which is open source and can be updated. Why not add to that? Also, it’s yet another preannouncement about how this new replacement tool will work – it’s not functional yet.
Text streams should be the fallback interface in Unix. Every 2 or 3 years someone gets this idea in some form – somehow it doesn’t overcome 40+ years of text usage.
Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems. Nobody can find fault with ideas like easier package management and signing. (Though maybe having the same upgrade mechanism for base + 3rd party software isn’t a good idea) However. this answer, coming from part of the group behind systemd, ties all software installation into having a btrfs volume – even requiring a virtual btrfs volume if there isn’t one installed. Incompatible software versions are dealt with by turning /usr into a sort of container. That kills any sort of need to interoperate with other software. And of course it assumes there is no Unix but Linux. (via)
Grump grump grump.
This has been a very hectic week for me, but I still have links for you.
- The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System book is getting a significant update.
- Install Snort on FreeBSD. That place isn’t too far from me. (via)
- uGet, Open Source Lightweight Download Manager, is Now Available for BSD.
- loksh, a Linux port of OpenBSD’s ksh.
- 2Q buffer cache in OpenBSD.
- DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/09/08.
- PC-BSD’s 10.0.3 quarterly package update is out.
- People are noticing the OpenBSD GSoC systemd replacement project.
- “GCC is by far the weirdest compiler I’ve ever used.“
- FreeBSD now supports the Dream Cheeky Webmail Notifier.
- FreeBSD has a ARM-based FPGA core programming tool. Not sure if that’s the right phrase.
- FreeBSD’s bootloader can now talk to the pcibios.
- Also, the UEFI bootloader can now talk serial/null console.
- Thanks for the BSD help, Microsoft!?
- procfs is gone from OpenBSD.
- Low power server discussion, in a home context.
- Building pkgsrc using cwrappers and pbulk.
- How to get Bitrig on ARM.
In a bit of perfect timing, PC-BSD’s desktop environment, Lumina, has been ported to DragonFly, thanks to mneumann! It’s not in dports yet, but it should be buildable from source…
BSDNow 054 has an interview with Ken Moore of PC-BSD about the just-released-as-a-port Lumina desktop environment, along with a slew of news items and a Lumina walkthrough.