Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
Tennessee area BSD user group KnoxBUG is meeting tomorrow, and Warren Block will be the guest speaker. He’ll be talking about documentation. Going by the linked announcement, there will be both prizes and blame, so something for everyone!
It’s a Cyber Monday deal, so I can’t wait until the normal weekend roundup: BSD Magazine is offering their Devops with Chef on FreeBSD course for 30% off today only.
A lot of this I picked up in previous weeks, knowing that the U.S Thanksgiving holiday was going to either dry up all links or give me a crapload.
- Junkbot competition results. (via)
- It Came From Bell Labs – Story of the Plan 9 operating system. (via)
- Modelling data structures as files and directories on disk.
- Compromising a Linux desktop using… 6502 processor opcodes on the NES?! (via)
- Who Will Command The Robot Armies? Starts describing awful things I knew about and then charges to a new level of awful, like this. (via)
- Jason Scott on porting VLC to the browser. (via)
- The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile. (via)
- Comments on the previous link led me to the fun-looking Pyra handheld.
- The end of the general purpose operating system. Or the start of a new application development category? I think this is a view that changes depending on what technology you are invested in.
- Hold down RET for 70 seconds to get a root shell.
- 30 days in a terminal: Day 0 — The adventure begins. Spoiler: it doesn’t work out. (via)
- Were your grandparents hacking in 1963? (via)
- IFComp crowns its first non-parser game.
- The current Humble Book Bundle is a lot of classic/useful Unix books. DRM-free, pay very little. Worth it for any two of the books involved. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Secret World of Stuff. (via)
I use italics a lot this week.
- Reddit advertising of “PAM Mastery”.
- Related: Michael W. Lucas talks about open source and fiction. Best pull quote: “imagine if I wrote a piece of fiction claiming that OpenBSD was contemplating a switch to GPLv3?“
- $ git commit murder is an excellent title, by the way.
- Also also: PAM Mastery is out for purchase.
- Debian considers merging /usr. For contrast to BSD. (via)
- Pinky Bar. An ecumenical status bar, which I didn’t realize I needed until I saw it. I like that the author specifically notes BSD in describing what to use. (via)
- FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2016 slides – all of them. There’s a lot of material here.
- In-kernel audio mixing ahead. (NetBSD)
- OpenBSD Foundation Welcomes First Iridium Donor: Smartisan. That’s a lot of money.
- OpenBSD on AWS : An Unexpected Journey. (via)
DragonFly has had binutils 2.24 and 2.25 both available for some time. 2.24 has been taken out and replaced by binutils 2.27, thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas.
The 2.25 version was and still is installed by default. If you want to try out 2.27 instead, WORLD_BINUTILSVER=binutils227 is what you need. I didn’t test that, of course. The binutils changelog will tell you what’s different in 2.27.
Even the U.S. holiday doesn’t stop the regular posting of BSDNow episodes. #169 is up now. I like the Let’s Encrypt vs. the FreeBSD cluster story, cause that’s an interesting and intricate problem.
UEFI, which I casually sum up as the replacement for BIOS, has been seeing some support in DragonFly, but not within the installer. Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner has ported over FreeBSD’s EFI ABI support, which I think means support for various EFI applications and features. I haven’t booted a machine using UEFI in any significant way, so I don’t have a good explanation – but I am sure this is useful for people with new hardware.
Update: some explanation plus a note that it’s experimental and you could brick your machine.
It took me three edits of this post to spell “Salvador” correctly.
- Dick Tracy Wrist-Mounted Lisp Machine. It segues into a link to Atari 2600 keyboard controllers, which look painful.
- Cataclysm DDA, a new dark future roguelike.
- After 20 years, the Toasters have returned. (via)
- A short history of shareware.
- “Guys it’s 2016, why are we still using mailing lists (listserv)?” No, forums are not a good replacement.
- A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand. (via)
- Manifesto for Responsible Software Development. (via)
- Related: Facebook: Still Literally The Worst. Related to that: irony.
- How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud. (via)
- 29 Bullets, about PowerPoint as a concept.
- Lost Car Key Puzzle. (via)
- The speed of light is unlikely to improve: consequences.
- i enter the web design class
Your unrelated food link of the week: Salvador Dali wrote a cookbook. (It’s getting reprinted.)
A much more well-rounded crop of BSD links this week.
- FreeBSD status report for 2016Q3.
- “Import (finally!) Tor Browser 6.0.5.” An obvious matchup. (via)
- “FreeBSD Flavors. Do We Need Them?“
- Next SemiBUG meeting: December 20th.
- “How to remote connect to BSD server behind double NAT?”
- Review of NAS4Free 10.3.0.3. I forgot about this… fork? (via)
- pycapsicum – sandbox your Python code on FreeBSD. (via)
- Iocage – A FreeBSD jail manager. (via)
- “What’s your favorite BSD jail administration software?“
- Build a FreeBSD 11.0-release Openstack Image with bsd-cloudinit. (via)
- OPNsense 16.7.8 released.
- b2k16 hackathon report: Landry Breuil, Jeremy Evans, Daniel Jakots.
- l2k16 hackathon report: LibreSSL manuals now in mdoc(7).
- openbsd changes of note
- Learning more about the NetBSD scheduler (… than I wanted to know)
- MeetBSD 2016 Report: Michael Dexter.
This week’s BSDNow episode is almost all FreeBSD, all the time. No interview subject this week. I’m going by the written summary because the video is showing as private… but maybe I’m catching it just before posting?
There’s a new version of re(4), the driver for Realtek network cards. Sepherosa Ziehau put it together for testing. He has it on a separate branch, so give it a try if you have appropriate hardware. This will hopefully fix some of that hardware’s quirkiness.
SemiBUG is meeting tomorrow; Joe Gidi will present on managing Android devices with BSD. My assumption is that it will be at Altair Engineering, in Troy, MI, again.
The January meeting will be Michael W. Lucas talking about Ansible. (Dunno if there’s a December meeting planned.)
Some of this is overflow from last week.
- “I don’t like computers.” Same reasons here, too. (via)
- Cheap IOT Threatens The Internet. ‘Cheap’ is almost the entire idea behind the Internet of Things.
- IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction. A light worm. (via)
- 54 years old, COBOL gets Wheelchair, a web framework. (via)
- inks. From Ted Unangst, an OpenBSD developer, though not necessarily BSD-specific. (via)
- Coloring your world with LS_COLORS.
- The Possibly Russian Fingerprints on the Shadow Brokers’ Trick or Treat Package. Peter N. M. Hansteen, but not BSD-related.
- Aztec for the Apple ][ was my first desktop video game.
- Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down.
- The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems.
- TERM=aaa60 Mk.2.
- When Your Screen Breaks (In The Himalayas) (via)
- production ready
- LiveCode, a modern version of Hypercard. It is available as open source, though I haven’t seen if it runs on any BSD. (via)
Started out with a short list, but I managed to find some extra links by Friday.
- b2k16 hackathon report: Antoine Jacoutot.
- NetBSD 7.0/xen scheduling mystery, and how to fix it with processor sets.
- Looking at the scheduler issue again. Part 2 from previous link.
- TrueOS Launch message. Might be time to retire the PC-BSD tag.
- Lynis – Security auditing tool for Linux, macOS, and UNIX-based systems. (via)
- Exit from Hell? Reducing the Impact of Amplification DDoS Attacks. Also as a paper. I’d like to compare the number of systems found as amplifiers vs. systems in general. e.g. are BSD less likely to create reflectors? (via)
- “PAM is Un-American” talk now online. Buy the PAM Mastery book!
- Devops with Chef on FreeBSD, an online course from BSD Magazine.
- SemiBUG is meeting Tuesday. Joe Gidi will talk about ‘managing Android devices with BSD‘.
Imre Vadasz is working on full-offload scan support for wlan, imported from FreeBSD. That doesn’t change much from a user point of view, other that (I assume) reducing load and power usage a tiny amount. I’m reinforcing something most people don’t think about: there’s tiny computers inside your computer with their own firmware and processors, that you don’t directly control.
I’ve been on the road all week, so it seems like I just posted about the last episode. BSDNow 167 is online, and it returns to the interview format. Scott Long of Netflix is interviewed. He’s part of the reason most of the Internet runs through BSD.
If you are using nvme(4), it’s no longer necessary to load the module. Update your configs accordingly, if you are on DragonFly 4.7.
Because of libressl, nc(1) is now available in the base DragonFly system. It was already available through dports, but it’s such a flexible tool that this is worth mentioning.
If you’re wondering about the new Braswell-series systems from Intel, Matthew Dillon has already run two with DragonFly. He reported on the results.