Sascha Wildner has brought in the NetBSD version of mtree(8), as groundwork for some other changes. There’s little user effect at this point, but it’s worth being familiar with mtree as a tool. Take a look at the man page, especially the section on trojan horse detection under EXAMPLES.
DragonFly now has a port of the ena(4) driver from FreeBSD. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s the Elastic Network Adapter used for running on Amazon EC2. That link for the commit message points at several dports tools useful for anyone wanting to try the next logical step.
Short, perhaps, but blame my traveling.
- “Why use OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps?” Better reasons than I expected. (via)
- Frank’s Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses. (via)
- Kermit Project. Found via previous link.
- A Global Guide to State-Sponsored Trolling. Trolling is not the right word. (via)
- Tariffs in a Nutshell. Linking because the author knows what he is talking about.
- WebAmp: WinAmp 2 in Your Browser. (via)
A lot of this was early overflow posted ahead; I’ve been on the road.
- NetBSD 8.0 released.
- How to port your OS to EC2.
- Booting Without /usr is Broken. Another step away from history and its lessons. (via)
- “Is there a LibertyBSD community? how big is it?“
- Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2018)
- Valuable News – 2018/07/20.
- OPNSense 18.1.12, 18.7-rc2 released.
- A whole bunch of g2k18 hackathon reports.
- “How many desktop BSD users are there?“
- “Will NetBSD play well to being dual booted with Windows (XP)?“
- New Patreon rewards for $1 tier. Michael W. Lucas snark as fortune file, which seems like a good deal to me.
The newest BSDNow episode is number 256 but it’s numbered as a power of 2 which makes me irrationally happy. (Rationally happy? Squarely happy? Trying to add in a combination math and language joke there.)
Aaaaanyway, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, some Linux comparisons, ZFS, and so on. It’s the usual content, though I don’t mean that to sound dismissive. It’s more that I’ve been driving for the past 10 hours and have to go to work in 6, and I’m going directly from this keyboard to bed.
I’ve been remiss in noting new DragonFly mirrors, so here’s the most recent: 4 new locations in Ecuador.
Sascha Wildner’s brought in a new rc mechanism that runs scripts on first boot, and only the first boot. It seems like something for an install process, but it’s also preparation for a new network interface.
A little while back I linked to an excellent deep dive into Ravenports, and added my own bit of statistical guessing at popular packages. John Marino wants to know what packages people find most useful/most required. If you have opinions, and I’m sure you do, post something on the Ravenports Google Groups page.
If you are saying to yourself “Gee, what packages did I install and what came in as a dependency?”, here’s an easy way to find out:
pkg query -a '%n %a' | grep 0 | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | less
This lists all “vital” packages, which usually means ones installed with intent, rather than automatically. This might be a useful thing to post for Ravenports…
History for a theme, I guess? It’s a random week.
- 80s video game commercials, a hour of video. (via)
- Don’t do this either.
- When generating a random password, the result must still be a valid string.
- Hackaday Prize, now open.
- New apps for MS/DOS.
- Omnicalculator, every type of online calculator you can think of. (via)
- Browsh, a text-based web browser. Uses FireFox under the hood, so all you need to transmit locally is text. (via)
- WordTsar, a modern Wordstar clone. (via).
- How to handle emoji (in code). (via)
- Related: There’s more to HTML escaping than &, <, >, and “ (via)
- A few things I know about LISP Machines. (via)
- Digital life simplification. Not saying all these things are good ideas; some are relative luxuries. (via)
Your Cyriak video of the month: Indigestion.
A few of the links are not directly BSD-ish, but related.
- Adventures in Open Source. Interesting for the fixes, and for just hearing how tools are being used – I will look up syncthing as an easier-to-fiddle-with replacement for sftp.
- Version Control Before Git with CVS. Not that long ago for BSD projects, depending where you look. (via)
- Ghost in the Shell – Part 2.
- “Slightly older Thinkpads“, same answer always.
- “SDF is a great UNIX shell provider running on NetBSD“. Not new, but worth repeating. (via)
- The Battle of the Schedulers: FreeBSD ULE vs. Linux CFS [pdf]. (via)
- OpenBSD gains Wi-Fi “auto-join” Plenty of comments in the source link.
- Valuable News – 2018/07/15.
- pkgsrcCon 2018 report & videos. Slides linked too. (via)
- A plan for open source software maintainers.
Aaron LI has been making a significant number of changes to the tap(4) and tun(4) interfaces, which he recently summarized. As his summary notes, you can now create and destroy tun devices. This will be very useful for some IPv6 and probably also VPN users. There’s some new sysctls, and corresponding man page updates.
BSDNow 255 doesn’t have an interview, and it doesn’t have interrogative punctuation in the title, either. My typographic issues aside, it covers zero-days, KDE, CI, new Core team for FreeBSD, and more.
Tonight’s SemiBUG meeting is piggybacking on an Azure User’s Group meeting, same general location. (This is why) Go, if you are near.
Remember the upgrade for dragonflybsd.org machines? It completed, and it’s interesting to see that SSDs have become so easily available that “spinning rust” hard disk drives are only still useful for bulk storage, and even then probably not for much longer.
Another neat side effect: disk usage on developer system leaf.dragonflybsd.org was cut in half, thanks to HAMMER2 dedup/compression. It’s a ‘free’ half-terabyte.
Oddball things week, this week.
- My favorite apps on F-Droid. All open-source, reviewed.(via)
- Commodore 64 BASIC inside your USB Connector. (via)
- Slack client for Commodore 64 (2016) (via)
- Bud Uglly Design. Goes with Smelvetica last week. (Thanks, Chuck Fry)
- “Now you have ???????? problems” Somewhat evil.
- n-gate Hackernews summaries are snarky-great, especially the last one here. (via)
- Portal Point Generator, a power source for use in Antarctica, or wherever.
- 1,600 pages on the history of computing.
- 2018 IEEE Chip Hall of Fame inductees. Stories for each model. (via)
- Excel Unusual. Animated Excel spreadsheets. Somewhat bonkers. (via)
- BASIC Engine. (also via)
- Terminal Whisperer and Command Line Curiosities, videos both via.
- Fractal Curve Generator.
- Animating “This Is America” on vintage Mac hardware. I did CAD work on similar hardware, years ago. It was slooooooow. (via)
- @Play 86: Interview with Dr. Thomas Biskup, Creator of ADOM.
Some overflow, and thank goodness cause I don’t have a day without work this week.
- Fixing bufferbloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer. (via)
- Designing the software specification [for 386BSD] (via)
- A question about BSD kernel syscalls/abi.
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2018Q2 release. (via)
- pkgsrcCon 2018 in Berlin – Videos. (via)
- A FreeBSD sysadmin job posting.
- NetBSD 8.0RC2 is out.
- [NetBSD] Kernel Address Sanitizer, Part 2. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/07/08.
- Introduce ‘auto-join’ to the [OpenBSD] wifi 802.11 stack. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 14 – Configuration – Tint2.
- pkgsrc-2018Q2 packages for illumos now available. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas got interviewed. Have you seen his Patreon video yet? (linked last week) It’s fun.
- Jupiter Broadcasting: Tech Talk Today 281. An interview of Allan Jude from BSDNow.
- Allan also shows up on podcast TechSNAP Episode 373: FreeBSD Already Does That.
- Need ZFS Config Advice.
BSD 254 has no interview but covers lots, including mostly-new-to-me BareOS. Also fun, this washing machine tidbit in their Beastie Bits.
Aaron LI continues to add to initrd(7): it now has scp, grep, diff, telnet, and 70 (!) more tools, bringing the total to over 200. That’s a lot for a “minimal” rescue image.
Various machines in dragonflybsd.org are getting hardware upgrades this week. They aren’t time-consuming, so I daresay it won’t have much effect on uptime.