If you happen to have a Intel Centrino advanced 6035 wireless card, it now works on DragonFly, thanks to Tobias Heilig.
This week’s BSD Now covers assembly on OpenBSD, games on FreeBSD, and disk space on DragonFly.
I’ve mentioned it before, but the tool ‘synth‘ is what DragonFly uses to build all the dports binaries – over 30,000 packages, though I’m typing that from memory and not from looking at a tool. Anyway, the one part of the release process I’ve never touched was the package building – and now it’s documented. This document is oriented towards DragonFly releases – but if you wanted to create your own package repo with custom options, this is the way to do it.
I uploaded the current 5.4 release candidate – there’s an ISO and an IMG file, though your local mirror may be a better place to get it than those links. Or just wait; I think the release won’t be long.
Note that I was smart for once and named it ‘rc1’, so if there’s another release candidate, it can be named ‘rc2’. I used ‘rc’ in previous releases and was never sure if I should name a second candidate rc1, rc2…
Bear with me; this is the history: wpa_supplicant is the program DragonFly uses to connect to most wireless networks. It’s been part of the base system for some time, but if you start it up, you will see a warning (at boot time) about how this version is deprecated. Installing from dports puts a newer version in place.
As is the case with most third-party include in any operating system’s base, there’s always lag between the newest version of software and what’s been included in. Dependencies creep in, or it’s duplicated work between packaging and basic OS maintenance, etc. (Who here used Perl on FreeBSD 4? That was frustrating, but a good example here.) Anyway, the dilemma is that since wpa_supplicant is a program that may be required in order to get online, it must be in the base install. However, since it has / had vulnerabilities, it must be updated. The base install doesn’t update as fast as the origin of the software, and there’s the mismatch.
All that’s a long explanation as to why network/wpa_supplicant is now on the DragonFly install CD, and gets automatically used if installed. Thanks for Aaron LI and Matthew Dillon for making it happen. The base package is still there, in case someone deletes their installed ports and needs to get online before they can reinstall. This is in master now and will be in the 5.4 release.
A sorta backwards-looking list for you, this week.
- IBM PC-XT Emulator on an ESP8266. The hardware is basically a wifi USB plug. (via)
- Leak Mitigation Checklist. “If you just leaked sensitive information in public source code…” (also via)
- @Play 87: Interview with Josh Ge, Creator of Cogmind.
- C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines. Wierd, wierd systems. (via)
- What I really miss when I don’t have X across the network.
- For a brief period, the kernel tried to deal with gamma rays corrupting the processor cache. Not … impossible?
- So tonight I’m gonna blog like it’s 2002.
- Learn Git Branching. (via)
- Hardware effects. (via)
- Fun tip #1: Apply a diff with ed.
- Moving away from Emacs, 130 days after.
- “please don’t “disrupt” my dotfiles, tech industry” (via)
- Why Aren’t There C Conferences? (via)
- sr.ht, the hacker’s forge, now open for public alpha. BSD-friendly, too. (via)
Unrelated video of the week: Mashups are a mental dead end in most cases, but this “Benny Hill/Slayer Mashup Disaster” tickled me. (via)
Games are the unofficial accidental theme this week.
- FreeBSD 12 Release Engineering Branch Created. Also, RC1 (via)
- Distrowatch.com NetBSD 8.0 Review. (via)
- Celebrating 50 years of Unix. (via)
- FreeBSD Network Management with network.sh. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 2.1 – Install FreeBSD 12.
- Our pragmatic attachment to OpenBSD PF for our firewall needs.
- Linux iptables compared to OpenBSD PF (through a real example).
- Bump.
- (OpenBSD) /etc/malloc.conf replaced by sysctl.
- (OpenBSD) ifconfig(8): vlandev and vlan upcoming option removal along with vlan(4): Replace link0 flag with txprio.
- Let’s Try on OpenBSD – Dust: An Elysian Tail and Let’s Try on OpenBSD: Capsized.
- GOG Black Friday Sale. A nice connection between sale and port.
- Games on FreeBSD. A port of fnaify to other BSDs!
- More OpenBSD contributions.
- Valuable News – 2018/11/17.
This week’s BSD Now (notice I’m spelling it correctly now, with a space) has, along with NetBSD and OpenBSD material, happens to talk about NomadBSD, which I’ve never really managed to cover.
I tagged the first release candidate for DragonFly 5.4 last night. The commit message has summary lines from all the commits in this release, if you want to go through them – or wait for the release notes. I’m happy to see some new-to-me committer names in there, too.
If you were looking to run DragonFly on the same disk as another operating system, Dr. Martin Ivanov has advice for you. Similarly, karu.pruun and Pierre-Alain TORET also have something on EFI booting.
I’m actually surprised this wasn’t already there: Aaron Li added terminfo entries for tmux and tmux-256color into DragonFly’s terminfo(5) file. I’ve been using tmux without issue for some time on DragonFly… but I may not be exercising it as hard as I could.
Michael W. Lucas is reprising his MeetBSD keynote, “Why BSD?”, at the November SEMIBUG meeting, happening at the usual location, tonight. Go, if you are near.
Update: you can attend remotely!
We’re overdue for 5.4 to be released. New releases are due every 6 months; I lost track! I plan to work on tagging and building over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday later this week.
Another cover-all-categories week.
- The Valley Girl of Oz, Bjork Bjork Bjork.
- Character by character TTY input in Unix, then and now.
- howto: create your own time zone. (via)
- Guide to computing. (via)
- Restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer, part 1, 2, 3, and 4. There’s more than what I have linked. (via)
- A book list for OS kernel developers and device driver writers (2006). (via)
- git-secrets: Prevents you from committing secrets and credentials into git repositories. (via)
- SpamAssassin is back. (via)
- FreePizza.io – free pizza for usergroups, meetups, hackathons, talks. (via)
- Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust. (via)
- “As far as I’m concerned, email signing/encryption is dead.” It’s all web pages now for encrypted traffic. (via)
- What MUDs Are You Playing?
- Raw Tty Input: Then And Now. (via)
- Managing Dotfiles with GNU Stow. A GNU version of null mounts, sorta? (via)
- How Many Computers Are In Your Computer? (via)
- Vim in the Future. (via)
- Related: Why Kakoune.
- Colin Raff animations. (via)
- Modern day vacuum tube use. More than just expensive amplifiers.
- mtime comparison considered harmful. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the week: A Guide to Breakbeats on Bandcamp.
Still lots of BSD stuff happening.
- DWM on FreeBSD, monocle not showing up.
- Play Stardew Valley on OpenBSD.
- Project Trident RC3 available. (via)
- NetBSD 8.0 ? dmesg?????? / KOF2018-NetBSD. Yeah, I know it’s all question marks. Something in my publishing chain doesn’t understand all character sets. (via)
- FreeBSD 12.0-b4 available.
- Capsicum.
- FreeNAS.
- Polish BSD User Group OpenBSD Gaming talk (slides, PDF, Polish) (via)
- Linux and FreeBSD networking. (via)
- The Source History of Cat. (via)
- FreeBSD 10.4 EOL.
- Valuable News – 2018/11/11. You can tell my backlog size from this.
- ZFS Boot Environments Reloaded at NLUUG Autumn Conference 2018.
- OpenBSD in Stereo with Linux VFIO.
- Play “Crazy Train” through your APU2 speaker. This prompted the “Someday you will need this” tag for this post.
- pfSense with a hardware identifier.
- The Tor Project needs a data architect.
- Assembly language on OpenBSD amd64+arm64. (via)
BSD Now 272, “Detain the bhyve” is up now, as is “garbage[45]: New fixes for old laptops“. Hope you have time for listening tonight!
Aaron LI has brought dhcpcd into DragonFly-current, as a replacement to dhclient(8) and rtsold(8). dhclient does support IPv6 but it’s bundled with server and BIND applications, so it’s harder to support.
There’s a section of the DragonFly website (a wiki) that records success with various laptops and DragonFly. The latest addition: Lenovo IdeaPad Y500.
For better or worse, there’s different browser options out there, especially for non-mainstream platforms. You know what I mean. DragonFly developer tuxillo has put together a helpful page listing options and how to get them to build.
The movies link should keep you busy.
- 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. It’s divided into sections, each one alphabetical, so if the first group doesn’t interest you, there’s more. Be ready to scroll to find a section that’s all martial arts, or an interview of Benoit Mandelbrot, or the classic Heavy Metal Parking Lot. (via)
- Learning When Values are Changed by Implicit Integer Casts.
- Metadata that you can’t commit into a VCS is a mistake (for file based websites).
- What Does It Take to Keep a Classic Mainframe Alive? (via)
- Another look into The Psychotherapy of Racter. Linked because Racter is a sort of anti-Eliza.
- Ten Great Adventure-Game Puzzles.
- “I do not understand your concern…“
- Goodness, Enumerated by Robots. Or, Handling Those Who Do Not Play Well With Greylisting. From a BSD person but not BSD specific.
- David A. Wheeler’s 6502 Language Implementation Approaches. i.e languages on an Apple ][ mostly. There’s some really interesting links down at the end of that article. (via)
- For example, Applesauce.
- Oddball epoch dates and also microfortnights.
- DKIM provides sender attribution (for both spam and not necessarily spam).
- Revisiting the Unix philosophy in 2018. Maybe clickbaity a bit. (via)
- I AM A COMPUTER. (via)