NYCBUG’s January meeting kicks off the new year, with an OpenBSD presentation by Brian Callahan on January 2nd. That’s this Wednesday, right after New Year’s Day. At the time I’m writing this, I don’t have the meeting agenda, but don’t let that stop you from attending, if you are near. Update: Brian told me directly what he is presenting.
Last of the year!
- The Internet of Unprofitable Things. Making mistakes permanent in hardware. (via)
- Why Mastodon is defying the “critical mass”.
- How People Used to Download Games From the Radio. (via)
- Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora. Don’t support dead ends.
- On the attempts to resurrect Space Cadet Pinball.
- xclave: Hardware Testing in Mass Production, Made Easier.
- A Short History of Computer-Generated Visual Effects.
- Some new-to-me features in POSIX (or Single Unix Specification) Bourne shells.
- Cygwin and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, when to use one and not the other. (via)
- xterm full reverse.
- RSync the old is still new…
- A Visual Defragmenter for the Commodore 64. Fun to watch, oddly. (via)
- Git Your SQL Together (with a Query Library). The “SQL Truths” section is correct. (via)
- How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar. Goes with the “no standard for tar” link last week. This bug could be in other tar versions… or none at all.
- EmuTOS, a free operating system for Atari computers. (via)
- Creating a (Non-Trivial) Lisp Game in 2018. Not the first language for game development. (via)
- Deorbital’s best games of 2018 named by Dante Douglas, Wasim Salman, David Shimomura, Amr Al-Aaser, Yussef Cole, and Shonté Daniels.
- The Very Slow Movie Player. (via)
A big reading week. Enjoy!
- BSD for old phones?
- Berkeley smorgasbord. (via)
- KLEAK: Practical Kernel Memory Disclosure Detection. (PDF, via)
- GhostBSD 18.01 Disk encryption?
- Request advice for controller/gamepads (Fnaify games: Axiom Verge, Chasm, Rogue Legacy).
- unix50.org. Celebrating UNIX historical systems by running them. (via)
- FreeBSD vs Linux: 20 Things To Know About Both The System. The article assumes, not surprisingly given the site, that Linux is the standard and that FreeBSD is a variant, when it’s really the other way around. (via)
- NetBSD/amd64-current Amazon Web Service EC2 c5. If you can’t read Japanese, the terminal command may help. I can’t tell. (via)
- January to September 2018 FreeBSD Status Report.
- The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts. (PDF, via)
- Valuable News – 2018/12/28.
- The many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2.
- A Survey of $RANDOM. (via)
- DragonFly 5.4 launch on Hacker News. Linked for the discussion, though the quality of the HN conversation is still declining. (i.e. lobste.rs is best.)
- I got a 750 MHz 64-bit HP/PA-RISC c3700 Visualize Workstation for X-mas! Put here because I think it was a BSD-heritage Unix.
BSD Now 278 has an interview of Marshall Kirk McKusick, from BSDCan 2018. If you aren’t familiar with him, he’s been involved with BSD possibly longer than you’ve been alive, and you’re probably using code he wrote, one way or another.
This should, I hope, affect no-one except people running DragonFly mirrors: I moved all the DragonFly 3.x release ISOs into a different directory than the normal master download location. This should shrink mirror size.
The 35th Chaos Communication Congress starts today. (I linked to the multi-day schedule.) It’s one of the few places you can see hacking, from the ground up. So, even if you aren’t near it, you can still see it, live.
Ravenports has been updated to have DragonFly 5.4 packages, if you are using it. (note typo if copying from that email) The eerielinux site also has what I am calling a review but is more of a followup report, after extended usage of Ravenports on multiple platforms. See the initial review, too.
If you enjoy the Digest and want to get me to my goal of a free sandwich, I have a Patreon account. Merry Christmas/happy holidays! Normal article posting resumes tomorrow, of course.
DragonFly 5.4.1 is out, just in time for Christmas. My users@ post describes upgrading, as do the 5.4 release notes. The changes in this version are in the tag commit, which can be summed up as “keyboard fix, dhcpcd support, HAMMER2 improvement”.
Images are available for download at various mirrors, too. If you’ve recently upgraded to 5.4, it’s the normal build process.
Merry almost Christmas! I hope you like reading, because I’m linking to some large collections of text.
- No Starch Press “Hacking for the Holidays” Humble Bundle. If Lazy Reading isn’t enough text for you, this will get you much, much more.
- From Hi-Fi to CLI. One of the authors of VisiCalc, blogging. He’s done a lot of writing in the last few decades. (indirectly via)
- Unfortunately with Mastodon, there’s no way (that I know of) to link to this stream of “edvent calendar” posts with various ed(1) tips, so I’m sending you to the main aggregation and you’ll have to scroll back.
- Author Robin Sloan is reading a translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight live on YouTube at 3 PM Eastern time today.
- A rediscovered mainframe game from 1974 might be the first text adventure. A comment on the source link mentions MULTICS games are available now.
- Control Keys. (via)
- A State of Sin. CERN has an artist in residence program?
- Searching the Creative Internet. I have the same problem; so much crap to swim in to get to the real joy.
- Related: Blogging and me. (via)
- Rocky Bergen’s Retro Computer Papercraft.
- Pro Office Calculator Is A Totally Normal Calculator.
- r/UnixArt.
- Small stupid things that make up my dev environment. (via)
- My small vim and tmux flow cheatsheet. (via)
- Magic Printer Cartridge Paintbrush.
- Why I’m usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us.
- nest, Xephyr, ChromeOS, synergy, and syncing some clipboards.
- Unix Folklore: curiosities from inside the Unix Room at Bell Labs. (via)
- Working around an irritating recent XTerm change in behavior.
- Publicly accessible .ENV files.
- Star Control II. A deep dive into a great game – that you can play now.
I had a lot of tabs to close, if you can’t tell.
- ClonOS 18.12 BETA1. I didn’t know this existed.
- Next NYCBUG meeting: January 2, with a presentation on OpenBSD from Brian Callahan.
- FOSSJobs. I don’t like the acronym, but I’m not going to complain if it gets someone good work. (via)
- Running NetBSD on DEC VAX on SIMH on Raspberry Pi. Video. (via)
- The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD. (Via many places) I don’t like the notion that the BSD implementation of ZFS is now going to be at the very best, only equal to what’s on Linux. That makes it no longer a compelling choice.
- OpenBSD song 6.2: A 3 line diff. (via)
- OpenRC on FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeNAS 11.2 out. (via)
- Related: December FreeNAS Plugins Updates.
- SoloBSD 12-STABLE.
- Stable release: HardenedBSD-stable 12-STABLE v1200058. (via)
- OpenBSD Errata: December 22nd, 2018 (pcbopts). (via)
- Grafana + InfluxDB fun on DragonFly BSD. Okay okay not other BSD.
- Problem booting after upgrading to [DragonFly] 5.4. The story has a happy ending.
- The Super Capsicumizer 9000. (via)
- What are you using for a simple GUI TextEdit/Notepad? The usual suspects of nvi/emacs show up, but there’s a lot more options listed.
- Reducing the delta with upstream version of sanitizers. (via)
- Python Development on BSD.
- Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD. (via)
- Torchlight 2 on NetBSD *almost* works!
- NetBSD desktop pt.5: automounting with Berkeley am-utils. (via)
- Valuable News – 2018/12/14, Valuable News – 2018/12/21.
- Standards. “There is no standard version of the tar program.” Linked with early BSD history, of course. (via)
- telnet, still being a problem. (via)
- protectli router.
- de facto vs de jure maintenance.
- The NetBSD support update before the LLVM-8.0 branching point. (via)
Podcast for the weekend: garbage[46].
I like seeing someone’s install notes – in this case, DragonFly, followed by XFCE and MATE. You can tell what someone considers the most important packages, cause they always come first. There’s video too. (via)
BSD Now episode 277 touches on a bunch of things like updating FreeBSD from 11 to 12, and Knuth history, but it links to some helpful directions for using nmap, which I think is one of those basic tools that should be in everyone’s arsenal, along with wireshark.
As planned, there will be a 5.4. 1 release for DragonFly. Matthew Dillon’s work on HAMMER2 will be in there, as will be a fix for keyboard attachment and updates from Aaron LI on dhcpcd support. I will tag and build this weekend, so it’ll be just in time for Christmas.
I’m not planning a holiday gift guide this year, though they are fun to do. You can always check previous ones; I try to link to stores rather than individual items.
- Six Ways to Level Up Your nmap Game. (via)
- Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune. The first real RTS.
- Choosing error codes based on a really nice
#definedoesn’t necessarily lead to a readable message to the user. - Xformer 10: The Atari 800 emulator has gotten a huge update. That’s a big monitor. A really really big monitor.
- HTTPS in the real world. (via via)
- Wget is not welcome here any more (sort of). I was bit recently by wget in a different way; currently using httrack for the same task based on advice from EFNet #dragonflybsd.
- Fun tip #2: Display trailing spaces using ed and Fun tip #3: Split a line using ed.
- Classic computer images for sale though it looks like only a C64 and Spectrum image are available.
- Kubernetes being hijacked worldwide.
- You Can’t Opt Out of the Patent System. That’s Why Patent Pandas Was Created!
- Announcing Yggdrasil Network v0.3. I am not sure of the use, but I am interested by the implementation. (via)
I think/hope I cleared my backlog of BSD links.
- FreeBSD Graphics Blog – Getting Started With drm-kmod. (via)
- Berkeley smorgasbord. (via)
- Amazon Web Service EC2?a1???????NetBSD/aarch64???????. Probably need to be able to render/read Japanese for that link to work out. (via)
- Today I (re-)learned that
top‘s output can be quietly system dependent. - pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p1 now available.
- unbound(8): DNSSEC validation enabled in default configuration.
- NetHack, OpenBSD, curses, tty. Curses as in the terminal interface, not as in Sword of Monster Calling -1.
- Configuration deployment made easy with drist.
- SoloBSD 11.2-STABLE-1206 is out.
- mports updates, mport package manager configuration feature added, and MidnightBSD security advisory site.
- Valuable News – 2018/11/24, Valuable News – 2018/12/01, and Valuable News – 2018/12/08.
- FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 Available. No, wait, FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE out.
- pkgs.org – packages for as many systems as possible, including FreeBSD and NetBSD. (via)
- GOG Winter Sale – OpenBSD Highlights. (via)
- Cirrus CI support and FreeBSD.
- OPNsense 18.7.9 released.
- OpenSMTPD proc filters & fc-rDNS. (via)
- Otto Moerbeek on the Virtues of OpenBSD malloc(3). I need to keep a better eye on bsd.network; I can’t collate it like RSS. Or can I?
- A proposal for a new RPKI validator: OpenBSD rpki-client(1). (via)
- OpenBGPD – Adding Diversity to the Route Server Landscape. (via)
- FreeNAS 11.2 new features.
- NetBSD desktop pt.4: The X Display Manager (XDM). (via)
- PINEBOOK on FreeBSD soon. Joining OpenBSD and NetBSD. (via)
The newest BSD Now covers the 12.0 release of FreeBSD, handily talks about setting up Synth, and links to an interview of the fellow behind GhostBSD.
Matthew Dillon’s been working on “reliable on-media topology” for HAMMER2. If you had a crash at just the right time with HAMMER2, you wouldn’t lose data but you might have to do some manual cleanup. (Don’t ask me the steps; never happened to me.) With these changes, that doesn’t happen any more. It’s present now in -master and will be in what should be DragonFly 5.4.1 by the end of the year. He has a post to users@ that goes into better detail. If you want way too much detail, you can check the commits.
Three related notes: snapshots are now faster, the HAMMER2 design document has been updated to the tune of 400+ new lines, and yes, you can encrypt your root HAMMER2 filesystem, and have been able to for a while.