I have nothing to post about, for the first time in a while, so here is a treat I have been saving: Request for biographies. (follow the whole thread) It’s a long thread from the SIGCIS mailing list for biographies of various people important to computing/mathematics, and there are some real gems in there. Your local bookstore or library should have many of these.
More in-depth reads this week.
- Introducing Precursor. This is neat.
- The unrealized potential of federation.
- 250M hard drive, 1979.
- X-COM, an in-depth history.
- Bergling’s Art Alphabets.
- The 20 greatest home computers – ranked! Your opinion on this is probably already set. (via)
- Software, maintenance, and me.
- Computer graphics circa 1981, a film. (via)
- “I’ve narrowed down my open application list, and only half are editors!“
- The mystery of the malformed command-line flags.
- Behind the Scenes Footage of Mortal Kombat. Nostalgia factor for some readers, I bet.
- Oleg Dolya Uses This. Linked cause I didn’t realize the person behind Medieval Fantasy City Generator and Pixel Dungeon was the same guy.
- Vintage Is The New Old. New things for old computers. I love the concentrated markets for very specific generations of hardware. (via)
Your unrelated musical link of the week: The best Electronic music on Bandcamp, August 2020.
Straight dump of my BSD RSS feed.
- On the use of a life. A BSD business.
- FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020. (via)
- FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration: Pt 1 Why?
- Related: Subversion and Git on FreeBSD. (video, via)
- k2k20 hackathon reports: Florian Obser on DNS, Klemens Nanni on network land decluttering, Bob Beck on LibreSSL progress, and Martijn van Duren on snmp, agentx, and other progress. An actual in-person meeting!
- Valuable News – 2020/09/21.
- A simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm(1).
- Unified pfSense documentation.
- New minecraft launcher in ports. OpenBSD.
- OPNSense 20.7.3 released.
DragonFly 5.8.2 was missing two CVE fixes – CVE-2019-1547 and CVE-2019-18408. They are fixed and the new 5.8.3 release has them.
See my users@ post for upgrade details.
Michael W. Lucas is doing a talk on Introductory Jails as part of FreeBSD Friday – mentioning it now instead of saving for In Other BSDs, cause Friday is tomorrow.
This week’s BSD Now covers a bunch of releases, a good rc.d argument, and a “How I Did This” story. HIDT? That’s a good acronym.
I tagged and built 5.8.2 today, and it should be appearing on a mirror near you, momentarily. The tag commit has a list of the changes, and of course there’s a users@ post to match. It’s a bugfix release, so no major changes – but there’s plenty of little updates.
If you buy a Lenovo Yoga 500, or any laptop with an iwm(4) chipset, here’s how to get it going with DragonFly.
Here’s a recommendation (and a usage lesson) on pkg-provides, a tool for matching a file to the installed pkg that brought it. It goes with the pkglocate article some weeks ago; it seems like this should be standard functionality. Thanks to Nelson H. F. Beebe.
A bit of this is overflow from last week.
- RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users. (via)
- Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner. (via)
- Spacewar! vs Spacewar.
- FVWM3 1.0 is released. (via)
- Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters. (via)
- Talking about an open book protocol.
- A collection of imaginary software. (via)
- High Score: Retro Video Game Sound Generator. (via)
- Skeletons in the closet. I grew up running through the back rooms of this museum; I have a good story about smashing into the Triceratops pictured on this page. (via)
- I’m now a user of Vim, not classical Vi (partly because of windows).
- Recent additions to my Infocom collection.
- We need physical audio kill switches.
- Writing system software: code comments. More in-depth analysis of just comments than you may ever have seen. (via)
No theme, just everything in a bucket.
- NetBSD-current now has GCC 9.3.0 for x86/ARM, with ASan, TSan (for 64bit archs), UBSan and LSan. (via)
- FreeBSD Core Team office hours this week.
- Interprocess Communication in FreeBSD 11 – Performance Analysis. (via)
- Rolling distribution releases versus periodic releases are a tradeoff. Linked here because BSD releases are both (point and -current)
- Over 1000 subscribers celebration thread!
- webcam on MidnightBSD.
- nut – testing shutdown and startup.
- GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, third evaluation report.
- FuryBSD 2020-Q3 The world’s first OpenZFS based live image.
- Retro UNIX. Sorta PreBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD 12.2 beta1.
- TrueNAS 12.0rc1.
- BSD Link Roundup 9.11.
- Firewall Ban-sharing across machines.
- Valuable News – 2020/09/14.
- My New Project: zedfs.com.
- login_ldap added to -current. (OpenBSD)
Recently updated in DragonFly: dhcpcd to 9.2.0, nvi2 2.1.3 to 2.2, tpm, libressl 3.1.3 to 3.1.4, TianoCore EDK II, and of course the pciconf database.
The theme of this week’s BSD Now seems to be about new roles for BSD, cause there’s talk about clustering and console changes.
There’s a security update for ftpd(8) in DragonFly, both current and release. As the note about it says, you shouldn’t use it anyway.
Screen switching, where an xterm’s contents return to what it was before starting a full screen program, was turned on and then back off for DragonFly. It would have only affected DragonFly-current users, and even then only for a short window of time. If you encounter it anywhere else, though, here’s how to turn it off using Xresources.
You can now add something to run on first boot after install, only, on DragonFly. This is probably of most use to you if you are building a custom image.
Completed Tuesday, in an effort to reduce tab count in my browser.
-
- A few tips about the command cd.
- FOSS laptops and subpar displays. Battery life is I think the hidden reason for this.
- How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History. “A century ago, nobody, not even a science fiction writer, predicted that someone would take a photo of a parking lot to remember where they’d left their car.” (via)
- Ideas Embodied in Metal: Babbage’s Engines Dismembered and Remembered. Chunks of the Babbage Differential Engine still exist, from 120+ years ago. So does Babbage’s brain, apparently. (via)
- DOOM via pregnancy test screen. (via)
- Vim as an IDE (VimConf 2020 Talk) (via)
- Starship, the cross-shell prompt. (via)
- “Damn your blood”: Swearing in early modern English. (via)
- Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW? A comic about public domain, of course free to download. (via)
- The Door Problem, or explaining what a game designer does. (via)
- moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young. (via)
- Internet Ascendant, Part 1: Exponential Growth. Everything in this series is pleasant to read.
- Winamp Skin Museum. (via)
- Bullfrog after Populous. Mentions underappreciated game Syndicate.
- Walk Cycles. (via)
- The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday. (via)
Perhaps a performance tweaks mini-theme this week?
- Valuable News – 2020/09/07.
- OPNsense 20.7.2 Released.
- Quare FreeBSD?
- FreeBSD Mini Git Primer. (via)
- Install OpenBSD 6.7 with Disk Encryption and FVWM Ricing. Note for non-English speakers: “ricing” is a derogatory term. (via)
- NetBSD Tips and Tricks. (via)
- OpenBSD/FreeBSD performance.
- Beginner’s Guide to FreeBSD. More of an overview. (via)
- nut – testing the shutdown mechanism.
- The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 4)
- pkgsrc Developer Monotony. Common in any open source project in the long term, I think.
- MidnightBSD 1.2.8 and MidnightBSD 2.0-CURRENT.
If you want to bring in the DragonFly projects repo, the option has been added to /usr/Makefile. (cd /usr; make projects-create)
This week’s BSD Now is a mix of historical content, and ZFS news items. Surely one or both of those interest you?