This week’s BSD Now has the usual roundup, with I think the highlight being a discussion of how SSDs can sometimes still not be fast enough for a ZFS scrub, depending on how it’s scheduled.
The ChiBUG monthly meeting has gone virtual, so go now if you are interested. The thread about it also includes some notes on how to connect under BSD that may be useful beyond this immediate event.
I always thought of cross-pollination – sharing of code between BSDs – as a good thing. This seems like the most basic way to do that: same base sh.
I guess history is a micro-theme?
- Think Twice Dice. (via)
- Happy Birthday, Ethernet. Still interoperable, 40 years later. (via)
- How we ran a Unix-like OS (Xv6), on our home-built CPU with our home-built C compiler. Sorta UNIX. (via)
- “Myst” demake for Apple II. (via)
- Ars Electronic 2017. Follow the art links.
- Spamtoberfest.
- Related, Hacktoberfest needs to stop.
- IFComp 2020 games are up.
- Transport Tycoon.
- New Object Storage Protocol Could Mean the End for POSIX. (thanks, Matthew C)
- Retry Mock Toys, Or, model rockets are fun.
- The Digital Future of Tabletop Games. (via)
- Dispatch 09 — Synthetic Reality & The Metaverse. (also via)
- A Nixie Tube Watch. Exactly as clunky as it sounds.
- Welcome to your Bland. (via)
I should have set this to post at 10:10AM GMT.
- OpenBSD Amsterdam Podcast interview. (via)
- duf – a user friendly alternative to df. Works on BSD. (via)
- Old School Disk Partitioning. (via)
- Why the Unix
newgrpcommand exists (sort of),
How the Unixnewgrpcommand behaved back in V7 Unix, and People still usenewgrp(to my surprise), touching BSD history. - FreeBSD laptop advice.
- The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 5).
- Valuable News – 2020/10/05.
- FreeBSD 12.2-RC1 Available.
- How to Recover From a BIOS Upgrade. Putting your boot sector back.
- FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration: Pt 2 Primer for Users.
- fnaify 3.0 released.
This week’s BSD Now talks about ZFS, TrueNAS, IPC, wildcards, and the UNIX family tree, for a mix of the old and new.
If you delete all your installed packages, you will also lose the certificate used by pkg to verify the connection to download new ones. There’s several workarounds for this problem.
A complete set of new dports binaries have been built, for 5.8 and for -current, so now is a good time to upgrade. Update to 5.8.3 if you haven’t yet, while you are at it.
Roy Marples helped out with the news drought (for me) by committing dhcpcd 9.3.0 to DragonFly. There’s a few user-affecting changes in there.
Hardware is the mini-theme this week, I think.
- Open source job with a cool title: Director Of Product, Disinformation at Wikimedia.
- Boring title but huge impact: Software engineer for BIND 9.
- Elite – the annotated source. Quite readable, even if you don’t know assembly. (via)
- Glitch techniques. (via)
- Hacking a gopher client into the Alpha Micro. I don’t even recognize the computer! (via)
- Built To Last. A story about COBOL. (via)
- ScummVm now runs Colossal Cave Adventure. (via)
- Open@RIT. There’s a name you should recognize on the advisory board.
- David Fletcher’s photogrammetry models of London. (via)
- Playing chess by email. Used to happen by snail mail!
- Guided Tour of the Precursor Motherboard. Followup from last week. It has a self-destruct mode – seriously!
- How to multiply currents: Inside a counterfeit analog multiplier. Linked for the cool analog computer picture.
- Roguelike Celebration T-shirts.
- Admiral Grace Hopper also drew. (via)
No theme, but lots to read.
- Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current. (via)
- OpenBSD on Desktop (Part I) and OpenBSD on Desktop (Part II). (via and via)
- FreeBSD Journal 2020/07-08 – Benchmarking/Tuning. I keep missing the new issues; no RSS feed. (via)
- FreeBSD 12.2-BETA3 Available.
- “Even if you’ve never heard of OpenSSH, you’ve also benefited from it.“
- Wayland on NetBSD – trials and tribulations.
- Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing.
- Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Curses Library Automated Testing.
- About pipelining OpenBSD ports contributions.
- Ingo announces pta (Plain Text Accounting). Only tangentially BSD, but it’s interesting how many text-only accounting programs there are.
- k2k20 hackathon report: Rafael Sadowski on KDE and other packages progress.
- Valuable News – 2020/09/28.
- ESET file server antivirus scanner on MidnightBSD.
This week’s BSD Now has FuryBSD, FreeBSD, and LDAP as topics, and I’m describing it that way because I feel like writing as many capital letters as possible.
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.