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.
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- 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?
Aaron LI has rewritten calendar(1) to support Chinese (lunisolar) and Julian calendars, and along the way added support for other calendars, more options, and generally improved the program. His original source archive is available, as is his reference book.
HAMMER2 now has a ‘growfs’ directive, so if there’s room in the partition, you can expand your HAMMER2 volume to fit. Related: gpt(8) and disklabel(8) now have similar options. fdisk(8) does also.
Apparently DragonFly used to disable IOAPIC when booting in a virtual machine. This helped with some old virtual machines, but broke newer ones. It’s now enabled, which helps boot DragonFly on Google Cloud.
I went esoteric this week, and it was fun!
- 7 habits of effective text editing. (video, via)
- My divergence from ‘proper’ Vim by not using and exploring features.
- 7 versatile Vim commands that are easy to memorize. (via)
- Arwes: Futuristic Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk Graphical User Interface Framework for Web Apps. It really is that. (via)
- Asciimatics – create full-screen text UIs on any platform. (via)
- How not to name variables.
- “Imperial is lit, but Metric is liter”… Linked for the measurement graph.
- An archive of a different type. I did not know this existed, but I hoped it existed, if that makes sense.(via)
- Kernel Mode Linux : Execute user processes in kernel mode. Hey, remember Windows NT and how a video error could bring it all down? (via)
- Model and Prototype of VMS Using the Mach 3.0 Kernel. 2 dead ends make a new dead end. (PDF, via)
- High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure. Free book. (via)
It’s a good mix this week.
- ChiBUG’s next meeting is in a few days, the 8th. I’ll post about it again.
- FreeBSD 11.3 EOL.
- Modernizing the OpenBSD console.
- Valuable News – 2020/08/31.
- FreeBSD Cluster with Pacemaker and Corosync.
- 6.8-beta tagged in CVS. (OpenBSD)
- PPP Over a WiFi232. Incidentally, how to run a PPP server in OpenBSD.
- GSoC 2020: Report-2: Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment.
- Find which package provides a given file in OpenBSD.
- The roles of OSs have changed. I like the alternate world suggestion.
- Running Wine in a 32-bit sandbox on 64-bit NetBSD. (via)
- In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for? If you’ve been reading this Digest for some time, I bet you already know many of these. (via)
- My Broadcast [The UNIX rwall problem]. (via)
There’s a new option in efibootmgr(8) on DragonFly to boot into firmware, on next boot. You may find this useful.
No pun in this week’s BSD Now title, but that’s usual now. ZFS news is the bulk of this week’s episode.
If you’ve got a newer i219 ethernet chipset – it’s now supported in DragonFly.
ncurses has been upgraded from 6.0 to 6.2 in DragonFly; a 4 year jump. Perhaps not a huge effect on you, but I want to link to it cause there’s such nice changelogs!
There’s work being done on a DragonFly hypervisor, based on NVMM. The theoretical next milestone is tomorrow.
No mini-theme; I’m balanced!
- The Selectric Typewriter. Belongs to a very specific time. (via)
- DIY Single-Chip 2D Retro Game Console. The controller is the console. (via)
- Backblaze Hard Drive Stats 2020 Q2. (via)
- Vim-like Layer for Xorg and Wayland. (via)
- EmacsConf 2020 Call for Proposals. Balanced coverage. (via)
- Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches. (via)
- Brothers Quay Day. (via)
- ROBLOX is a MUD: The history of virtual worlds, MUDs & MMORPGs. (via)
- The Golden Age of computer user groups. (via)
- A nuclear powered laser to melt a tunnel from NYC to London, a serious proposal. (via)
- Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-ons? (via)
- Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e. D&D. (via)
- Chairigami, all-cardboard furniture. Not the first time I have seen this idea, but well-implemented. (also via)
- Mixed-radix fractions in Bengali.
- Embrace, extend, and finally extinguish – Microsoft plays their hand. AKA, use sourcehut over github.
- OSDI goes annual. Yes, there’s that much operating system research happening after decades. That makes me happy.
- The first 4 hours of MTV. Argh nostalgia for a better and worse time. (via)
No theme, but plenty of variety.
- A reimplementation of NetBSD based on a microkernel.
- Valuable News – 2020/08/24.
- “TLS Mastery” Covers Reveal, with T-shirts and Posters.
- TrueNAS 12.0 beta out.
- MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out.
- pkgdb belongs in libdata, not var. Them’s fightin’ words!
- rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc. Them too!
- GhostBSD financial reports. I like seeing this out in the open. (via)
- What is the oldest BSD? Not as short an answer as you may think. (via)
- Tarsnap podcast episode with FreeBSD ex security officer Colin Percival. (via)
- From 8′ to 4″: massive pkgsrc performance gain by replacing a shell script with awk.