Vincent DEFERT put the DragonFly handbook and other notes into epub format, and you can download them now.
This week’s BSD Now is a nice round number, 365, and covers all sorts of subjects. I like the command line tools vs Hadoop link.
I didn’t know this, but the label in disklabel(8) is called “pack ID” in the man page, and there’s only one way to update it right now in DragonFly. You may only need to know this a few times in your life.
Something I didn’t know but also never tried: ttyv0, the base terminal when booting up DragonFly, can extend to a max of 160 characters. Given that I am used to 80, that seems like overkill.
As part of installing DragonFly, Jonathan Engwall happened to create a script to install every part of xfce4 that he wanted. I’m linking to it in case you want it too.
(xorg and web browser install not included)
No accidental theme this week.
- Princess Bride + Oracle. You will laugh if you recognize all the components.
- The Infinity Modules Player: Never Turn Off Your Amiga Again.
- aboutfeeds.com. (via, via)
- Inside a counterfeit 8086 processor. I’ve seen faked capacitors, too.
- Best “Business-Grade” Laptop.
- In search of the perfect pocket device. (via)
- ‘use this power wisely’: Big list of http static server one-liners. (via)
- Donald Knuth’s email regime. (via)
- Dependency.
- MacSnap RAM Upgrade for Macintosh 512Ke.
- Tech hardware fails, as written in 2012.
- How Game Titles Work.
- Donglevision.
Started this with overflow from last week.
- New fnaify games: Eagle Island, Ruggnar, Camera Obscura.
- Trademarks disputes in tech. Linked for NetBSD mention.
- Android debugging in OpenBSD.
- Speed up pkgsrc on retrocomputers. (via)
- Important parts of Unix’s history happened before readline support was common.
- Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader.
- Sandbox for FreeBSD. (via)
- HardenedBSD August 2020 Status Report and Call for Donations.
- PostgreSQL on FreeBSD advancements. (via)
- You don’t need tmux or screen for ZFS.
- OPNsense 20.7.1 released.
- Valuable News – 2020/08/17.
- LibreSSL documentation status update.
- A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch.
- Changing from one dataset to another within a FreeBSD [iocage] jail.
- FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead).
For those with a different keyboard layout – different than US English, I mean – and running xorg 1.20 or later: setxkbmap is the command you need.
This week’s BSD Now talks about a bunch of different hardware platforms.
If you have an AMD processor, support for the System Management Network and CPU temperature readings are now available in DragonFly as amdsmn(4) and amdtemp(4).
Instead of posting about updates, here’s a feature that you will hopefully never notice: ‘make upgrade’, part of the upgrade process in DragonFly, will now go look for 3rd party software built to depend on deprecated DragonFly system libraries, before removing those libraries. (details) If you’ve had a program stop running because something else was upgraded – and I’m sure you have, cause “dll hell” is an actual phrase – you’ll be thankful for this.
Unofficial theme this week is open source project contribution.
- The UX of LEGO Interface Panels. Far more in-depth than you may expect. (via)
- Online text to diagram tools. More comprehensive than you may expect. (via)
- tech brain. (via)
- Embrace the Complexity, related to the previous link. (via)
- “Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.” (via)
- I want to contribute to your project, how do I start?
- The Sifter, a searchable database of historical cookbooks. Huge in scope and not designed to extract money; very different from many projects today. (via)
- Mumford’s treasure map. Math via squiggles. (via)
- Random Coinage Generator, and a d100 table of ways to open secret doors. (via)
- An Amiga Sampler 30 Years Later. (via)
- Retracing the Roland Sound in Hip-Hop. (via)
- Superhero League of Hoboken. Meretzky, post-Infocom.
Check the BSDCan videos this week; there’s more than a day’s worth of material right there.
- BSDCan 2020 videos. (via)
- File handling in Unix: tips, traps and outright badness. Not only BSD. (via)
- My views on some conventions for Unix command line options, followed by Unix options conventions are just that, which makes them products of culture. Related to last week’s options links.
- A Generation Lost in the Bazaar. 2012 but still accurate. (via)
- EvilQuest on OpenBSD.
- FreeBSD and Jails at BSD Rennes, an event I did not know about. Here’s more.
- Drawing Pictures The Unix Way – with pic and troff.
- Valuable News – 2020/08/10.
- Recovering 2.11BSD, fighting the patches.
- LLVM 10.0.0 imported into -current.
- NetBSD on the NanoPi NEO2. (via)
- GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report.
- GSoC 2020 Second Evaluation Report: Curses Library Automated Testing.
For those of you who like csh, or are too lazy to switch away from it, it now includes the current directory in the prompt on DragonFly. Another of those “hey, this can still get updates?” moments for me.
This week’s BSD Now links to recent items on the UNIX way of tools, which is certainly a source of endless thinkpieces but also good history to know.
If you’re running a very recent HP laptop, this recent DMAP change may get DragonFly to boot on it.
EDIT: this MSIX fix, too.
DragonFly’s direct rendering has been updated to match Linux 4.12.15, which means improved support for a number of Intel processors.
This can’t wait for the In Other BSDs weekend: ChiBUG is meeting at Giordano’s, in Oak Park, 6 PM on the 11th. Go if you are anywhere near Chicago.
I started this last Sunday.
- IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude.
- We’re a long way from the halcyon days of ASCII-only text.
- The 48 Laws of PowerPoint.
- Putting some extra ‘obvious’ information into our temperature alerts.
- Conventions for Command Line Options. Does not mention that short options were classic Unix, while GNU went long.
- 25 Years of OU – 2000: Open Source Teaching Project. (via)
- Critical Digital Infrastructure Research. Something people don’t think about… and then you get OpenSSL and Heartbleed, etc. (also via)
- Perfect Edition: A lightweight, responsive web e-book template. (via)
- ZSA Moonlander: A next-generation ergonomic keyboard. I like the thumb switches. (via)
- Similar: Sinc Split Mechanical Keyboard Build Log. (via)
- Trademarking Infocom, again, part one and part two. A followup to the reverse-engineering job post I linked last week.
- The SQL Murder Mystery. (via)
- RIPscrip, something I never encountered before.
- 10 year long Civ II game, from 8 years ago. (via)
- Helicopter crash tests. (via)
- Play the history of Microsoft Flight Simulator. (via)