Justin Sherrill – Page 49 – DragonFly BSD Digest

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!

2020/08/31

DragonFly hypervisor in the works

There’s work being done on a DragonFly hypervisor, based on NVMM. The theoretical next milestone is tomorrow.

2020/08/302020/08/27

Lazy Reading for 2020/08/30

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)

2020/08/292020/08/27

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/29

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.

2020/08/272020/08/27

DragonFly and epub

Vincent DEFERT put the DragonFly handbook and other notes into epub format, and you can download them now.

2020/08/27

BSD Now 365: Whole year round

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.

2020/08/26

Disklabel == pack ID

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.

2020/08/25

Max base terminal width in DragonFly

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.

2020/08/24

All the parts of xfce4

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)

2020/08/232020/08/21

Lazy Reading for 2020/08/23

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.

2020/08/222020/08/21

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/22

Started this with overflow from last week.

2020/08/212020/08/20

Changing your xorg keyboard config

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.

2020/08/20

BSD Now 364: FreeBSD Wireless Grind

This week’s BSD Now talks about a bunch of different hardware platforms.

2020/08/192020/08/14

amdsmn, amdtemp in DragonFly

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).

2020/08/182020/08/14

Unnoted changes, one place

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.