A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
cpdup(1), a DragonFly copying tool that really should be more used, now uses microseconds for comparison. This is probably related to the sysctl vfs.timestamp_precision also now using microseconds.
This probably won’t affect your usage of cpdup unless you are copying some very actively modified files, but I like to mention it in case someone feels like porting it to OpenBSD/NetBSD – it’s already in FreeBSD, though I assume it’s a slightly older version.
I’ve added Webmentions on the Digest. If you don’t know what that is, let me save you the Google search. It’s a method to connect discussion between blogs, similar to having a conversation on Twitter or whatever, except you aren’t storing your words away on someone else’s platform.
The option to add your Webmention URL is at the end of each post; if you have your own blog and want to comment, this is the time to install Webmentions and use it!
The next NYCBUG meeting is tomorrow, January 8th. It’s not the normal location. Go if you are near.
Thanks to Pierre-Alain Toret, we know 2008 Macbooks and Samsung NP370R5E-A04FR laptop models support Dragonfly. If you have DragonFly running on a model not mentioned, please add it.
I very nearly scheduled this to January 01, 2019. And then fixed it for the right year but not the day, so you may have seen an early draft of this. Oops; it’s here now.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cankor. (click on preview button) I saw Cankor pages years ago; it’s disturbing in a good way.
It was an abnormally quiet week – probably because of the Christmas holiday, or maybe because I cleared my BSD link backlog last week.
SIGCHLD signal useful for (BSD) Unix.There’s a refresh of the iwm(4) driver in DragonFly, which will apparently help most for iwm-9000 and iwm-9260 owners.
I don’t know which product names correspond with those chipsets, but you may be able to tell who you are. Interesting note: original driver via OpenBSD, then synced from FreeBSD version. Cross-pollination!
This week’s BSD Now leads with two articles about how UNIX-ish machines and philosophy can make things better.
I did a rough count – 360 posts on the Digest for 2019. I haven’t been tracking per-year averages, but that’s good – I’m a daily digest, even without meaning to be!
mrouted(8) is removed from DragonFly – but it’s available as a port if you need it.
i915 DRM has been updated to match the Linux 4.8.17 version, in DragonFly. It includes some OpenBSD work too, interestingly.
CCC 36 is over, but the videos are on Relive and will eventually be collected. CCC is one of the few remaining big not-a-corporate-event events; always worth viewing. (posting now so it doesn’t get lost in the new year.)
There’s several accidental themes fighting it out this week.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Cosey Fanni Tutti ?– Tutti. Found via Ted Gioia’s Best 100 Albums of 2019, which was discovered via Conversations with Tyler. There, now you definitely have enough to listen to until 2020.
Quiet week, so catch up on your reading here.
It’s probably going to be quiet for at least a few days because of the Christmas holiday, though I’ll of course have the normal weekend features up.
In the meantime, here’s something to ponder: this post about tmux and plugins for it led me to thinking about plugins in general. The pkg system is sort of a plugin scheme for BSDs, much like apt for Debian, yum, etc. Each language has its own libraries to load and plugins to manage past that, like Perl’s CPAN. Nowadays, applications have their own plugins. For instance, a system with WordPress installed with PHP installed with PHP plugins required with WordPress plugins that also require given PHP libraries. WordPress manages keeping itself and its plugins up to date, but not the underlying PHP installation. You can get something similar with Perl along with the Perl-specific package updates, through cpanm. Or, npm, which seems to be its own world of constant flux.
How many levels could this go? Like running multiple emulators within each other, how many levels of plugin could you achieve? There’s probably a series of levels proceeding from tedious to barely maintainable to ridiculous.
I didn’t even know the leave(1) program existed, but now it takes slightly more flexible input.
Accidental theme this week: roguelikes! Maybe with me that’s not so accidental.
I managed to miss the Thursday update to BSDNow (#329) – Michael W. Lucas is interviewed mostly about his unnatural love of gelato BSD books , and he’s always an entertaining talker.
You probably type “du -sh *” reflexively when looking at disk usage, or at least I do. On DragonFly, there’s also a -t option, which gives the simple file size on disk. That’s the amount of data that would need to move when copied; that may differ from other amounts because of compression at the filesystem level.
This is minor, but I’ll mention it because it might bite you someday: if you are using powerd to minimize CPU power usage, and also trying to push a high data rate through your serial port, you might drop characters. It’s mentioned in the powerd(8) man page, which has an entertaining bugs section.
