There’s yet another security problem with OpenSSL, and it’s been updated in DragonFly. I’ll probably roll 4.2.2 this weekend so that it’s in the release image.
Some time ago, I acquired a Chromebook with the help of all you kind readers. Here’s a mini-report on how DragonFly works as a desktop.
The hardware: what I have is an Acer c720 Chromebook. The C720p is the touchscreen model, and is equally well-supported by DragonFly. A larger-capacity M.2 SSD (which is relatively easy to install) is the only real need, as the installed one is only 16G. It’s easy enough to see what the laptops look like; it’s nothing fancy but it’s suitably light.
The software: There’s a wide-ranging and complete install/tweak guide for the c720 and c720p on the DragonFly site. Note that it goes down to the point of even changing the keymap for the special keys on the keyboard.
Things I don’t like:
- The mousepad needs a physical click, not a tap, which decreases accuracy.
- There’s only 2G of RAM, and not expandable. You will notice this if you tend to open a lot of tabs when web browsing.
- I’ve had mousepad trouble, but I’m the only one reporting it, so I think it’s just bad hardware luck on my part.
Things I do like:
- pkg is a godsend, making installation and upgrades almost effortless. I’ve gone binary-only so far.
- Many things Just Work – for example, the xfce4 battery plugin.
- xscreensaver works great; even the 3D modules. I don’t know why it entertains me so.
- I haven’t run the battery out to make sure, but it looks like it would last a few hours. Suspend/hibernate are not supported, but low power modes are.
- There’s a lot of multi-touch shortcuts built into the touchpad.
It’s an excellent BSD laptop, for light use, at low cost. The next step up would be into Thinkpad territory, which raises the cost or increases the age – and may not be as consistently supported.
Something I’ve wanted for a long time: DragonFly stickers. Or ‘decals’, if you want to sound fancier. Markus Pfeiffer has them set up on Stickermule.
I just created an account there, and apparently I can supply a referral link which gets you and me both a $10 credit, if you use that. It’ll make you sign up, then you’ll probably have to go back in with the direct link for the DragonFly sticker.
Insert fireworks graphic here.
- OpenBSD from a veteran Linux user perspective. (via)
- Call for Testing: Valgrind on OpenBSD.
- 10.2-PRE-RELEASE and 11.0-CURRENT Images Available for Testing. (PC-BSD)
- BSDCan 2015 trip reports: Zbigniew Bodek and Vsevolod Stakhov.
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/06/29.
- DistroWatch Weekly talks about running FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi 2 computer. (via)
- BSD Magazine: “Web server security”.
- FreeNAS 10: A developer’s perspective.
- NetBSD on NVIDIA Jetson TK1 (Tegra K1)
- New binary releases for NetBSD on Raspberry Pi
- BSD dmesg collection service
- OPNSense 15.7 is released.
- finding bugs in tarsnap
- FreeBSD gets a graphical front-end for pkg-ng. (probably works for DragonFly dpkg too) (via)
- User account administration for Linux/BSD
- moving from Linux to BSD and the Acer C720. I already replied all over that.
There’s a minor update for DragonFly 4.2 – this covers a problem with i915 support, so it’s worth upgrading if you have an Intel video chipset.
DragonFly 4.2 is officially released! You can go to the 4.2 release page for details, go to the mirrors page to download, or read my users@ post for upgrade steps.
Update: news stories and commentary seen on lobste.rs, Hacker News, and linux.fr.
If you wanted to try IPFW3 and NAT, nans_nans1 has done the experimentation for you, and wrote down the steps.
Sascha Wildner has been removing the no-longer-needed bits of i386 support in DragonFly. One of the things going away is APM, the 32-bit power management superseded by acpiconf. If you still type ‘apm’ out of habit, it’s aliased so you won’t be surprised.
Now that DragonFly can (in most cases) offer video outside of X with KMS, not just text, more console options are possible. By default, your accelerated console will scale to 80×25, but you can now tell it how many columns you want and it’ll automatically scale to fit your resolution. Or you can turn it off.
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, powerd will now start the shutdown process if you are down to 2% battery on your DragonFly laptop. It also will delay for 60 seconds if you just booted up and are desperately searching for a power cable.
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 4.0.6 ISO and .img files. (Does that capitalization make sense?) They should be available at your nearest mirror, or will be shortly. I am still working on the 4.2 release candidate images.
The more eagle-eyed may have noticed a branching for DragonFly 4.2, and for DragonFly 4.0.6. The 4.2 branch is currently only a release candidate, so don’t necessarily change over yet – it’s for testing, not release. Note that packages for 4.2 are not yet built, so you’ll have to manually specify a package path to install with pkg on 4.2 – for now.. That won’t be the case for the actual release, of course. DragonFly 4.3 users will have to specify PKG_PATH manually to use 4.2 images until new ones are built. 4.2 release candidate users will be fine. (see comments for correction.)
The 4.0.6 release is mostly to get the recent OpenSSL update into a 4.0.x build.
I am working on image building for both.
This week’s BSDNow has a talk with DragonFly’s very own Sepherosa Ziehau, about the huge amount of work he’s done on the network stack.
Matthew Dillon’s already using a 4K monitor on DragonFly, and he’s written notes on the various performance tweaks that went with it.
The direct memory access reservation on DragonFly has been set to 128M. It used to be 16, but anyone using a system for more than a text console would want the greater memory reservation. It can be set back to 16M, which is useful probably if you are one of those text console users, or if you have a strangely underpowered video card.
Even sysctl accesses can be made to handle multiprocessor environments. This can actually make a difference when you’ve got a lot of processors building a lot of software, as in all of dports.
From IRC today:
“19:43 <@dillon> I’m bored at the moment. lemme try to speed up module builds“
Buildkernel, depending on your processor count, now may have tripled in speed.
Those changes I mentioned yesterday for text console support? They’re in DragonFly-master now, along with a loader tunable to turn it on and off.
If you are using a DragonFly system with accelerated video, and you have noticed that you can’t return to a text console after exiting xorg – Sascha Wildner/Imre Vadasz have a branch for you to try. Please do so if you have time and are on master; this is the last big item to fix before the next release.