Goings-on – Page 40 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2012/01/012012/01/02

Lazy Reading for 2012/01/01

Happy new year! Regular posting should resume soon now that my holidays are over.

I like the line, “Please note that BSD manpages are usually better as compare to Linux” [sic] found on this odd page of where to find documentation.
Hey, this encryption of DNS requests is a good idea. Then again, so is DNSSEC. I’ve done neither.
Stop using GoDaddy, if you can. There’s plenty of reasons, other than support for SOPA.
There’s got to be at least one reader who gets this joke.
If you don’t mind digging through all the comments in this Slashdot article about building a desktop environment, there’s some neat descriptions of different window managers and so on.
A mild brain teaser to start the year: a regular expression to find prime numbers.
This is a nice description of just what the Archive Team does. (via)
The Coming War on General Purpose Computing. Sometimes the stuff on BoingBoing gives me the same irritated feeling as sensationalistic Wired articles, but this one is good to read if you happen to be working on your own operating system. Also, the similar thing with APIs.
This “best tech writing of 2011” summary on Verge (via) led me to this excellent article: “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium“. There’s lots more reading in that summary.
I’ve seen this mentioned before, but now it’s with a graph so it’s better! On the continuing decline of the GPL.
OK, I admit graphs are not always a good idea. (via )
Trivium, from which I yoinked that last link, also has an blog from its author, Chris Neukirchen. It’s not updated often but there’s some entertaining sysadmin tidbits on there, such as going all-ed, or zsh tips, or Why I use the MIT license.

Your completely unrelated link of the day: Tiny Legs of Fire. (video) Worth it for the origin of Beardslap.

(Sorry about the giant text block. This isn’t as readable as I’d like.)

2011/12/29

OpenJDK 1.7 on DragonFly

Chris Turner got it working on i386, at least, and his post will help you do the same. I don’t know if these changes have made it through to pkgsrc or for x86_64 yet.

2011/12/192011/12/18

Licensing for pkgsrc

I’m linking to this small discussion about licensing and its documentation in pkgsrc, just because these paragraphs, out of context, are good for any pkgsrc user to know.

2011/12/17

pkgsrc-2011Q4 freeze started

The freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q4 has started. No updates to pkgsrc, other than for security, for the next two weeks.

2011/12/152011/12/14

New DragonFly mirror

There’s a new DragonFly mirror, in Colorado, USA – at dragonflybsd.mirrorcatalogs.com. It’s on the mirrors page on the DragonFly site, too.

2011/12/14

pkgsrc-2011Q4 freeze soon

The last quarterly release of pkgsrc for the year is scheduled for the end of this month. This means the freeze, where only bugfixes are applies, will be starting on the 17th.

2011/12/132011/12/13

Shopping shopping shopping!

I do this almost every year, with a little bit more every time. Check those previous years for non-comics/books, cause that’s most of what I’ve seen lately. I’ve recently seen a number of comics lists:

Comics/books: Wondermark gift guide – Wondermark store and cards – Dr. McNinja store – Schlock Mercenary guide – Spacetrawler (scroll down) – Secret Headquarters 1, 2, and 3 (via).

Other lists: Matthew Baldwin’s Good Gift Games list, plus his followup. (The defectiveyeti site is funny, too.)

2011/12/112011/12/11

Lazy Reading for 12/11/11

Last week was low on links, but this week is great! I hope you have some time set aside.

This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11. I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before. (via)
Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonfly)
nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently. Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point. Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run. (via)
Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
“Don’t Be a Free User” (via) The last paragraph is the best.
An expanded grep and diff. ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds. Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult. (via)
A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright. This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference. It doesn’t.
So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like. You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI. (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
I like this indicator light setup. (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too. I wish there still were computers like these.
While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station? Here’s some pictures. (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?

2011/12/09

Coccinelle usage examples and DragonFly

Sascha Wildner has been using a new-to-me tool called coccinelle (no, not that) to scan for a number of problems. Patches for this tool may be useful for anyone else using coccinelle for bug-finding in other software.

2011/12/07

Moving files with a virtualized DragonFly

If you’re running DragonFly in a virtual machine – specifically in VirtualBox, on Windows – there’s a recent thread on users@ that may have some tips, including a link from John Marino to tunnelier.

2011/12/052011/12/05

Two pkgsrc work directory tips

Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience. If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf :

You can clean up any leftover package building files by deleting the files in that directory and leave your pkgsrc files untouched.
You can have a read-only /usr/pkgsrc, which means it can be shared over NFS (or SMB?) between multiple machines, DragonFly or otherwise.

2011/11/28

Disk serial numbers and how to mess with them

Siju George asked about how he could figure out which serial number (in /dev/serno) maps to which disk. Tim Darby posted a script he used for it, or you can just use devattr(8). There’s also a linking trick described by Chris Turner to remember how the names map.

2011/11/272011/11/25

Lazy Reading for 2011/11/27

Happy (post) Turkey Day for the U.S. readers! A light link week this week.

Facebook is bad for the Internet. ‘Gaslighting’ is a new term to me. As that article points out, I can’t even put my posts to the Digest onto Facebook in any sort of automated way. Facebook suggests that of course I’d love to retype them all by hand. That’s not realistic. Facebook doesn’t want any sort of useful external link to be visible to their customers. Customers isn’t actually the right word; the customers are the advertisers. What would be a better word for the users? Crop?
“the internet is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.” It’s a very long essay that points out people are confusing brand identity with personal identity. (via)
You know what would be good? More conversations about games on BSD, cause it could use some attention. Oh hey there you go.
A Dragonfly lamp (via Julian Gehtdichgarnichtsan)

Your unrelated link of the week: Animals Talking In All Caps. It is what it says it is.

2011/11/252011/11/24

Even more Postgres results

Francois Tigeot has updated his PDF of Postgres benchmarks with some OpenIndiana results. They’re crazy high, though he reported some freezes too, as with Linux.

2011/11/212011/11/20

What to do with /usr/obj

When building world and kernel on DragonFly, /usr/obj is where the work files get placed. This can eat a bit of space, but it can be safely deleted. If you keep the files around, subsequent rebuilds can be done faster with a quickwork/quickkernel, but this may not matter to you.

(This was answered on the mailing lists by Max Herrgaard, but I don’t have a link to his reply – sorry!)

2011/11/192011/11/17

Linux results for that Postgres benchmarking

Remember the Postgres benchmark I described here a few days ago? Francois Tigeot has updated it with numbers from Scientific Linux running the same pgbench procedure. (see page 2) If you’re too lazy to look at the PDF, his summary is this: Linux is fastest of all, and also crashes the most.

2011/11/182011/11/17

New bug tracker

DragonFly now uses Redmine for bugs.dragonflybsd.org. This means that the bugs@ and submit@ lists have can still be read by anyone, but to post a new bug or patch, or reply, you need to be registered on the bug tracker itself. You don’t have to be subscribed to the mailing list to use the web interface. See the bugs@ and submit@ announcements for other details.

2011/11/172011/11/16

New clang 3.0 and DragonFly work

Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado has been working with clang and DragonFly, along with Sascha Wildner. DragonFly mostly compiles using clang, with lib/citrus being (the only? one of?) the last holdouts. Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado detailed how to test it out using clang 3.0 in case someone else wants to help solve this.

2011/11/162011/11/15

Huge speed improvements, plus graphs

The two things that make my day! The work on DragonFly-current has led to some significant speed improvements. So good, that Samuel Greear’s post on OSNews.org links to graphed results from him and from Francois Tigeot (multi-page PDF) showing the results from pgbench.

The results show a jump in multi-core/processor numbers that vastly exceeds DragonFly 2.10’s performance, and is comparable to FreeBSD 9/10. Here’s some of what did it.

2011/11/142011/11/13

Turning over a new leaf

The host leaf.dragonflybsd.org has been upgraded to new hardware. This is the machine used for anyone who wants to develop on DragonFly, so there’s a good performance boost there for developers. It also hosts bugs.dragonflybsd.org, which should be working again soon.