This week’s BSD Now talks about ZFS, TrueNAS, IPC, wildcards, and the UNIX family tree, for a mix of the old and new.
If you delete all your installed packages, you will also lose the certificate used by pkg to verify the connection to download new ones. There’s several workarounds for this problem.
A complete set of new dports binaries have been built, for 5.8 and for -current, so now is a good time to upgrade. Update to 5.8.3 if you haven’t yet, while you are at it.
Roy Marples helped out with the news drought (for me) by committing dhcpcd 9.3.0 to DragonFly. There’s a few user-affecting changes in there.
Hardware is the mini-theme this week, I think.
- Open source job with a cool title: Director Of Product, Disinformation at Wikimedia.
- Boring title but huge impact: Software engineer for BIND 9.
- Elite – the annotated source. Quite readable, even if you don’t know assembly. (via)
- Glitch techniques. (via)
- Hacking a gopher client into the Alpha Micro. I don’t even recognize the computer! (via)
- Built To Last. A story about COBOL. (via)
- ScummVm now runs Colossal Cave Adventure. (via)
- Open@RIT. There’s a name you should recognize on the advisory board.
- David Fletcher’s photogrammetry models of London. (via)
- Playing chess by email. Used to happen by snail mail!
- Guided Tour of the Precursor Motherboard. Followup from last week. It has a self-destruct mode – seriously!
- How to multiply currents: Inside a counterfeit analog multiplier. Linked for the cool analog computer picture.
- Roguelike Celebration T-shirts.
- Admiral Grace Hopper also drew. (via)
No theme, but lots to read.
- Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current. (via)
- OpenBSD on Desktop (Part I) and OpenBSD on Desktop (Part II). (via and via)
- FreeBSD Journal 2020/07-08 – Benchmarking/Tuning. I keep missing the new issues; no RSS feed. (via)
- FreeBSD 12.2-BETA3 Available.
- “Even if you’ve never heard of OpenSSH, you’ve also benefited from it.“
- Wayland on NetBSD – trials and tribulations.
- Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] RumpKernel Syscall Fuzzing.
- Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Curses Library Automated Testing.
- About pipelining OpenBSD ports contributions.
- Ingo announces pta (Plain Text Accounting). Only tangentially BSD, but it’s interesting how many text-only accounting programs there are.
- k2k20 hackathon report: Rafael Sadowski on KDE and other packages progress.
- Valuable News – 2020/09/28.
- ESET file server antivirus scanner on MidnightBSD.
This week’s BSD Now has FuryBSD, FreeBSD, and LDAP as topics, and I’m describing it that way because I feel like writing as many capital letters as possible.
I have nothing to post about, for the first time in a while, so here is a treat I have been saving: Request for biographies. (follow the whole thread) It’s a long thread from the SIGCIS mailing list for biographies of various people important to computing/mathematics, and there are some real gems in there. Your local bookstore or library should have many of these.
More in-depth reads this week.
- Introducing Precursor. This is neat.
- The unrealized potential of federation.
- 250M hard drive, 1979.
- X-COM, an in-depth history.
- Bergling’s Art Alphabets.
- The 20 greatest home computers – ranked! Your opinion on this is probably already set. (via)
- Software, maintenance, and me.
- Computer graphics circa 1981, a film. (via)
- “I’ve narrowed down my open application list, and only half are editors!“
- The mystery of the malformed command-line flags.
- Behind the Scenes Footage of Mortal Kombat. Nostalgia factor for some readers, I bet.
- Oleg Dolya Uses This. Linked cause I didn’t realize the person behind Medieval Fantasy City Generator and Pixel Dungeon was the same guy.
- Vintage Is The New Old. New things for old computers. I love the concentrated markets for very specific generations of hardware. (via)
Your unrelated musical link of the week: The best Electronic music on Bandcamp, August 2020.
Straight dump of my BSD RSS feed.
- On the use of a life. A BSD business.
- FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020. (via)
- FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration: Pt 1 Why?
- Related: Subversion and Git on FreeBSD. (video, via)
- k2k20 hackathon reports: Florian Obser on DNS, Klemens Nanni on network land decluttering, Bob Beck on LibreSSL progress, and Martijn van Duren on snmp, agentx, and other progress. An actual in-person meeting!
- Valuable News – 2020/09/21.
- A simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm(1).
- Unified pfSense documentation.
- New minecraft launcher in ports. OpenBSD.
- OPNSense 20.7.3 released.
DragonFly 5.8.2 was missing two CVE fixes – CVE-2019-1547 and CVE-2019-18408. They are fixed and the new 5.8.3 release has them.
See my users@ post for upgrade details.
Michael W. Lucas is doing a talk on Introductory Jails as part of FreeBSD Friday – mentioning it now instead of saving for In Other BSDs, cause Friday is tomorrow.
This week’s BSD Now covers a bunch of releases, a good rc.d argument, and a “How I Did This” story. HIDT? That’s a good acronym.
I tagged and built 5.8.2 today, and it should be appearing on a mirror near you, momentarily. The tag commit has a list of the changes, and of course there’s a users@ post to match. It’s a bugfix release, so no major changes – but there’s plenty of little updates.
If you buy a Lenovo Yoga 500, or any laptop with an iwm(4) chipset, here’s how to get it going with DragonFly.
Here’s a recommendation (and a usage lesson) on pkg-provides, a tool for matching a file to the installed pkg that brought it. It goes with the pkglocate article some weeks ago; it seems like this should be standard functionality. Thanks to Nelson H. F. Beebe.
A bit of this is overflow from last week.
- RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users. (via)
- Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner. (via)
- Spacewar! vs Spacewar.
- FVWM3 1.0 is released. (via)
- Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters. (via)
- Talking about an open book protocol.
- A collection of imaginary software. (via)
- High Score: Retro Video Game Sound Generator. (via)
- Skeletons in the closet. I grew up running through the back rooms of this museum; I have a good story about smashing into the Triceratops pictured on this page. (via)
- I’m now a user of Vim, not classical Vi (partly because of windows).
- Recent additions to my Infocom collection.
- We need physical audio kill switches.
- Writing system software: code comments. More in-depth analysis of just comments than you may ever have seen. (via)
No theme, just everything in a bucket.
- NetBSD-current now has GCC 9.3.0 for x86/ARM, with ASan, TSan (for 64bit archs), UBSan and LSan. (via)
- FreeBSD Core Team office hours this week.
- Interprocess Communication in FreeBSD 11 – Performance Analysis. (via)
- Rolling distribution releases versus periodic releases are a tradeoff. Linked here because BSD releases are both (point and -current)
- Over 1000 subscribers celebration thread!
- webcam on MidnightBSD.
- nut – testing shutdown and startup.
- GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, third evaluation report.
- FuryBSD 2020-Q3 The world’s first OpenZFS based live image.
- Retro UNIX. Sorta PreBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD 12.2 beta1.
- TrueNAS 12.0rc1.
- BSD Link Roundup 9.11.
- Firewall Ban-sharing across machines.
- Valuable News – 2020/09/14.
- My New Project: zedfs.com.
- login_ldap added to -current. (OpenBSD)
Recently updated in DragonFly: dhcpcd to 9.2.0, nvi2 2.1.3 to 2.2, tpm, libressl 3.1.3 to 3.1.4, TianoCore EDK II, and of course the pciconf database.
The theme of this week’s BSD Now seems to be about new roles for BSD, cause there’s talk about clustering and console changes.