BSD Now 340 is up, with dives into different BSD platform tools; very enjoyable if you like digging into how things work, which of course you do if you are reading this.
If you follow the upgrade instructions in my 5.8 update post, there is one ‘gotcha’. If your copy of /usr/src was downloaded using “make src-create-shallow”, you will not have any git history – or any branches other than 5.6.
The easy, cheesy way to fix it is to remove /usr/src, then type “make src-create” in /usr, and proceed from there. There’s probably a way to edit in the other branches, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’m counseling the brute force method for now.
DragonFly 5.8.0 has been released. This version brings dsynth, with matching optimizations to fit dsynth running many parallel builds of ports.
My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading, as do the release notes.
Note that you will get some noise in dmesg until you remove opie from where it’s mentioned in /etc/pam.d/ files. It’s cosmetic unless you use opie, and you probably don’t. I mention it because I noticed it. Check /usr/src/UPDATING after pulling in the 5.8 source to see details of this and other changes.
Dr. Paul Vixie is giving a talk at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, titled “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes“. It’s tomorrow. Go, if you are near; this is one of the people who built basic blocks of the Internet’s infrastructure.
If you are near Stockholm, go to the Stockholm BUG meeting, tomorrow. I’m posting it a bit ahead of time to account for time zone difference.
Tab-clearing links!
- Have You Played… SimCity 2000? Not really about the game, but the music involuntarily associated with it. Elektra:Assassin and MARRS is the same for me.
- Prosthetic synthesizer. (via)
- Cable standards history. More interesting than I make it sound!
- Kermit, a history. Not just a summary; the source documents. (via)
- Old CSS, new CSS. (via)
- Evoboxx, uneasy retro synth. Game of Life as dedicated hardware.
- A love letter to the fantasy airship. (via)
- What is a traditional roguelike? (also via)
- byNWR, streaming restored fringe films, plus a talk about it. (also via)
- Stickers for the RSS massive.
- Rooibos. Technically not tea.
- Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet. And that’s awesome. (via)
- Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses. (via)
- Zip Files: History, Explanation and Implementation. (via)
- The ‘sextortion’ Scams: The Numbers Show That What We Have Is A Failure Of Education. I like the deep dive.
Your unrelated music link of the week: KUTMAH – New Appliance. (via)
Happy leap day!
- RSVP to the ChiBUG mailing list if you are attending the March 10th meeting, in its new location.
- The Vixie talk at NYCBUG is this week; this is worth making an extra trip for.
- Critical OpenSMTPd update.
- FreeBSD 12.0 EOL.
- A Q&A with the FreeBSD Foundation.
- Valuable News – 2020/02/10, 2020/02/17, and 2020/02/24. Clearly I am behind.
- FreeBSD Enterprise Storage at PBUG.
- dig(1), host(1) and nslookup(1) moved to /usr/bin.
- a2k20 Hackathon Report: Ken Westerback on
xhci(4),dhclient(8), and scsi. - OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup.
- FOSDEM 2020 videos available.
- OPNsense 20.1.1 released.
- Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates.
- Full name of root account in BSD. A chunk of history I had never heard.
- Managing a database of vulnerabilities for a package system: the pkgsrc study case. (PDF, via)
- Low power BSD-based AP/router?
- HashLink port for running Dead Cells. (via)
I am running a bit late posting about it, but BSD Now 339 is out, with conversations about recent different releases, plus as the title says, fundraising.
Yes, that is ambiguously phrased for fun. Matthew Dillon committed some benchmarks inside rdrand() code to show the actual performance improvements.
This recent commit changes how random number provision is seeded on DragonFly. It sounds interesting, but I don’t know if the performance improvement translates to real-world activity.
Still backlogged, which means one of these weekends I’ll catch up and you’ll have about a zillion links to click.
- vt100.net. (via vttest)
- Another post on open source civility.
- How thick is an hour?
- Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces?
- ENIAC, 74 years old and printable in 3D. Yes, the whole room. (via)
- MIDI 2.0, 37 years after the 1.0 release. (via)
- Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) vs USB-C Chargers. (via)
- Age of Invention: Where Be Dragons? Why no ancient D&D? (via)
- 42 years ago, the first BBS. (via)
- 136 INTERNET VIDEOS THAT BLEW MY MIND. A Google Doc. (via)
- Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate.
- A curated list of command line apps.
- building a note-taking system with vanilla vim.
- The worst of time64 breakage. (via)
- NEXTSPACE, another NextStep revisit. (via)
- i3wm 4.18 released. Useful to at least a few readers. (via)
- Bunnie Huang’s Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. PDF. (via)
No theme this week cause I think I hit everything.
- Dr. Paul Vixie is giving a talk on March 3rd at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting, titled “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes“. I’ll post a reminder.
- NetBSD 9.0 is out, in case you missed the late update last week.
- Related: NetBSD 2020 Fundraising Campaign.
- What started as investigating /opt on FreeBSD.
- FixedMisc [MirOS] 20200214 released, for “I ? Free Software” day. Tangentially BSD.
- Approaching the end of work on ptrace(2).
- LLDB now works on i386.
- A day as an OpenBSD developer. How do people discover ports?
- Daily life with the offline laptop. (Running OpenBSD) I like the “What do I like to do?” breakdown approach.
- An emulator for a Sun 2 workstation. I think that dates to the BSD timeframe.(via)
- HamBSD Hardware Wanted. Scotland. (via)
- Vulnerabilities in OpenBSD’s hypervisor. (via)
- Pine64 February Update: Post CNY and FOSDEM Status Report. The Pro runs NetBSD, so it applies, along with fitting my small computer fetish. (via)
- Can You Use FreeBSD for a Developer Machine in 2020? I’d argue that a ‘developer machine’ needs only a text editor and a file transfer program to qualify. (via)
- Stanford 1967 PDP-6 logbook, a PDF. (via)
- “SNMP Mastery” leaking out. BSD-first author, of course.
tmpfs on DragonFly now clusters writes better, so performance is improved in high-activity environments… which is probably why you are using tmpfs anyway. The post says 2-4x improvement when paging out.
If you post about a problem and later solve it, you will help many people in the future if you summarize the problem and (very important) the fix. In this case, Nelson H. F. Beebe installing DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 on his Dell Precision 7920 workstation.
BSD Now 338 is up, which strangely is listed as the “100th episode” on the site, but I think that means it’s only indexed through #239. Anyway, it has the normal ingredients – a ZFS article, a convention note, and a link into a conversation about OpenBSD, among other things.
I tagged version 5.8 a few days ago. Release will be soon, but not before this weekend.
The next scheduled meeting for SEMIBUG is tonight. Go, if you are near.
Partial overflow this week, which means probably even more next week. We all benefit!
- OUIGO – Let’s Play. Pinball in your browser. Good pinball. (via)
- shlide—a slide deck presentation tool written in pure bash. (via)
- Under Armour Dumped Its App, and Consumers Feel the Heartbreak. As the article mentions, companies will dump cheap services – and your data and invested time – at a moment’s notice. The article might be paywalled.
- How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporary x86? Begs the question, but still interesting to ask. (via)
- Apple 2 connecting via acoustic coupler modem and rotary phone. (via)
- Hard Drive Stats for 2019. Backblaze. (via)
- Blackwing Pencils: A Comprehensive Guide.
- Rotary Cellphone. (via)
- noclip.website, game floor plans. (via)
- Genres evolve and so does language. Roguelike arguments.
- The Burroughs Memoirs. I briefly worked at a child company of Burroughs. (via)
- The Missing Semester of Your CS Education. Open source teaches exactly this; most schools do not. Guess which makes you a better programmer? (via)
- A Bit of History Regarding “Tunnels of Armageddon” for the Apple IIgs.
- Building a Note-taking System with Vanilla Vim. (via)
- Vintage Computer Festival East 2020. (via)