NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

OpenBSD is a Cozy Operating System

Lichee Console 4A - RISC-V mini laptop

News Roundup

Lessons learned with XZ vulnerability

Techies vs spies: the xz backdoor debate

Not Not Porting 9front to Power64

One less Un*xy option for 32-bit PowerPC

Beastie Bits

• 20 years since...
• Jails PDFs
• NixOS BSD
• rigg - run indie games on OpenBSD
• pkgsrc 2024Q1
• PackMule
• AcephalOS - A new FreeBSD image build tool

Tarsnap

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Headlines

Tailoring OpenBSD for an old, strange computer

• The author of this article had an OmniBook 800CT, which comes with a pop-out mouse, black and white display, 32MB of RAM and a 133MHz CPU
• Obviously he had to install some kind of BSD on it!
• This post goes through all his efforts of trimming down OpenBSD to work on such a limited device
• He goes through the trial and error of "compile, break it, rebuild, try again"
• After cutting a lot out from the kernel, saving a precious megabyte here and there, he eventually gets it working ***

pkgsrcCon and BSDCan

• pkgsrccon is "a technical conference for people working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, focusing on existing technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc infrastructure"
• This year it will be on June 21st and 22nd
• The schedule is still being worked out, so if you want to give a talk, submit it
• BSDCan's schedule was also announced
• We'll be having presentations about ARM on NetBSD and FreeBSD, PF on OpenBSD, Capsicum and casperd, ASLR in FreeBSD, more about migrating from Linux to BSD, FreeNAS stuff and much more
• Kris' presentation was accepted!
• Tons of topics, look forward to the recorded versions of all of them hopefully! ***

Two factor auth with pushover

• A new write-up from our friend Ted Unangst
• Pushover is "a web hook to smartphone push notification gateway" - you sent a POST to a web server and it sends a code to your phone
• His post goes through the steps of editing your login.conf and setting it all up to work
• Now you can get a two factor authenticated login for ssh! ***

The status of GNOME 3 on BSD

• It's no secret that the GNOME team is a Linux-obsessed bunch, almost to the point of being hostile towards other operating systems
• OpenBSD keeps their GNOME 3 ports up to date very well, and Antoine Jacoutot writes about his work on that and how easy it is to use
• This post goes through the process of how simple it is to get GNOME 3 set up on OpenBSD and even includes a screencast
• A few recent posts from some GNOME developers show that they're finally working with the BSD guys to improve portability
• The FreeBSD and OpenBSD teams are working together to bring the latest GNOME to all of us - it's a beautiful thing
• This goes right along with our interview today! ***

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

The life and daily activities of portmgr, GNOME 3, Tinderbox, portlint, various topics

Tutorial

The FreeBSD Ports Collection

News Roundup

DragonflyBSD 3.8 goals and 3.6.1 release

• The Dragonfly team is thinking about what should be in version 3.8
• On their bug tracker, it lists some of the things they'd like to get done before then
• In the meantime, 3.6.1 was released with lots of bugfixes ***

NYCBSDCon 2014 wrap-up piece

• We've got a nice wrap-up titled "NYCBSDCon 2014 Heats Up a Cold Winter Weekend"
• The author also interviews GNN about the conference
• There's even a little "beginner introduction" to BSD segment
• Includes a mention of the recently-launched journal and lots of pictures from the event ***

FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis

• GNN in yet another story - he gave a presentation at the NYLUG about the differences between FreeBSD and Linux
• He mentions the history of BSD, the patch set and 386BSD, the lawsuit, philosophy and license differences, a complete system vs "distros," development models, BSD-only features and technologies, how to become a committer, overall comparisons, different hats and roles, the different bsds and their goals and actual code differences
• Serves as a good introduction you can show your Linux friends ***

PCBSD CFT and weekly digest

• Upgrade tools have gotten a major rewrite
• You have to help test it, there is no choice! Read more here
• How dare Kris be "unimpressed with" freebsd-update and pkgng!?
• Various updates and fixes ***

Feedback/Questions

• Jeffrey writes in
• Shane writes in
• Ferdinand writes in
• Curtis writes in
• Clint writes in
• Peter writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD foundation's 2013 fundraising results

• The FreeBSD foundation finally counted all the money they made in 2013
• $768,562 from 1659 donors
• Nice little blog post from the team with a giant beastie picture
• "We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon."
• A special thanks to all the BSD Now listeners that contributed, the foundation was really glad that we sent some people their way (and they mentioned us on Facebook) ***

OpenSSH 6.5 released

• We mentioned the CFT last week, and it's finally here!
• New key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519 (now the default when both clients support it)
• Ed25519 public keys are now available for host keys and user keys, considered more secure than DSA and ECDSA
• Funny side effect: if you ONLY enable ed25519 host keys, all the compromised Linux boxes can't even attempt to login lol~
• New bcrypt private key type, 500,000,000 times harder to brute force
• Chacha20-poly1305 transport cipher that builds an encrypted and authenticated stream in one
• Portable version already in FreeBSD -CURRENT, and ports
• Lots more bugfixes and features, see the full release note or our interview with Damien
• Work has already started on 6.6, which can be used without OpenSSL! ***

Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower

• In 2000, MWL wrote an essay for linux.com about why he uses the BSD license: "It’s actually stood up fairly well to the test of time, but it’s fourteen years old now."
• This is basically an updated version about why he uses the BSD license, in response to recent comments from Richard Stallman
• Very nice post that gives some history about Berkeley, the basics of the BSD-style licenses and their contrast to the GNU GPL
• Check out the full post if you're one of those people that gets into license arguments
• The takeaway is "BSD is about making the world a better place. For everyone." ***

OpenBSD on BeagleBone Black

• Beaglebone Blacks are cheap little ARM devices similar to a Raspberry Pi
• A blog post about installing OpenBSD on a BBB from.. our guest for today!
• He describes it as "everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black"
• It goes through the whole process, details different storage options and some workarounds
• Could be a really fun weekend project if you're interested in small or embedded devices ***

Interview - Ted Unangst - tedu@openbsd.org / @tedunangst

OpenBSD's signify infrastructure, ZFS on OpenBSD

Tutorial

Running an NTP server

News Roundup

Getting started with FreeBSD

• A new video and blog series about starting out with FreeBSD
• The author has been a fan since the 90s and has installed it on every server he's worked with
• He mentioned some of the advantages of BSD over Linux and how to approach explaining them to new users
• The first video is the installation, then he goes on to packages and other topics - 4 videos so far ***

More OpenBSD hackathon reports

• As a followup to last week, this time Kenneth Westerback writes about his NZ hackathon experience
• He arrived with two goals: disklabel fixes for drives with 4k sectors and some dhclient work
• This summary goes into detail about all the stuff he got done there ***

X11 in a jail

• We've gotten at least one feedback email about running X in a jail Well.. with this commit, looks like now you can!
• A new tunable option will let jails access /dev/kmem and similar device nodes
• Along with a change to DRM, this allows full X11 in a jail
• Be sure to check out our jail tutorial and jailed VNC tutorial for ideas ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0 "Joule Edition" finally released!
• AMD graphics are now officially supported
• GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
• Grub updates and fixes
• PCBSD also got a mention in eweek ***

Feedback/Questions

• Justin writes in
• Daniel writes in
• Martin writes in
• Alex writes in - unofficial FreeBSD RPI Images
• James writes in
• John writes in ***