31: Edgy BSD Users

JT Pennington — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 08:00:00 -0400

This week we'll be talking to Richard Stallman about the upcoming GPLv4 and how it will protect our software from being stolen. After that, we'll show you how to recover from those pesky ZFS on Linux corruption issues, as well as some tips on how to explain to your boss that all the production boxes were compromised. Your questions and all the latest GNUs, on Linux Now - the place to Lin.. ux.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Preorders for cool BSD stuff

The 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is up for preorder
We talked to GNN briefly about it, but he and Kirk have apparently finally finished the book
"For many years, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System has been recognized as the most complete, up-to-date, and authoritative technical guide to FreeBSD's internal structure. Now, this definitive guide has been extensively updated to reflect all major FreeBSD improvements between Versions 5 and Versions 11"
OpenBSD 5.5 preorders are also up, so you can buy a CD set now
You can help support the project, and even get the -release of the OS before it's available publicly
5.5 is a huge release with lots of big changes, so now is the right time to purchase one of these - tell Austin we sent you! ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 CFP

This year's pkgsrcCon is in London, on June 21st and 22nd
There's a Call For Papers out now, so you can submit your talks
Anything related to pkgsrc is fine, it's pretty informal
Does anyone in the audience know if the talks will be recorded? This con is relatively unknown ***

BSDMag issue for March 2014

The monthly BSD magazine releases its newest issue
Topics this time include: deploying NetBSD using AWS EC2, creating a multi-purpose file server with NetBSD, DragonflyBSD as a backup server, more GIMP lessons, network analysis with wireshark and a general security article
The Linux article trend seems to continue... hmm ***

Non-ECC RAM in FreeNAS

We've gotten a few questions about ECC RAM with ZFS
Here we've got a surprising blog post about why someone did not go with ECC RAM for his NAS build
The article mentions the benefits of ECC and admits it is a better choice in nearly all instances, but unfortunately it's not very widespread in consumer hardware motherboards and it's more expensive
Regular RAM also has "special" issues with ZFS and pool corruption
Long post, so check out the whole thing if you've been considering your memory options and weighing the benefits ***

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

EdgeBSD (slides)

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD desktop

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr-lurkers

This week we get to hear from Frederic Culot, colut@
Originally an OpenBSD user from France, Frederic joined as a ports committer in 2010 and recently joined the portmgr lurkers team
"FreeBSD is also one of my sources of inspiration when it comes to how organizations behave and innovate, and I find it very interesting to compare FreeBSD with the for-profit companies I work for"
We get to find out a little bit about him, why he loves FreeBSD and what he does for the project ***

NetBSD on the Playstation 2

Who doesn't want to run NetBSD on their old PS2?
The PS2 port of NetBSD was sadly removed in 2009, but it has been revived
It's using a slightly unusual MIPS CPU that didn't have much GCC support
Hopefully a bootable kernel will be available soon ***

The FreeBSD Challenge update

Our friend from the Linux Foundation continues his FreeBSD switching journey
This time he starts off by discovering virtual machines suck at keeping accurate time, and some ports weren't working because of his clock being way off
After polling the IRC for help, he finally learns the difference between ntpdate and ntpd and both of their use cases
Maybe he should've just read our NTP tutorial! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

The mount tray icon got lots of updates and fixes
The faulty distribution server has finally been tracked down and... destroyed
New language localization project is in progress
Many many updates to ports and PBIs, new -STABLE builds ***

Feedback/Questions

26: Port Authority

JT Pennington — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

On today's show we have an interview with Joe Marcus Clark, one of the original portmgr members in FreeBSD, and one of the key GNOME porters. Keeping along with that topic, we have a FreeBSD ports tutorial for you as well. The latest news and answers to your BSD questions, right here on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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 ***

BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Gnome Shell”

31: Edgy BSD Users

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions

26: Port Authority

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Interview - Joe Marcus Clark - marcus@freebsd.org

Tutorial

News Roundup

Feedback/Questions