54: Luminary Environment

This week on the show, it's all about Lumina. We'll be giving you a visual walkthrough of the new BSD-exclusive desktop environment, as well as chatting with the main developer. There's also answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Portscout ported to OpenBSD

Portscout is a popular utility used in the FreeBSD ports infrastructure
It lets port maintainers know when there's a new version of the upstream software available by automatically checking the distfile mirror
Now OpenBSD porters can enjoy the same convenience, as it's been ported over
You can view the status online to see how it works and who maintains what
The developer who ported it is working to get all the current features working on OpenBSD, and added a few new features as well
He decided to fork and rename it a few days later ***

Sysadmins and systemd refugees flocking to BSD

With all the drama in Linux land about the rapid changes to their init system, a lot of people are looking at BSD alternatives
This "you got your Windows in my Linux" article (and accompanying comments) give a nice glimpse into the minds of some of those switchers
Both server administrators and regular everyday users are switching away from Linux, as more and more distros give them no choice but to use systemd
Fortunately, the BSD communities are usually very welcoming of switchers - it's pretty nice on this side! ***

OpenBSD's versioning schemes

Ted Unangst explains the various versioning systems within OpenBSD, from the base to libraries to other included software
In contrast to FreeBSD's release cycle, OpenBSD isn't as concerned with breaking backwards compatibility (but only if it's needed to make progress)
This allows them to innovate and introduce new features a lot more easily, and get those features in a stable release that everyone uses
He also details the difference between branches, their errata system and lack of "patch levels" for security
Some other things in OpenBSD don't have version numbers at all, like tmux
"Every release adds some new features, fixes some old bugs, probably adds a new bug or two, and, if I have anything to say about it, removes some old features." ***

VAXstation 4000 Model 90 booting NetBSD

We found a video of NetBSD booting on a 22 year old VAX workstation, circa 1992
This system has a monstrous 71 MHz CPU and 128MB of ECC RAM
It continues in part two, where we learn that it would've cost around $25,000 when it was released!
The uploader talks about his experiences getting NetBSD on it, what does and doesn't work, etc
It's interesting to see that such o

Published on 11 years, 3 months ago