Luminary Environment | BSD Now 54

chris

8 years ago

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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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

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 author 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 old hardware isn’t necessarily obsolete just because newer things have come out since then

Interview – Ken Moore – ken@pcbsd.org

The Lumina desktop environment

Special segment

Lumina walkthrough

News Roundup

Suricata for IDS on pfSense

While most people are familiar with Snort as an intrusion detection system, Suricata is another choice
This guide goes through the steps of installing and configuring it on a public-facing pfSense box
Part two details some of the configuration steps
One other cool thing about Suricata – it’s compatible with Snort rules, so you can use the same updates
There’s also another recent post about snort as well, if that’s more your style
If you run pfSense (or any BSD) as an edge router for a lot of users, this might be worth looking into

OpenBSD’s systemd API emulation project

This story was pretty popular in the mainstream news this week
For the Google Summer of Code, a student is writing emulation wrappers for some of systemd’s functions
There was consideration from some Linux users to port over the finished emulation back to Linux, so they wouldn’t have to run the full systemd (lol)
One particularly interesting Slashdot comment snippet: “We are currently migrating a large number (much larger than planned after initial results) of systems from RHEL to BSD – a decision taken due to general unhappiness with RHEL6, but SystemD pushed us towards BSD rather than another Linux distro – and in some cases are seeing throughput gains of greater than 10% on what should be equivalent Linux and BSD server builds. The re-learning curve wasn’t as steep as we expected, general system stability seems to be better too, and BSD’s security reputation goes without saying.”
It will NOT be in the base system – only in ports, and only installed as a dependency for things like newer GNOME that require such APIs
In the long run, BSD will still be safe from systemd’s reign of terror, but will hopefully still be compatible with some third party packages like GNOME that insist on using it

GhostBSD 4 preview

The GhostBSD project is moving along, slowly getting closer to the 4 release
This article shows some of the progress made, and includes lots of screenshots and interesting graphical frontends
If you’re not too familiar with GhostBSD, we interviewed the lead developer a little while back

NetBSD on the Banana Pi

The Banana Pi is a tasty alternative to the Raspberry Pi, with similar hardware specs
In this blog post, a NetBSD developer details his experiences in getting NetBSD to run on it
After studying how the prebuilt Linux image booted, he made some notes and started hacking
Ethernet, one of the few things not working, is being looked into and he’s hoping to get it fully supported for the upcoming NetBSD 7.0
They’re only about $65 as of the time we’re recording this, so it might be a fun project to try

Feedback/Questions

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Lumina was committed to ports just last week, so you can go try it out on vanilla FreeBSD now as well (or on PCBSD 10.0.3)
There’s a new OS conference being held on November 25th in London, and they’re looking for people who want to give BSD presentations (it’s run by a NetBSD developer)
This year’s Hackfest 2014, to be held November 7th and 8th in Quebec, will feature a presentation by Theo de Raadt, so mark your calendar and get out there if you’re in the area
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)