Main topic of this week is BSD versus Linux distribution development. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with news and tutorials.
BSD versus Linux distribution development
It is said that the BSDs have a distinct approach in terms of packaging the base system relative to userland apps, and that the Linux distros at the time were not following the same practice.
Are there Linux distros that have adopted the same approach in modern times? If not, are there technical limitations that are preventing them from doing so, such as some distros supporting multiple kernel versions maybe?
In short, while there are technical hurdles (such as distributed development) which make it harder for Linux distributions to provide the same sort of base platform isolated from third-party applications, it is possible for Linux distributions to offer this approach. There are several solutions available, each with their strengths and weaknesses. None of these approaches is exactly the same as the BSDs, but some of them are similar and offer some of the same benefits.
Releases
Seems to be none.
BSDSec
Seems to be none.
As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.
News
FreeBSD Day postponed: The FreeBSD Foundation has announced via Tweet that it is postponing FreeBSD day. Decisions comes due to fact that the same day is also “Juneteenth” - a holiday celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. The same day is significant to Project origins and thus was designated as “FreeBSD Day”.
DragonFlyBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. Ubuntu 20.04 On Intel’s Core i9 10900K Comet Lake: One of the areas where Intel has the leg up over AMD when it comes to open-source software support is on the BSD side where generally the likes of FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD often exhibit better out-of-the-box support at launch. Here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD are running on the Core i9 10900K “Comet Lake” processor with Z490 motherboard.
wg(4), an in kernel driver for WireGuard vpn communication has been committed into OpenBSD.
History of FreeBSD – Part 1: Unix and BSD: FreeBSD, a free and open-source Unix-like operating system has been around since 1993. However, its origins are directly linked to that of BSD, and further back, those of Unix. During this History of FreeBSD series, we will talk about how Unix came to be, and how Berkeley’s Unix developed at Bell Labs.
Tutorials
In November 2018 AWS published an Open Source tool called Firecracker, mostly a virtual machine monitor relying on KVM, a small sized Linux kernel, and a stripped down version of Qemu. NetBSD would be a perfect match for this kind of target, as the kernel and the entire OS can be stripped down easily, so one user indeed tried and wrote about it.
FreeBSD’s METALOG: unprivileged installs. When you 'make installworld -DNOROOT DESTDIR=blah', the system will create a $DESTDIR/METALOG file. This file contains all the permission and modes for the files. Normally, installworld requires root permission. -DNOROOT instructs the build system to install them as the user and to note what permissions, etc in a METALOG.
Running Jitsi-Meet in a FreeBSD Jail: How-to for running Jitsi-Meet videoconferencing system in a FreeBSD jail.
Grafana Dashboard for Jitsi-Meet: Setting up the Jitsi-Meet Grafana Dashboard on FreeBSD.
Renaming and replacing zroot filesystems using mfsBSD: Post about replacing one zroot with another because of missing binaries and suspect layout. The existing zroot is an old system predating current zroot layouts.
MTA-STS on MidnightBSD: Steps to setup MTA-STS for inbound mail on MidnightBSD.
Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With “pot” Within 5 Minutes: When using FreeBSD on your desktop, you can use “pot” to easily create “throw away” browser jails. That way, the browser environment is reliably and completely erased and reset each time you re-create it with one single, simple command.
Graphical view of the x86 OpenBSD boot process: Ever wanted to know how PCs boot into OpenBSD? This document shows which files are related to each step, in which order things are read/executed and a human readable list of the operations done by /etc/rc up to the point where you can log in to your system and your personal customizations start.
Running pgbackrest on FreeBSD: pgbackrest is a tool for backup and recovery of a PostgreSQL database. It fully supports non-Linux platforms, including FreeBSD, thanks to the changes in the compilation approach. It is therefore a simple process to get pgbackrest installed on your FreeBSD machine.
OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS: This post will cover setting up bhyve on OmniOS, so it will also be a good introduction to bhyve. As well, it looks into OpenBSD’s uEFI boot loader so if you have had trouble with this, then you are in the right place.
More
As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Upgrading OpenBSD, Where do Unix man pages come from?, Help for NetBSD’s VAX port, FreeBSD on Dell Latitude 7390, PFS Tool changes in DragonflyBSD, and more.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to providing summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. The latest is from 2020-06-22.
In Other BSDs for 2020/06/20 is out, too.
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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Stay home and stay safe!