This week we look once again at the releases, security announcements, news and tutorials.
Releases
NomadBSD 1.4 released: NomadBSD team has announced the release of NomadBSD 1.4, latest stable release of FreeBSD based, persistent, live distribution:
- The base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 12.2-p4.
- Automatic graphics driver detection has been improved
- Touchpad support has been improved
- and more
BSDSec
OpenBSD Errata: March 9th, 2021 (npppd): Errata patches for npppd have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. npppd PPTP protocol handler can cause heap over-read leading to a crash. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
OpenBSD Errata: March 4th, 2021 (sshagent): Errata patches for SSH have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. Double free in ssh-agent(1) Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.
News
New games on DragonFly: New to DragonFly, but not new to games. Aarom LI has added several old–school BSD games back to DragonFly mostly via NetBSD. It’s ching(6), gomoku(6), monop(6), and cgram(6).
helloSystem got first statistical report on BSD-Hardware.info: The system has found the required number of users to get its first statistical report on BSD-Hardware.info portal as it was done earlier by FreeBSD, OpenBSD and OPNsense. You can see in the report which hardware/software components are preferred by users of this OS. The report is available to clone from the GitHub repository.
Top 12 best opensource games available on OpenBSD: This article features the 12 best games (in authors opinion) in term of quality and fun available in OpenBSD packages. The list only contains open source games that you can install out of the box. This means that game engines requiring proprietary (or paid) game assets are not part of this list.
This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by BSDSec.
Tutorials
Manage containers on Raspberry Pi with this open source tool: In-depth article on opensource.com describing container use on the Raspberry Pi using Bastille. Covers installation of FreeBSD 13.0 (beta), installing and configuring Bastille, creating jails and working with templates.
FreeBSD Network Troubleshooting: Understanding Network Performance: FreeBSD has a full set of debugging features, and the network stack is able to report a ton of information. So much that it can be hard to figure out what is relevant and what is not.
Quick-publishing of poudriere packages: An essential tool in the FreeBSD porter’s arsenal (“porters” are the people who package third-party software, software like KDE Plasma, Haskell, ..) is poudriere, which is an evolution of the old tinderbox. It leverages ZFS and FreeBSD jails to do clean, consistent builds even on an otherwise occupied workstation, and can build for OS versions and architectures you’re not even running. Using the packages you’ve built can be slightly harder, so here’s some notes.
Side-loading FreeBSD versions using Boot Environments: Sometimes using boot environments is not sufficient to upgrade a FreeBSD ZFS installation. Side-loading is creating an empty boot environment, and then moving in the bits you need. Some breakage may occur along the way.
Using Restic for fast backups and restores: Set up your own BSD backups using restic, with zfs and tar for good measure. Restic also allows multiple backends, so you can store these on your own infrastructure, or almost anywhere else in the world.
More
As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about FreeBSD 13 BETA Benchmarks, FreeBSD Jails Deep Dive by Klara Systems, FreeBSD Foundation looking for a Senior Arm Kernel Engineer & OSS Project Coordinator, macOS-Inspired BSD Desktop OS by helloSystem, A Trip into FreeBSD 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 2021/03/08.
In Other BSDs for 2021/03/06 is out, too.
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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Stay home and stay safe!