Pinned post

Dexter’s second law: The pendulum that swings twice as high lasts half as long.

Pinned post

Having spent days making PkgBase easy on

The (highly opinionated) Sum Total of computer history:

0. BSD Unix
1. Macintosh
2. Packaged Base in Red Hat 5.2
3. Squiggly underline spell check
4. FreeBSD Jail to manage the fustercluck that are RPMs on Red Hat
5. Two-finger scrolling
6. Hardware-assisted virtualization
7. ZFS v28
8. NVMe

TCP/IP is taken for granted, as it is not vendor/platform-specific.

Flat screen displays are a TV crossover technology, as are WiFi, GPS, and fancy batteries.

Pinned post

If that doesn’t set people off, I don’t know what will.

Pinned post

Call For Testing: Major updates

occambsd.sh - More-consistent syntax
propagate.sh - Propagate PkgBase installs
imagine.sh - Image boot images from the others and upstream
sideload.sh - Push (much of) a configuration to a new installation
rc.local.sh - Semi-idempotently configure basic aspects of a system

They’re never done, never perfect, but they do exactly what I have envisioned in various ways and given talks about for 20+ years.

github.com/michaeldexter/occam

Pinned post

Emerging observations on how lockdown was great for :

Work from home was blessed as a valid thing

Sci-fi-like casual video conferencing without hesitation around the world is now the norm for some of us, only limited by time zones and languages.

Group video chat is equally familiar and commonplace, with excellent self-policing of audio quality and behavior.

Events are focusing on quality over quantity, complimenting the above.

Basically, the “open source seems to be where drunk guys pinch your butt while mansplaining you” factors were globally nipped in the bud.

Good work everyone!

These are delightful times!

❤️❤️❤️

Pinned post
Pinned post

Repost: It took time, but development is back to a robust pace on both and with a good balance of new features and subtle refinement.

I have begun posting recordings of the weekly Jails/Zones, , and bhyve Production Users calls:

youtube.com/@callfortesting

The running minutes documents are linked from callfortesting.org

Heads-up: There are many ways to participate and lots to do!

The existence of Net BSD implies the existence of Gross BSD

Sure, Proxmox is one way. For FreeBSD and bhyve and jails, you might want to have a look at Sylve

See also https://gyptazy.com/blog/sylve-a-proxmox-alike-webui-for-bhyve-on-freebsd/

Yesterday, 42 days to go to the next BSD-NL Conference - Early 2026 🐡😈⛳

You can still get tickets!
tickets.bsdnl.nl/bsdnl/

You can still submit your talk!
events.bsdnl.nl/
(CfP closes on 2026-04-12)

📆 2026-05-09 / May 9th 2026
🕐 10:00-23:00 CEST
📍 Brouwerij Maximus (Utrecht)
🌐 bsdnl.nl

#BSDNL #RUNBSD #BSD #OpenBSD #FreeBSD #NetBSD #HardenedBSD #SecBSD #DragonflyBSD

Call for testing: #mlmmj 2.0.0
Changes from 1.8.0
- new build system
- by default respect RFC 2919/2369 List-* and Precedence headers generated by default (can be disabled via nolistheaders)
- Subscription follow reply-to for confirmations
- X-Forwarded-To (Gmail forwarding)
- X-Signed-Recipient (DARA/ARC)
- A bit of hardening
- some portability fixes
- archive partitioning option (archive/YYYY/MM) with automatic migration (that's per request of #Gentoo people)

Tribblix m39 released

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has released a new version.

There are several noticeable version updates in this release. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series.

osnews.com/story/144613/tribbl

#Solaris

Reposting this amazing mini-guide on how to write helpful alt text created by @Veron4ica (source: veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-a) and found via @karengregory (including Karen's original image description) so that I can pin it.

#AltText #ImageDescription #accessibility #a11y

@jperkin Might you know why fdupes is not available for pkgsrc macOS/Intel?

Next NYC*BUG: Wednesday April 1st
What's Changed Since The Last Time I Came this Way - a talk that was supposed to be about OpenZFS, by Michael W Lucas
2026-04-01 @ 18:45 local (22:45 UTC) - Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
nycbug.org/
Hear how the newest ZFS book is going and what @mwl has planned.

Flyer: nycbug.org/media/2026-04-01_Lu

The Human Cost of Failing to Name COVID ‘Airborne’

"It’s difficult to know why the word “airborne” is avoided so consistently, but the impact is clear: without that word, occupational health and safety requirements can be evaded."

#COVIDisAirborne #COVIDisNotOver #MaskUp

Source: thetyee.ca/Analysis/2026/03/27

A flurry of bets made prior to major announcements about the Iran war has ramped up speculation that individuals or groups with advance knowledge of U.S. military plans are cashing in on insider information.

So far, no American has faced federal charges related to insider trading on event-driven news.

But accusations about questionable trades are mounting. nbcnews.com/business/consumer/

Headlines 

Wait. They’re all inside stock trading deals? 😐

Registration for #BSDCan2026 is now open!

BSDCan brings together BSD developers, administrators, and users of all experience levels for in-depth tutorials, technical sessions, and meaningful collaboration.
Tutorials: June 17–18
Conference: June 19–20
Location: University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Register now:
bsdcan.org/2026/registration.h

#BSDCan2026 #FreeBSD #BSD #OpenSource #Conference

Hold on to your hardware and keep it maintained and clean. It may be the last hardware you own.

#TIL that there are #UEFI-only computers being sold now with no legacy BIOS compatibility mode.

That kind of sucks for experimenting with alternative OSes.

I've heard there's a software shim in development to replace this lost functionality, but it's still very early/alpha/basic/incomplete.

🌸 Day 2 of CHERI Blossoms 2026 is about to begin! 🌸

We’re excited to welcome everyone back to Cambridge for day two of the conference, but if you can't join us in person, you can still register for and access the livestream.

Watch keynotes and sessions live from anywhere in the world and take part in live Q&A with speakers: cheri-alliance.org/events/cher

FreeCAD Version 1.1 Released

After an enormous amount of work and dedication from FreeCAD contributors we are delighted to announce that FreeCAD Version 1.1 is now released and available for download. There are significant amounts of improvements and new features.

blog.freecad.org/2026/03/25/fr

#FreeCAD #CAD #CAM #BIM #opensource #fc3d

@dexter

If you want to identify dupes above a minimum size, a while back I wrote a Python dedupe script¹ that, if you run it with the --dry-run flag and a min-size should identify duplicate files without altering the file-system:

$ python3 dedupe.py --recurse --dry-run --min-size=$((1024*1024*2)) /path/to/potential/dupes/

to identify duplicates over 2MB under the given directory.


¹ github.com/Gumnos/dedupe/blob/

Show older
BSD Network

bsd.network is a *BSD-adjacent Mastodon Instance. We have a code of conduct.