40: AirPorts & Packages

Author: JT Pennington
Published: Wed 04 Jun 2014
Episode Link: https://www.bsdnow.tv/40

On this week's episode, we'll be giving you an introductory guide on OpenBSD's ports and package system. There's also a pretty fly interview with Karl Lehenbauer, about how they use FreeBSD at FlightAware. Lots of interesting news and answers to all your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

BSDCan 2014 talks and reports, part 2

More presentations and trip reports are still being uploaded

Ingo Schwarze, New Trends in mandoc

Vsevolod Stakhov, The Architecture of the New Solver in pkg

Julio Merino, The FreeBSD Test Suite

Zbigniew Bodek, Transparent Superpages for FreeBSD on ARM

There's also a trip report from Michael Dexter and another (very long and detailed) trip report from our friend Warren Block that even gives us some linkage, thanks!
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Beyond security, getting to know OpenBSD's real purpose

Michael W Lucas (who, we learn through this video, has been using BSD since 1986) gave a "webcast" last week, and the audio and slides are finally up

It clocks in at just over 30 minutes, managing to touch on a lot of OpenBSD topics

Some of those topics include: what is OpenBSD and why you should care, the philosophy of the project, how it serves as a "pressure cooker for ideas," briefly touches on GPL vs BSDL, their "do it right or don't do it at all" attitude, their stance on NDAs and blobs, recent LibreSSL development, some of the security functions that OpenBSD enabled before anyone else (and the ripple effect that had) and, of course, their disturbing preference for comic sans

Here's a direct link to the slides

Great presentation if you'd like to learn a bit about OpenBSD, but also contains a bit of information that long-time users might not know too
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FreeBSD vs Linux, a comprehensive comparison

Another blog post covering something people seem to be obsessed with - FreeBSD vs Linux

This one was worth mentioning because it's very thorough in regards to how things are done behind the scenes, not just the usual technical differences

It highlights the concept of a "core team" and their role vs "contributors" and "committers" (similar to a presentation Kirk McKusick did not long ago)

While a lot of things will be the same on both platforms, you might still be asking "which one is right for me?" - this article weighs in with some points for both sides and different use cases

Pretty well-written and unbiased article that also mentions areas where Linux might be better, so don't hate us for linking it
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Expand FreeNAS with plugins

One of the things people love the most about FreeNAS (other than ZFS) is their cool plugin framework

With these plugins, you can greatly expand the feature set of your NAS via third party programs

This page talks about a few of the more popular ones and how they can be used to improve your NAS or media box experience

Some examples include setting up an OwnCloud server, Bacula for backups, Maraschino for managing a home theater PC, Plex Media Server for an easy to use video experience and a few more

It then goes into more detail about each of them, how to actually install plugins and then how to set them up
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Interview - Karl Lehenbauer - [email protected] / @flightaware

FreeBSD at FlightAware, BSD history, various topics

Tutorial

Ports and packages in OpenBSD

News Roundup

Code review culture meets FreeBSD

In most of the BSDs, changes need to be reviewed by more than one person before being committed to the tree

This article describes Phabricator, an open source code review system that we briefly mentioned last week

Instructions for using it are on the wiki

While not approved by the core team yet for anything official, it's in a testing phase and developers are encouraged to try it out and get their patches reviewed