Tracing the History of ARM and FreeBSD, Make ‘less’ more friendly, NomadBSD 1.4 Release, Create an Ubuntu Linux jail on FreeBSD 12.2, OPNsense 21.1.2 released, Midnight BSD and BastilleBSD, and more.

NOTES

When we think of computers, we generally think of laptops and desktops. Each one of these systems is powered by an Intel or AMD chip based on the x86 architecture. It might feel like you spend all day interacting with these kinds of systems, but you would be wrong.

You probably know about less: it is a standard tool that allows scrolling up and down in documents that do not fit on a single screen. Less has a very handy feature, which can be turned on by invoking it with the -i flag. This causes less to ignore case when searching. For example, ‘udf’ will find ‘udf’, ‘UDF’, ‘UdF’, and any other combination of upper-case and lower-case. If you’re used to searching in a web browser, this is probably what you want. But less is even more clever than that. If your search pattern contains upper-case letters, the ignore-case feature will be disabled. So if you’re looking for ‘QXml’, you will not be bothered by matches for the lower-case ‘qxml’. (This is equivalent to ignorecase + smartcase in vim.)

Version 1.4 of NomadBSD, a persistent live system for USB flash drives based on FreeBSD and featuring a graphical user interface built around Openbox, has been released: “We are pleased to present the release of NomadBSD 1.4.

Work has so far been focused on the firmware update process to ensure its safety around edge cases and recovery methods for the worst case. To that end 21.1.3 will likely receive the full revamp including API and GUI changes for a swift transition after thorough testing of the changes now available in the development package of this release.

We recently added a new port, mports/sysutils/bastille that allows you to manage containers. This is a port of a project that originally targetted FreeBSD, but also works on HardenedBSD.