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Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm thankful for the BSD projects, particularly FreeBSD & OpenBSD.

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    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today it's OpenSMTPD¹.In the past I've tried to set up Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and qmail at various junctures, but found them all unwieldy in their configuration syntax. Macros and compiling them, or digging through dozens of config files for relevant settings. Lots of "here are thousands of settings, but don't change them unless you really know what you're doing." It drove me a bit crazy.Then OpenBSD folks created OpenSMTPD.The configuration syntax was sensible and simple. It didn't try to do everything, just adequate SMTP serving with some privsep. It was easy to point it at certificates that acme-client(1) obtains for me via httpd(8) interactions scheduled in cron(8), all within the base system.It's the MTA with OpenBSD's fingerprints of simplicity & security all over it.⸻¹ https://opensmtpd.org/
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    Going a bit off the beaten path for #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today I get to appreciate HaikuOS¹. While it has some issues (mostly keyboard-mapping) that prevent me from using it as the main OS on my writerdeck netbook, it is AMAZING in how well it uses resources. That little underpowered Atom processor with its 2G of RAM just flies. It boots in a fraction of the time of anything else (other than DOS) that I've installed on the hardware. The GUI and all the applications are delightfully snappy.So please join me in sending a little praise toward the @haiku project for all the wonderful work they do!⸻¹ https://www.haiku-os.org/
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    Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/
  • Today it's awk(1)

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    Today it's awk(1)I use it almost daily—from simple column-extraction (specifying column separators and mashing together various columns feels easier with awk than with sort(1)), to summing and running totals, to aggregating counts of data, to reformatting text, etc…so many little uses pop up.It's available on every POSIX platform making it easy to write cross-platform utilities without having to install additional run-times like Python/Ruby/Node and the heavy dependencies that come with them.I've even written cgi-bin/ scripts in awk, allowing dynamic data processing on my stock OpenBSD systems with httpd+SlowCGI without non-stock software in the chroot.https://blog.thechases.com/categories/awk/#FreeSoftwareAdvent