The prebuilt packages at GoBSD.com have been updated; see David Rhodus’s post for details on upgrading. He also notes that you can now buy a 4-CDROM set of DragonFly BSD (branded FireFly BSD) now, with all these packages included.
Zera William Holladay posted a link to an entertaining DragonFly image he created.
The FreeBSD Foundation has received enough donations from private individuals to retain non-profit status for 2004.
‘walt’ passed along details of his GRUB configuration for booting Windows and DragonFly. Steven Looman added a writeup of how to do it with the Windows XP bootloader.
Matthew Dillon posted a number of explanations about how he expects DragonFly journalling to work. Maxim Sobalev raised some issues (answered twice), and work continued.
Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote me to mention that his recent libm changes “included optimised assembly routines for certain mathematical functions for x86 and amd64.”
Matthew Dillon posted what he plans to do to implement journaling, with some very impressive goals. He also detailed his methodology for new technology in a separate followup, and he performed more work on the topic. Here’s more on journaling if you’re unfamiliar with the general concept.
Unixreview.com has posted 3 new articles originally found in SysAdmin magazine, all of which can be used with DragonFly: Checking Your Bookmarks (a Perl script), Entrap: A File Integrity Checker (Korn shell schripts), and Online Backups Using dump and NFS.
A fellow named John Leimon posted a helpful tip on how to set up your soundcard under DragonFly, and some statistics on file transfer speeds improvements under DragonFly. (hint: it’s good)
Hiroki Sato of AllBSD.org has built 6,278 packages from the FreeBSD ports tree as of Dec. 12th. They’re available at ftp://ftp.allbsd.org/pub/DragonFly/ports/i386/packages/, meaning you can add packages with ‘pkg_add -r ftp://ftp.allbsd.org/pub/DragonFly/ports/i386/packages/Latest/packagename.tgz‘.
Matthew Dillon’s committed more journaling work; Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai has committed Kristian Vlaardingerbroek’s patch to support the 10/100 Ethernet chipset on ICH5-based Intel motherboards. If you are planning to edit man pages, look at mdoc(7), and vim may be a good editor to use, especially if you tackle it like this. Hiten Pandya will be in Bremen, Germany, through January 6th; look him up is you’re a DragonFly user and local.
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to add $30,400 by the end of the year – i.e. within about a week. The Foundation has a good amount of cash, but a greater proportion of the Foundation’s money needs to come from private individuals, not corporations, in order to keep its non-profit status (and accompanying tax breaks) in the U.S.
Donating via PayPal or check to the Foundation doesn’t directly help DragonFly, but a high tide raises all boats, as the saying goes.
Look! Joerg Sonnenberger committed something big and it looks important and I have no clue what it is! Oh, I am so tired.
What kind of payoff is Matthew Dillon expecting from the threaded subsystems in DragonFly? *HUGE*
Oliver Fromme posted two helpful notes – one on mounting devices as non-root, and another on booting a group of computers without disks. The ‘diskless boot’ discussion continued on, with comments from Joerg Sonnenberger and Matthew Dillon.
UNIXReview.com has posted three new articles, all of which may be useful for DragonFly users: One on using OpenOffice, and another on integrating Cisco and Unix equipment, both of which are really book reviews. There’s a third article that covers the ports for Logmon, Portmanager, and Nullmailer.
Jeffrey Hsu’s comitted more work to get ready for a parallelized routing setup. Interestingly, if you look at the commit message and count the lines added and subtracted (the ‘Changes’ column), there’s generally less code as a result.
A fellow named Robert T. Kopp posted a question on whether a new BSD user should pick FreeBSD 5.3 or DragonFly, and Matt Dillon did a short summary on the reasons for picking either.