Sascha Wildner has brought in the mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) drivers from FreeBSD, adding support for a number of different RAID controllers – including the Dell PERC 5 and PERC 6.
Rui-Xiang Guo has brought chromium, the base of Google’s speedy Chrome web browser, into pkgsrc, in the wip branch. He’s looking for testers of the work, especially on DragonFly. Please try it and report!
I did this last year and the year before, so why not make a habit of it? I get no commissions; these are mostly places I’ve shopped or plan to shop. It’s based on “This would be SO COOL to have”, and nothing else.
General:
Nerditry: Newegg, ThinkGeek, Leatherman Wave, ISC.org (see 9-layer OSI model shirt).
Science: American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear.
Creepy: Bone Room, Skulls Unlimited, or Skullduggery.
BSDs:
There are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD stores, where money goes back to the project.
Bookwise, Jeremy C. Reed publishes a number of BSD–related books. Buy his stuff through Amazon. There’s also No Starch Press, which has a number of BSD publications. (and LEGO, too?) And of course O’Reilly, for a bunch of things.
Nice things to do:
The FreeBSD Foundation is having an end-of-year appeal for funds, so you can donate in someone’s name. The NetBSD Foundation probably accepts donations, though I don’t have a specific page to link to for that.
Donations to the Itojun Service Award fund are also a good thing.
Everything else I could think of:
- MAKE Magazine subscriptions
- SparkFun Electronics (I want one of their Port-O-Rotary phones),
- Topatoco shirts and books
- Klein bottles
- RLT.com (check out the many subsites linked there)
Further suggestions welcome, especially for European shoppers. I’ve been slowly growing this list year-to-year, and I can always use more interesting and unique places.
Update: George Rosamond pointed at DealExtreme.com. There are some crazy cheap prices there.
Also, and I can’t believe I didn’t link to this before: Brando. If you’re looking for something with a USB port, Brando has it. Even if it’s a jeweled scorpion necklace… USB drive.
DragonFly versions >=2.6 and ipfw don’t seem to get along for doing network address translations. I’ve posted about this before, but I’m linking again because this time I have the explicit config lines written out.
I should probably create a pf category…
Several Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly have already been claimed and finished – a regression test and desktop documentation, plus others I haven’t been involved in.
The contest runs through January and is open to anyone 13-18, with Google paying per task. Hopefully we’ll have enough tasks to make it the full time, as it’s more popular than I anticipated.
Alex Hornung has added the basic work for dmirror, a software RAID-1 implementation into the tree, along with a concept description from Matthew Dillon. It’s not ready for use yet; ready for development, though.
Siju George noticed that his mouse would stop working in X, perhaps every hour. Restarting X would fix it, but he didn’t have a clear cause. Antonio Huete Jimenez suggested turning the sysctl ‘debug.psm.loglevel’ to 9 to at least see what messages cropped up, and that seemed to fix it. I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution, but it’s worth mentioning in case this odd bug bites someone else.
Please welcome our newest committer: Ilya Dryomov. He’s already responsible for deduplication code for Hammer, so now he can work directly.
Tomas Bodzar found robotpkg, a pkgsrc-based collection of robotics-related software. Because of its pkgsrc origins, it should in theory work with DragonFly, or most anything.
APIC_IO is back as a kernel config option, though it just toggles the sysctl loader tunable default. This is so a kernel config file with that option still set won’t cause an error.
Matthew Dillon’s made several changes to improve support for AMD SB850 chipsets (for AHCI) and also for 880/890 chipsets. If you have one of these systems, it may be bootable/more reliable. Don’t start messing with the hot-plug capability yet, though.
Peter Avalos has committed his speedups for OpenSSL encryption (using assembly), along with a lot of numbers to show performance changes. It’s definitely sped up, but the quantity of values is so large that you’d have to visualize it differently to get a summary I could show here.
If you’re between 12 and 18 years of age, Google Code-In has started. There’s plenty of tasks available for DragonFly BSD, so jump in now! (or, well, wait a few days for the holiday if you’re a U.S. resident.)
A general roundup of things, this week.
- The 1978 Bell System Technical Journal, describing this new Unix thing. (via)
- The book Modern Perl is out, written by chromatic. I link to it for two reasons: the first is that while the book is available for purchase, it’s also available as a free download, with the only condition that you must tell others about it. The second reason – and the reason I’d mention this book anyway – is that chromatic writes on his site and for O’Reilly, and his articles are succinct and enjoyable. The Web is a deluge of text, so any author that can hold your attention, with all the other sources to read, is worth following.
- More NYCBSDCon 2010 stuff, from the comments on my previous post: Will Backman has partial audio recordings, and Jason Dixon’s adventure is online. (thanks, Will and Lawrence)
- This summary of the (BSD-ish) Tarsnap service made me smile.
- Top 5 Best Practices for an Open Source Development Community. (via) I especially agree with items 2 and 3.
- Oddly compelling. (via everywhere)
If you can see this, the RSS switch worked. Here’s hoping.
I’m moving the RSS feeds for the site to go through Feedburner, so I can see how actively they are used. I’m putting in a redirect, so it should not (I hope) affect reading it for anyone, but this note is here just in case.
The new location for the RSS feed will be: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dragonflybsddigest
Peter Avalos is working on having OpenSSL use assembly code. On i386, he reports initial rough results of blowfish working 15% faster, and DES doubling in speed. (seen via IRC.)
The utility pkg_add has a -u option that tells it to upgrade any existing matched package with a given binary package. Since pkg_radd passes options on to the underlying use of pkg_add, after automatically setting a remote repository for binary files, pkg_radd -u <packagename> tells pkg_add to automatically find and upgrade a package.
I never thought this would work. However, I’m building a package on a system that has pkgsrc-2010Q1 packages installed, but a pkgsrc-2010Q3 /usr/pkgsrc. Every time I’ve encountered an error because installed software was too low a version, pkg_radd -uv <package_name> has resulted in a quick upgrade.
I’m not recommending this as a new upgrade method; I’m noting how unexpectedly well this experiment is going. It may be just blind luck, but this sure would be nice if it ‘just worked’.
Peter Avalos is bringing in OpenSSL 1.0.0b. I’m not sure what the difference between 1.0.0b and 1.0.1 would be. Also, Alex Hornung has updated vn(4) – there’s more updates than the one I linked.