Dual-console default

Matt Dillon committed code that makes DragonFly computers boot in dual mode – i.e. both the serial console and the video console are active. Use -h at boot to get just serial, and -V to get just video.

Pesky Postfix

A few people using Postfix for mail have reported system hangs at irregular intervals; Joerg Sonnenberger and Matt Dillon have been trying to track this down. Joerg posted these steps to take if you are so fortunate as to encounter this problem:

“Please try to provide the following for us for download:

  • a tarball of your /var/spool/postfix [if this doesn’t contain private mail, save it and try to remove them as long as the problem persists]
  • a crash dump of the system when it hangs and the kernel.debug, please test that ‘gdb -k kernel.debug vmcore.X‘ actually works and gdb doesn’t crash.
  • if you can easily reproduce the problem, compile kern/kern_lockf.c with -DLOCKF_DEBUG, use the ddb command ‘w lf_print_ranges 1‘ to set the lockf debugging and give us the /var/log/messages.

I really want to fix this, but neither Matt nor I can reproduce this problem and the code is not obviously bad. There is some interaction going on, but the crash dump we had so far doesn’t work (see above about testing). It would be nice, if you can use bzip2 or gzip on all this data.”

KDE ‘packs’

GoBSD.com has a ‘packages’ section which holds prebuilt software packages for DragonFly, suitable for adding with pkg_add -r packagename. It doesn’t happen to have many KDE packages, which can be very time-consuming to build by hand. However, there’s a whole bunch in a different directory, http://gobsd.com/packs/.

WineX release

WineX, a commercial version of Wine oriented towards gameplay, has been released (version 4.0) and renamed (“Cedega”). I vaguely recall it was possible to get it working on FreeBSD – it would be interesting to see how it performs on DragonFly, comparatively.

kbdmap Kicked, adduser Added

Thanks to Chris Pressey, Tim Wickberg, and William DeVries, the Perl script kbdmap has been replaced with a C equivalent, and adduser/rmuser, also formerly Perl, has been replaced with Bourne shell scripts. These all came from FreeBSD-5.

asf, csplit, tabs, and asa

Hiten Pandya’s added asf(8): Add Symbol File. It’s ported from FreeBSD – I’m adding the commit comment below. Also, csplit(1), tabs(1) as specified in IEEE Std. 1003.1-2001 (SUSv3) and ported from Tim J. Robbins’ code on FreeBSD. He’s also committed the POSIXv2 asa(1) utility for interpretation of FORTRAN carriage-control characters. How often does that happen?
Continue reading “asf, csplit, tabs, and asa”

gcc34 causes buildworld

Since GCC 3.4 is now in the source tree, which means a ‘make buildworld‘ (not ‘make quickworld‘) is neccessary on your next update. You can use it – after updating and rebuilding – with “setenv CCVER gcc34” set. Avoid using the -j flag to speed things up, just yet. ProPolice is supported with this version.