Of 1.4 and 1.5

Matthew Dillon has posted a description of what remains to be accomplished before the 1.4 release, and just when that will happen, and he also has a detailed plan of what he’s going to do in 1.5. (Which, when stable, will be DragonFly 1.6.)

That second post contains several special things to note:

  • 1.5 will be significantly unstable (at least compared to the previous development versions), so stick with 1.4 for a while if you don’t want trouble.
  • The introduction of a new acronym that I daresay we will hear more and more often: cache coherency management system (CCMS).
  • ZFS! (See Flash demo)

New Sys Admin CD out

Sys Admin Magazine has a new CD out that contains all issues of their magazine (1992 through 2005) and all the issues of The Perl Journal (1996-2002). I think I have all the paper issues of the Perl Journal around here someplace…

If you like Perl and miss the Journal, there’s also The Perl Review, which can show up in both print and PDF form. I like the paper, but I can back up the PDF…

Spare time testing

Want a project for your winter vacation? Matthew Dillon wrote in a post that I don’t have a link for:

I would still like to have a regression suite that can be run with a simple ‘make DESTDIR=(some_place_with_lots_of_space_available)‘. It would be a good project for someone.

Off-topic: hardware as a software add-on

This doesn’t directly have anything to do with DragonFly, but it’s interesting: Sun is offering an Ultra 20 workstation free with a 3-year subscription to the services they offer. Those services cost $360 a year (which is how it’s billed, not monhly like they say), so it’s about $1K for the computer.

It’s certainly neat; while you could assemble a similar machine for close to a third of the price from off-the-shelf parts, it wouldn’t have the support, or run nearly as well. In terms of units, Sun is the second-largest Unix vendor around (here’s the first), and the biggest when it comes to server systems, as far as I know. If I worked with more Solaris machines, or more with Java, it would be an attractive offer. (First seen on The Howling Void.)