Matthew Dillon’s commited a large quantity of bug fixes back to the 1.4 release tag today, and if no problems arise, 1.4.2 will be released.
William Grim is proposing to use DragonFly in his master’s thesis, where he writes a framework for user-space device drivers. Matthew Dillon and Emiel Kollof had some interesting feedback.
For those who like their console a little more roomy, vidcontrol is a way to fit smaller/different text onto your console screen immediately on startup. Attention to >font and LCD use is a good idea.
Curious about where to place rc scripts from pkgsrc? Joerg Sonneberger says where to stick them.
There’s a new mailing list – pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org – specifically for people using pkgsrc packages. tech-pkg@netbsd.org is now for packagers. To subscribe, send ‘subscribe pkgsrc-users’ to majordomo@netbsd.org.
Pkgsrc questions should generally go to this new list, though DragonFly-specific questions should be asked on users@dragonflybsd.org first. (Unless, of course, the package doesn’t build yet on DragonFly.)
Interestingly, the number of actual broken pkgsrc packages is down to only 10% of the entire collection. Much credit is due to Joerg Sonnenberger, Jeremy C. Reed, and others, for knocking this quantity down.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a patch that provides a new binary kgdb along with other features, and he needs testers before it gets committed.
Greg Lehey’s big book, “The Complete FreeBSD”, is now available as a PDF and as a set of source files under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can download, update, and submit back changes. This was the first book ever on FreeBSD, and it’s a big ‘un.
Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich are giving a talk at BSDCan about various firewalling technologies on BSD systems, including DragonFly.
I’m going to try to make it to this event, too…
Chuck Tuffli is working on an implementation of MSI for DragonFly. MSI is a way for device drivers to talk, similar to but better than the old IRQ method. As Chuck kindly explained it to me, MSI and MSI-X are necessary for PCI-Express support.
This worked great when I was looking for a laptop, so I’ll solicit opinions again:
If I wanted to move shiningsilence.com to someplace that wasn’t the end of my cable modem, where could I look? A perfect solution would be someplace where I could put a small rackmounted server in, and run DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon recently committed code to fix a timing issue that could cause filesystem corruption. This may have (on DragonFly) fixed the ‘dirbad’ bug that has been seen on both DragonFly and FreeBSD.
Adrian Nida has put together a new Atheros patch, for anyone using that chipset. Please test if you have the hardware, so that this can go in the tree – it’s overdue!
UnixReview.com has two noow book reviews up: Pro Perl Debugging, which should have obvious uses, and Math You Can’t Use, for those who want to feel bad about copyright.
The 5th System Administration and Network Engineering Conference is being held in the Netherlands, May 15-19, 2006. Register before April 7th for a discount.
Postings will be slow here for the next week or so, as my net connection will be intermittent.
OnLAMP.com has an article up about bandwidth shaping using various tools; it should work on DragonFly…
Things have been quiet for the past few days, so there’s few posts here. Take a look at the NetBSD News Beat if you’re hungry for links. Also, BSDNews.com appears to have become a lot more busy lately (perhaps it’s more automated).
Since DragonFly has been diverging from the FreeBSD 4 model, and because NVIDIA no longer produces a FreeBSD 4 X11 driver, there is no 3D acceleration for NVIDIA chipset video cards under DragonFly. It’s frustrating, though there are efforts to deal with this.
Looking at the latest version of xorg, there is mention in a few places of 3D support for more recent ATI cards, though it’s not reflected in the radeon man page.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added OpenSSH 4.3p2 to DragonFly.