This week on UnixReview: a program review of ‘Snort 2.6 and Afterglow‘, a book review of ‘BigNum Math‘, which may be good for causing naps, and ‘Sharing A Linux Scanner On Your Network‘. Don’t let that last title fool you – that’s more about the available-for-BSD SANE.
The binary driver (“blob”) for NVIDIA video cards contained, until recently, a remote root exploit. Maybe those anti-binary people aren’t completely crazy. (Thanks, Undeadly)
I’ve moved to HiddenNetwork for the sidebar ad. HiddenNetwork provides ads for computer jobs, which I’d bet would interest most of the Digest’s readers. Some of them look tempting to me, in fact.
I originally heard of HiddenNetwork from reading The Daily WTF, and then had a followup recommendation (good idea, Simon). Please let me know your opinion by comment or email.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s port of FreeBSD-6’s sound infrastructure (including the HDA driver) is available. See his post for more details. It’s an easy install, requiring a simple patch and kernel or module build.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert suggests two projects available for a taker: updating Radeon DRM support, or updating the linux syscall support, both of which have existing code from which to start.
In the news recently:
Advisory Check 1.0 was released, which checks for vulnerabilities in installed software, and works with an impressive number of package managment systems on BSD and Linux. It includes pkgsrc, so it should work on DragonFly. (Thanks, BSDNews)
PC-BSD, a ‘with-its-desktop-and-package-manager’ version of FreeBSD, was bought by iXsystems. Reading this interview, it seems ‘bought’ == hiring of the main developer of PC-BSD by iXsystems. The lucky guy gets to be paid for what he used to do for fun.
pfSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall derived from m0n0wall, has reached version 1.0. One of the project leads on pfSense is Scott Ullrich, who also commits to DragonFly. pfSense uses the BSD Installer (again, Scott Ullrich is involved in that) as does DragonFly.
For those of you who run Preview, the tag is about to be slipped up to synchronize with the beeding edge code, as it’s been running pretty stable recently.
If you aren’t sure what Preview is, see “Is there a branch oriented towards stability?” on the FAQ.
Anthony L. Bryan has created a ‘metalink‘ for the DragonFly 1.6 ISO.  See his message for more details on the format.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has brought over FreeBSD’s high definition audio support, making it possible to get sound from ICH8 chipsets, for instance. It’s not yet committed; contact corecode if you want to try it out.
(No mailing list post yet; he announced this on the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
Jeremy C. Reed interviewed a number of folks using pkgsrc on non-NetBSD platforms, and put the results together on a webpage at bsdnewsletter.com. (DragonFly is represented by your humble Digest writer.)
Vector image files of the DragonFly logo are now available, which can produce much better versions of the image, especially at higher resolutions.
fsck(8) in DragonFly now can handle filesystems containing millions of directories. Matthew Dillon added this support because he happens to have 23 million directories laying around on a single volume.
YONETANI Tomokazu has added support for disk suspension for saving power.
A discussion on users@ has wandered into just how much of any data transmission is overhead; e.g. not data.
Hubert Feyrer has an interesting post showing some of the many places BSD (often NetBSD, in his search) code can be found, which is probably in no small part due to the BSD license.
DragonFly 1.6.2 is released, along with 1.4.5, to include the recent changes that had been merged back to the branches. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert moved the release up, and a changelog is available for 1.4 and 1.6. (changelogs are in forward chronological order, so skim down.)
Updating pkgsrc is usually done through cvs, though it is apparently also now possible using Mercurial. (Thanks HubertF)
csup is usable for a cvsup client, and since it’s written in C, doesn’t require modula-3, which doesn’t build on DragonFly. csup was broken on DragonFly, though YONETANI Tomokazu has a fix. Of course, the server side still needs to be compiled, with the same dependency problems. Alternatives like cvsync have problems, and rsync is supposed to be too taxing, but now is a good time to test that assumption, perhaps with a benchmark?
Sascha Wildner has updated timezone data! Yeah, slow news day.