Month: June 2007

The Gnu Public License has reached version 3. Generally, everyone seems indifferent or, in Jem Matzan’s case, apathetic. (Links via hubertf) Everyone’s more interested in the Jesusphone. While we’re being mean about GPLv3… that’s one ugly logo.

Here’s two slightly tangential things that involve DragonFly: The first is a thread about large (64-bit) file support in Apache, and how it is treated as a special case because of poor planning under Linux – it’s not a problem in BSD. This led to an excellent quote from an excellent book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg“, by Clifford Stoll:

“We’re watching someone who’s never used Berkeley Unix.” He sucked in his breath and whispered, “A heathen.”

Also, “_why” posted a question about checkpointing to the users@ list, for an issue that Matthew Dillon later fixed. I recall that this _why is the same fellow who wrote “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby“, a programming book that is unlike any other.

Theo De Raadt’s description of bugs in recent Intel processors has made it to Slashdot, where in the comments, Matthew Dillon went through each bug and listed his opinion on each.  (two comment entries, starting here)  In contrast, Linus Torvalds’ general response was much more subdued.  (Thanks, Wiger Van Houten, for links)

According to these reports from the OpenBSD-misc mailing list, Intel’s Core Duo is buggy, and upcoming features on Intel motherboards create a second running environment accessible even when your computer is off, both of which create security risks. (Thanks, Hasso Tepper)

Before anyone starts to hyperventilate, keep in mind: 1: this is a warning of potential problems, not an assessment of existing problems. 2: It’s an OpenBSD mailing list, which can be described as ‘adversarial’.

Sascha Wildner posted a patch that allows direct use of WPA and DHCP commands within ifconfig for wireless connections, along with some other changes.

It is indeed possible to watch every file access made on your system, everywhere, by attaching ktrace to the init process.  It’ll generate a lot of data, though.

Here’s an entertaining possibility: Brian de Alwis, on the port-i386 NetBSD mailing list, noted that he was able to get ATI’s proprietary drivers for XFree86/Xorg working on NetBSD, at least for Xinerama support.   I daresay this would work for DragonFly too – anyone have a recent ATI card to try out?  (Original link from Greg Troxel)

A recent post here on the Digest attacted a lot of comments – some trolling, some useful.  Read at your leisure.

BSDTalk, which has a working RSS feed again, has a 9 minute interview with Sidsel Jensen from EuroBSDCon.

This week, UnixReview.com has a full arrangement of the usual topics: “Certification Changes and Updates“, a Regular Expressions column on “Python’s Mechanization“, a Shell Corner column continuing “Littera Delenda Est“, along with “Elements of Efficient and Secure Service Provisioning with Solaris“, and “Test Your Knowledge of Users and Groups“. Strangely, no book reviews this time.

The latest BSDTalk has no interview; it instead goes into using one-time passwords for a 6-minute talk.

Seen linked on Blue’s News: Kahvipapu articles on Linux gaming with first person shooters, and strategy games parts one and two.  There’s more sections promised, and it covers some games I’ve never heard of.

I link it here because some subsection of these games run on DragonFly; they can be found in pkgsrc or may compile directly.  DragonFly’s biggest hurdle for many games is the lack of 3D support through DRI.  Now that we have modular xorg, it’s probably not too complex a project.  Admittedly, I’d mostly be using it for fancy screensavers, but it’s still a project I’d like to see.

If someone wanted to fill a niche site need, there’s no site that exists for BSD games.  Admittedly, it’s a subset of a relatively small audience, with a limited quantity of games, but that just means that such a site could be built with sheer willpower, rather than funding.   Kind of like this one!

How big a disk can DragonFly’s new 64-bit disklabel support?  Very.

Steve_- on #dragonflybsd and others sent along a link to an article on DragonFly on InformIT.com. It’s pretty in-depth, though there are some minor errors.

Chris Turner wrote up an interesting summary of what he’s seen in terms of the need for ‘realtime’ audio and how it’s been dealt with in the Linux world as well as BSD.  There’s some mailing list links in there that can be used to eat up an hour or two of reading on a weekend…

Welcome Joe Talbott, who by this change appears to be our newest committer.