Matthias Schmidt has added support for the em(4) device found on Intel ICH9 chipsets.
Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer (we’ve had a lot lately!): Nuno Antunes.
Matthias Schmidt has committed a useful feature from FreeBSD that uses dumpfs to get the correct newfs command to duplicate an existing filesystem. Also, he added PAM support to cron, which I’m surprised we didn’t have already.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s dri/drm update has a followup; you will need to update your sources to try it. Other people (who have been reporting success) have some other tips.
Hasso Tepper has described some simple steps for using Bluetooth under DragonFly.
Peter Avalos, in reply to a question from ‘walt’, has pointed out that DragonFly is available via git on repo.or.cz, though it’s infrequently updated.
Max Herrgard has been cleaning up bug reports on bugs.dragonflybsd.org. (Thanks, Max!) Please contribute, as many of these reports just need someone to mark them closed.
If there’s a report from you on there, make sure it’s up to date, too. It would be helpful to clean up as much as possible before the next release.
Matthias Schmidt has committed Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s pkg_radd, a wrapper script that allows installation of pkgsrc binaries, even if there isn’t a local pkgsrc tree. Check the commit message for an explanation, or the script itself for the details. Note that this is a DragonFly-specific pkgsrc utility, meaning it doesn’t appear on any other pkgsrc platform.
The 2007Q4 quarterly release of pkgsrc is out, with almost 7,500 packages available. Prebuilt binaries for DragonFly will be available ‘soon’.
New ones are popping up everywhere! Our newest committer: Aggelos Economopoulos.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has done what we’ve been needing for a long time: an update for DRI/DRM. That’s 3D support in X Windows, for those who aren’t familiar with the acronyms. His note contains extensive instructions for testing this update; give it a whirl and report back so it can get in the tree.
Astute reader “Yair K.” sent along links to two things:
There is work being done on a “user-mode NetBSD“, which sounds quite similar to DragonFly’s vkernel(7) system.
4Front Technologies has placed their Open Sound System (discussed previously) under a BSD license, removing what I think was the only obstacle to using it in DragonFly and other BSDs. A press release is out, too.
I didn’t know this existed: there’s an official OpenBSD non-profit that’s been created to handle donations. (via) There’s one for FreeBSD and NetBSD, so perhaps DragonFly should follow suit?
The first BSDTalk of the new year is here, with Marten Vijn about Open Community Camp, a camping/geekout event in the Netherlands being held August 2008.
For your entertainment: (some of these require Flash; all are off-topic)
- Why geeks are a handy weapon
- 10 minutes of awesome
- Working on short attention spans (last two via)
- Oldie but goodie: the Electronic Music Guide
- A nice open-source payback story
The call for papers for CONFidence 2008 is out, with papers due February 1st. (via undeadly)
FOSDEM 2008, the “Free and Open Source software Developers’ European Meeting”, is happening February 23-24th, in Brussels, Belgium. There will be a BSD-specific room, for which we could use a DragonFly presence. Also: beer. (via FreeBSD-announce)
The Best of FreeBSD Basics is out now on Amazon and perhaps elsewhere, containing much (all?) of Dru Lavigne’s column of the same name from OnLAMP.com. It says ‘FreeBSD’ in the title, but I’d expect everything that isn’t ports-specific will apply to every BSD. Her columns are clear and to the point.
Other factoids:
- A portion of the book’s proceeds are going to the BSD Certification Group.
- Dru Lavigne is also the author of O’Reilly’s BSD Hacks.
- The publisher of this book, Reed Media Services, is Jeremy C. Reed, a contributor to pkgsrc and DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon wrote an update for the state of HAMMER, the new file system for DragonFly. It’s at the point where historical data can retrieved even after data is deleted, though it’s not stable yet. The most recent commit notes an interesting upcoming feature idea: historical atime and mtime tracking.
Matthias Schmidt committed changes to kdump(1) that make the output more human-readable. (Original code is from FreeBSD.)
Stephane Russell posted on users@ asking for opinions on using commodity gateways (Linksys devices, etc) vs. DragonFly for a firewall and network gateway device.
Link summation time! Those gateway devices can run open-source operating systems – most famously the Linksys WRT54G. However, they can be problematic, though “Tomato” was recommended, as was OpenWRT. For read-only security, you can also boot from CD, as Dave Hayes does.
Matthew Dillon pointed out a small device that boots an free OS is all you need, which leads to stores selling my personal fascination: teeny computer systems. Michael Neumann listed favorites pcengines.ch and soekris.com, and Thomas Donnelly added Logic Supply.