The Preview tag has been moved up; if you run Preview or 1.12.2, and still have errors building m4 from pkgsrc 2008Q1, add this patch.
Robert Luciani, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, did some initial testing of the libc_r and libthread_xu libraries, with some graphable results. Unfortunately, there’s some degree of error, but that’s OK – I just like having tests performed and images created.
‘Sdavtaker’ posted news of a slight DragonFly presence at FLISOL08. Not huge, but interesting since it’s very oriented towards easy Linux installs. I didn’t know the event existed, possibly because it does not appear to have a central website.
Update: Damien posted a descriptive link – in Spanish.
The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource online magazine is out. This issue focuses on Communications. (via)
Murray Stokely has an interesting post up on his blog noting a bunch of interesting BSD-themed tutorials on (mostly) Youtube. His sentiments – and I agree – are that there should be more BSD instruction in video form, not just the various texts we have today. (via)
BSD systems have always been well-documented compared to the open source … well, ‘standard’ isn’t the right word. Branching past text-based media is a good idea, though I suspect part of the barrier is common Flash support.
I’ve been traveling the past few days, so I’m going to do a linkdump to catch up:
OpenBSD has an interesting mergemaster replacement, sysmerge. I’ve never seen a final answer on if DragonFly needs some sort of merging tool or not.
Nominations for the 2008 Open Source Awards are now possible. (Via)
ScummC is a tool for creating ScummVM adventures, another one of those things that people of a certain age look on fondly. (via)
The first issue of BSD Magazine is out, and Dru Lavigne has a list of the contents.
OSNews.com has an article highlighting some interesting projects among the various Google Summer of code proposals. First on the list? DragonFly’s LiveCD project. (via Matthias Schmidt on IRC)
The 1.12.2 release is out; check the download page and the errata page for details on the changes that went into this minor release.
Jeremy C. Reed, on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list, has proposed a ‘upstream’ pkgsrc hackathon. This would be specifically to construct patches to submit to the vendors of given pkgsrc packages, so that the changes would no longer have to be maintained in pkgsrc. This is a good idea; please jump in if you want to help with DragonFly-specific changes, or if you have access to some of those upstream vendors.
We have 7 accepted projects in the Google Summer of Code; the full list is available at the Google site, with links to each proposal.
We’re now in the Community Bonding Period; time for us to get to know each other. Please welcome your new student codevelopers; we should be hearing a lot from them over the next few months.
I have a collection of small things I’ve been meaning to link; here they all are in a post.
Waxy.org has the details about the never-published sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game (original playable as Java or as Flash), taken from a backup drive circa 1989; readers of a certain age will appreciate the historic Infocom details, and the page includes (for those with Java) a somewhat playable version of the sequel, Milliways. Waxy also had a link to a history of Interactive Fiction, for those who aren’t as familiar, or if you want to know why Infocom is important. It’s not hard to draw a line from these early games to the LucasArts adventure games and other later variations, like my personal favorite.
Seeing this CPAN search trick for the search bar in FireFox reminds me of something linked to by Hubert Feyrer some time ago: a pkgsrc.se search plugin, so that instead of trawling your /usr/pkgsrc via the command line, you can search through the just-as-fast-but-prettier pkgsrc.se pages for package details.
This undeadly.org article highlights an interesting tool called pkg_mgr; it’s designed to work with OpenBSD ports, but it’d be nice (and I assume not too difficult) to have it work with pkgsrc.
Someday, are we going to be nostalgic for the old default-font no-image open source software web pages? Everyone seems to be getting into making it pretty.
Dru Lavigne’s latest blog post has even more links to click; I’ll draw attention to two of them: the prescient 1967 article “The National Data Center and Personal Privacy“, and OpenSourceHowTo.org.
I’ve added the various BSD-related links from an earlier story over on the sidebar to this site. If you have more suggestions for BSD-related site, please tell me at justin@shiningsilence.com, or in the comments.
Aggelos Economopoulos has volunteered himself and his diploma project for getting the DragonFly network stack out from under the Big Giant Lock. This benefits everyone. He plans to post a preliminary roadmap soon.
Peter Avalos committed two OpenSSH fixes (CVE-2008-1483 and CVE-2008-1657); there’s enough of these little changes that 1.12.2 is going to be released tomorrow.
Apparently, with a simple plugin, it’s possible to telnet to your FireFox browser and issue Javascript commands. (Via) Is FireFox becoming the Emacs Operating System of this century?
Peter Avalos has updated bzip2 to version 1.0.5, which fixes the Denial of Service issue described in CVE-2008-1372.
BSDTalk 147 is out, with an 16-minute interview of Alexander Motin.
I’ve put a page on the DragonFly wiki describing my procedure for building all the packages in pkgsrc using Joerg Sonnenberger’s tool ‘pbulk‘. Suggestions are welcome.
Matthew Dillon posted a HEADS UP: that the vm_page structure has changed. This will probably not affect you unless you are working in the kernel. He didn’t specify in the message, but it’s probably a good idea to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if you’re running bleeding edge code.