Month: May 2008

James Frazer sent along a new site design for dragonflybsd.org; I've got an example of it hosted locally. Mailing list discussion starts here, and of course comments are welcome.

NASPRO, a sound processing framework, recently had a 0.1.0 release - it works 'out of the box' on DragonFly.

BSDTalk 151 has Sean Cody of Frantic Films, a visual effects studio spread over the North American continent, who details his use of BSD at home and at the office.  They apparently sling about a huge amount of data.

Vkernels on leaf.dragonflybsd.org are now able to locally network; if you are a Google Summer of Code student that needs that functionality, tell Matthew Dillon and he will put you in the right group. In addition, he's created a new tool called vknetd, which enables network creation in userland. This is intended for userland applications like vkernels, though there seems to be some capability for a SSH-based VPN? Someone correct me - or better yet, try it out.

I have a number of small things, mostly old-school games, to post, so I'll break out the bullets:

• Temple of the Roguelike has some links to roguelike applets; they need Java.
• Rob Beschizza asks on Boing Boing Gadgets, "Who'd like a portable text game console?" Me? Of course, running a BSD on a handheld (NetBSD is the most obvious choice) will get you that free.
• Parchment, a z-machine implemented in Javascript. You can play many free text games or dig up Infocom games. (via)
• Everyone has Big Kernel Lock troubles - everyone!
• The howling void has a post on "Smartphones for text SSH use" - an interesting idea, and there are some good suggestions interspersed with the bickering in the comments.
• Hubert Feyrer found an interesting thing: DracoPKG - a combination of pkgsrc and Slackware's pkgtools.

There's a bounty for fixing up the Linuxulator; bringing it up to match FreeBSD-current's state will net you €250. If you want to contribute to the bounty, write your sum into the page. If you want to do the update, volunteer. (There's already one interested person.)

As Dru Lavigne reports, the May issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on "Enterprise Readness". I found the article on the need for project management in open source very interesting.

DragonFly hasn't worked under VirtualBox for a long time. Several people found a cause, though not the reason for it - yet.

This question at the howling void about donating to open source projects (in this case, DesktopBSD) got me thinking. I've been meaning to investigate setting up a DragonFly nonprofit similar to FreeBSD and NetBSD's foundation efforts, in order to receive donations and have a legal entity. Anyone have experience with setting up a 501(c)3 company?

Christian Sturm put together a DragonFly mirror stats script; the script connects to and graphs the how reachable each mirror site is. Nifty!

Louisa Luciani, one of the Google Summer of Code students for DragonFly, wants to hear what people want on a LiveCD. Suggestions by email, please, though some discussion ensued anyway. Nirmal Thacker, another SoC student, asked some questions to prepare for his anticipatory scheduler work, which incidentally led to some good links for comparing or reviewing existing FreeBSD/DragonFly code.

Some notes from BSDCan attendees have popped up. There's pictures, too. Any other stories?

BSDTalk has made it to the semicentennial milestone of 150 podcasts, with number 150 being Alex Feldman from Sangoma.

Everybody welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Michael Neumann.

I'm breaking out the bullet points again:

• The NetBSD on a Stick idea looks interesting, in part because it's a complete tiny system and in part because I like the name. (Via)
• The most recent @Play column draws a line between roguelike games and Dungeons and Dragons. Fun reading, if you're the right kind of geek, or even just the right age. I think I might have to play me some Angband again.
• Oh, while talking about roguelikes: this Strafe Left cartoon. I like "sleeping zombie".
• Also, this Procedural Content Generation wiki from an Angband variant creator. (via)
• Wow, that's a nice gift for Perl development! (via)

It's from back in March, but this Ars Technica article on filesystems does a pretty good job of historical coverage, though it's doesn't go very far into the technical specifications.