I had a conversation with a coworker today about what phone to buy, and I thought about this: iPhones are pretty, but you don’t get to own your software or fully choose what to run. This developer’s blog entry sums up all the things you can’t do with Apple’s App Store, and by doing so manages to describe the opposite of open source. (via, I think) The point I’m making: BSD licensing is more valuable than you think.
The latest BSDTalk (actually from August 18th – I’m still catching up) has Isaac Levy and Steven Kreuzer talking about NYCBSDCon 2008, coming up October 11-12. It’s 15 minutes total.
Sorry about a week without posts! I was in the wilds of Canada and without any Internet access, for probably the longest period for me since 1995. It was weird. Regular posts resume tomorrow.
One link to describe the pain of creating with software/the web, and one link that will make you want to keep doing it.
(Culled from other blog’s posts – sorry, lost original entries!)
Dru Lavigne has posted another set of BSD links, and something I wouldn’t expect: a video presentation (Youtube) of the table of contents to the July Open Source Business Resource.
Max Lindner posted a status update and a detailed followup on his Summer of Code project, dma(8). Matthias Schmidt asked for more DMA testing; it’s worth trying if you don’t care for Sendmail.
Matthew Dillon has posted an update for the 9th on the state of Hammer. The next big question: should the Hammer code for porter be stored in Subversion or Git?
Also: Nothing earth shattering, but this post on users@ has some details on Hammer usage and how it works with large files and with backups in general.
A recent commit from Matthew Dillon enables use of at least a terabyte of swap space. Is there anyone who can actually use that much yet? Swap is traditionally 2x available memory, so that would make for 500 gigabytes of RAM. I don’t think that’s even workable, though you’d be able to build up a heck of a MFS.
Steve O’Hara-Smith found that DVD playback didn’t work unless compiling with gcc34. Matthew Dillon’s implemented a possible fix.
Aggelos Economopoulos is looking for feedback for his NetMP (meaning giant lock removal from the network stack) work.
In a similar vein, Sepherosa Ziehau has committed the first stage of the first step of his parallelization of ipfw(4).
(Thanks to Sascha Wildner for the man page correction)
Antonio Huete Jimenez has created a DragonFly Facebook group; join up, if you’re a Facebook user.
(Update: fixed the accidentally Anglicized name – sorry!)
Louisa Luciani has put up a website for her Google Summer of Code LiveDVD project. (Work history is also available.)
Caveat: I don’t know if it’s done yet, as the work period for GSoC projects is not quite over.
Today is one of those dates that’s fun to type. Anyway!
- KernelTrap has a summarization of the recent Tux3/Hammer discussion between Matthew Dillon and Daniel Phillips. Read for the summary, stay for the mind-boggling filesystem design detail.
- Philip Paeps has a note on his blog on how to use one-time passwords, good for when you are traveling and know you won’t be connecting from secure locations. He does it on FreeBSD, but it works on DragonFly too. (update: site seems to be down. Darn. Look at opiepasswd(1) in the meantime.)
- This article titled “Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)” talks about how people generally don’t mind copying; what makes them mad is attribution. e.g. Someone copying your works doesn’t bother people unless the copier claims the work is his or her own. This is not an unfamiliar concept, folks. (via)
There’s something there being updated, though it just has the old icon and what looks like a default PHPNuke-ish interface. Hopefully some authorial voice will arise.
Samuel J. Greear started a new topic on kernel@: what Revision Control System should DragonFly move to, based on needs. This is a subject that can lead to lots of bikeshedding, but it has stayed pretty calm so far.
Also, ideas from me: packaging pkgsrc into releases, and zipping the release ISO.
As part of a larger discussion about PXE booting, Pedro F. Giffuni pointed at a Google Summer of Code project for FreeBSD, titled “http support for PXE“. This would be very convenient.
Matthew Dillon’s latest Hammer update, among other things, brings news of a Hammer mailing list specifically for people working on porting Hammer to other systems.
Matthew Dillon is planning for the most recent minor bugfixes for Hammer to go in Wednesday; they will also be merged to the 2.0 branch.
With all these updates going in, a 2.0.1 release, sometime soon, appears likely.
The 2008Q2 pkgsrc bulk build pn pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has been redone; it should flow out to the mirrors normally.
These linkdumps are really kind of fun to do:
- Star Trek, the console game, from BASIC to C#. I knew the game was old, but not that it originated from 1971. A version is on your system right now, probably. (via)
- This week’s @Play column talks about modeling player motion in roguelike games.
- Hopefully, this report (among others) makes me sound a little less crazy when I say “You should be able to choose what software you can use, on hardware you own.” is one of the reasons for open source.