OnlineDirect has a new DragonFly mirror up in Bulgaria; it’s hosting the official ISOs at this point.
- This Coding Horror article talks about garbage collection and happens to mention an entertaining common BSD function in shutdown.c: die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog()
- The DCBSDCon Blog has some notes on the facilities – there will be wireless, and Jason Dixon will be giving his “BSD Is Dying” talk, too.
- An hour of Marshall Kirk McKusick’s FreeBSD kernel class (based on his book) is available now on Youtube. (via) Plus, more videos on other open source topics at the FOSSLC. (via)
- This new column on GameSetWatch, The Amateur, titled “Why You Should Pay for Free“, gets into free software (like BSD) from a giveaway gaming point of view (not like BSD). It’s an interesting take.
- ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack is a new Rock, Paper, Shotgun article about playing a tiled roguelike, and quite enjoyable to read. Check the comments for some interesting links.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to fix problems with memory alignment when doing tasks like burning optical media. Try it if you’ve had this problem, or wait, as it will probably be committed soon.
For those of you thinking of installing DragonFly on a EeePC 901, Christopher Rawnsley tried, with some booting problems. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has an easy fix, however.
pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has a set of packages for pkgsrc 2008Q4 on DragonFly 2.0.1. The bulk build was started after the freeze for 2008Q4 but before the actual branch was released, so it’s not exactly the 2008Q4 release, but it’s pretty close. It’ll be updated as soon as the next build completes. Please, use a mirror as soon as they update.
For those going to DCBSDCon but not yet having rooms to sleep in, a cheaper Days Inn has been found a few metro stops away from the convention.
(Hotel costs kept me from making it to NYCBSDCon, for instance.)
Dmitry Komissaroffis doing a very useful thing and producing code to support more ACPI stuff – specifically, HPET timers, the mysterious Smart Battery, and Asus systems.
Hasso Tepper is looking for other people with experience and/or interest in porting FreeBSD’s mmc(4) support for SD cards greater than 2G in size. Contact him is that describes you.
The 2008Q4 release of pkgsrc is out, with a number of improvements: pulseaudio, OpenOffice 3, and perl 5.10, among other things. The announcement mentions using audit-packages and pkgsurvey, too.
There’s a build of pkgsrc from just before the 2008Q4 ‘freeze’ finishing now on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; a build will happen soon. Hasso Tepper noted a higher failure rate in package building for that release…
Peter Avalos has committed a new version of OpenSSL – 0.9.8j. (New version caused by a recent security issue.) Also, the vendor branches are no longer versioned, since git has made that unneccesary.
I have a number of items that are all going to get posted together:
- Antonio Huete Jimenez has a binary build of pkgsrc 2008Q3 for DragonFly 2.1.
- Michael Neumann has integrated his “USB stick image integration” code; check the commit message for notes.
- Matthias Schmidt has added IPv6 support to dntpd(8).
Some extra reading: Hasso Tepper posted a link to an article talking about non-uniform memory access (NUMA). Any article that can have diagrams labeled ‘hypercubes’ must be worthwhile.
Google’s planning a Summer of Code again for 2009, according to the still-running mailing lists from last year’s SoC event. More will be announced at FOSDEM.
DragonFly may or may not be participating; it’s dependent on the application process same as every year. If you’re a student, start thinking about what to do, now.
Michael Neumann came up with an interesting script that creates a bootable DragonFly USB drive. This makes it possible to boot up and install on a netbook that lacks a normal CDROM, for instance.
The DCBSDCon Blog announces the last 3 speakers at DCBSDCon:George Neville-Neil, one of the authors of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Ken Caruso of SchmooCon Labs, and our very own Robert Luciani, talking about DragonFly and threading.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. (via) Dru Lavigne posted a list of the contents, earlier.
The bleeding edge version of DragonFly broke for a short while on Tuesday night. It was quickly fixed; I’m linking to it because Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s explanation of his fix is interesting.
Sascha Wildner posted a clarification: ISA and EISA support in any card will be dropped after the 2.2 release is out.
The hotel discount for DCBSDCon 2009 expires this Friday, so now is a good time to register. Registrations for the convention itself closes at the end of this month.
Also, Kurt Miller will be talking at DCBSDCon about his work in OpenBSD on Position Independent Executables.
Michael Neumann brought up the idea of using C++ in kernel programming, which has been suggested before. Reactions were generally negative, but there would be some possibilities.