BSDCan 2010, coming up the 13th-14th of May, has put out the call for papers. The website says proposals start December 19th, but I suppose that's just the day you start handing them in.
BSDTalk episode 180 is a 25-minute conversation with Girish Venkatachalam about ... stuff. (I am posting before listening.)
Thunderbird, in pkgsrc, has been updated to version 3. This means that if you don't want to make the upgrade right yet, you'll want to follow mail/thunderbird2. This won't affect binary package users until the next quarterly release.
Alex Hornung pointed out that getting the Linux Test Project to work on DragonFly (using the linuxulator) would be a very helpful step in that same Linux emulation. Running the LTP does not require programming skills, incidentally.
Updated pkgsrc-2009Q3 packages for DragonFly 2.5, for i386 and for x86_64 are available.
Welcome DragonFly's newest developer with commit access: Antonio Huete Jimenez, also known as 'tuxillo' on EFNet #dragonflybsd via IRC.
Jon Birrell, a contributor to a number of BSD projects (primarily FreeBSD), has died. His friend and coworker Craig Rodrigues has posted a notice about his death, along with some memories. It's always awful when someone dies, but it always strikes me about how when an open source contributor dies, it's noticed, quietly, worldwide.
That's a mouthful, isn't it? There's a fresh build of pkgsrc packages for 32-bit DragonFly 2.4, from pkgsrc-2009Q3, on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Utilities like pkg_radd should find it automatically. New builds for i386 2.5 and 64-bit 2.5 are on the way. (though pkgsrc packages built on 2.4 should work fine on 2.5.)
I like linkblogging, especially because there's been a lot of good stuff floating about:
- Matthew Dillon detailed some of the problems he had using hardlinks to create backups - problems Hammer solves.
- The History of the Internet in a Nutshell: pretty good, though it says Unix "influenced" Linux and FreeBSD. Influenced is right for Linux, but there's parts of the different BSDs that are from UNIX directly.
- From O'Reilly: The War for the Web. The walled garden that failed in the long run for Compuserve and AOL and so on is being resurrected. (via)
- Along the same lines: The Death of the URL.
Thomas Nikolajsen came up with some ideas for making the configuration files for a given Hammer volume accessible, even when that volume is being presented over NFS. He's looking for more ideas.
SSH, on DragonFly, now defaults to allowing root logins, but does not allow plaintext password logins. This is on new installs only, so any existing installations won't be affected, even after upgrades. Plaintext passwords are under constant brute-force attack for some years now, so this is probably safer.
YONETANI Tomokazu wrote up a nice bit of explanation about compiling src and pkgsrc as non-root. He even explicitly names some useful variables to set.
Several people have been working on having DragonFly compile with clang. Alex Hornung's updated the clang page on the DragonFly site for details; if this interests you, a conversation on EFNet #dragonflybsd may be in order.
Sascha Wildner has added pkgin to the base DragonFly system. It's still present as a pkgsrc package, so it's manageable and upgradeable with the normal pkg_* tools. See prior discussion here for the history.
Did I already make that joke? Oh well. less has been updated to version 4.3.6 from a patch by Jan Lentfer.
Linkbloggy, briefly:
- A view of Bell Labs, where that other Unix flavor came from, in the 1960s. (via) Best sideburns ever.
- IRC, as explained by American prime time television. (YouToooob, via) Remember, #dragonflybsd is available on EFNet.
- Stallman, Torvalds, and Knuth walk into a bar... (via)
The National Center for the History of Electronic Games is looking for tangible artifacts having to do with old text-based games, like Adventure or Zork. The article includes some history, too.
(This place is in my town, and it's eye-bleedingly awesome. I predict that a few years from now, when people realize what this is, it will become a game history Mecca along the lines of PAX.)
This blog post from Peteris Krumins lists all the publicly available Introduction to Algorithms lectures from MIT, and links to his summary for each, so you can find out what it's like before investing in over an hour of lecture. Very specific but very valuable stuff.