A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The April 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is all about FreeNAS. I mean, every article is FreeNAS related. If you’re curious about the product, this is the place to start. (The magazine is also now available in ePub format in addition to PDF.)
Does FreeNAS count as another BSD flavor, rather than an appliance? I’m not sure.
Now’s the time to put in your application for Summer of Code projects, if you’re a student. The application period runs until May 3rd. There’s already been some proposals on the mailing lists; now they can be put in officially.
I’ll point out the last link is from a returning GSoC student, and has a lot of detail; use that as an example if you’re thinking about your own application.
I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades. Time to move to 64-bit! Anyway, lots of links this week. These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…
Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out. If you liked those links, you know what to do next.
If you administer one of the DragonFly mirrors, there’s a new /dports directory that can be mirrored. See that second link for details.
Ivan Uemlianin expressed a desire to read about the boot process, and how BSD works in general. I made a short list of suggestions.
Peter N. M. Hansteen has a long writeup about using and creating ports on OpenBSD, which is apparently a reprint of an article he wrote for BSD Magazine back in 2008. I don’t remember if I read it, so it’s new to me, in any case. Port and package creation across the BSDs is juuuust close enough that reading about one version will leave you with a good guess about the others.
BSDCan 2013, which is happening in a few weeks, is going to have a “Documentation Lounge“, which is essentially a docs sprint, but with a much more relaxed-sounding name. Anyway, it’s a good thing to contribute to.
John Marino published a ‘cheatsheet‘ (also, typo fix)for DragonFly 3.5 users who want to try dports, using DragonFly 3.4 packages.
John Marino has a concise explanation of why dports mostly uses gcc 4.4 still to compile, even if you’re building DragonFly itself with the default 4.7. It’s a reason to not use NO_GCC44 – yet.
Eric Radman sent along a plug for a utility he is working on called entr(1). The desciption is “Run arbitrary commands when files change.” The site for it has several nifty examples – run make when *.c files change, or convert Markdown files to HTML as soon as they are modified. The really nice thing about it is that it’s perfectly BSD-friendly, and uses kqueue, but will also work on Linux. This beats the “This runs on the one flavor of Linux I use, in one particular shell!” approach I’ve seen from some other developers. See the reddit discussion of it for comparisons to inotify. No, it’s not in pkgsrc/ports yet.
Update: And thanks to Thomas Klausner, it’s in pkgsrc as sysutils/entr, and in ports as sysutils/entr thanks to Eitan Adler. You have no reason not to try it now.
This is interesting: Verisign is sponsoring a new BSD convention (PDF link) in October, in Dulles, Virginia, USA. Apparently the use of BSD systems at the company is increasing, and they want to host something for it. The pkgNG presentation may be very interesting for DragonFly users. See the announcement. A new convention to support increased BSD uptake is really a nice surprise.
NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge is this weekend, 4/20/2013. Fancy as it sounds, it’s really a single-day hackathon around open software and hardware, with the problems to fix coming from NASA and therefore probably very unique. It’s happening in a bunch of places around the world, but there’s one right here in my town.
Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.
We are very close to the next release. As always, it comes down to building third-party software. Lots of material here to read, until then.
Your unrelated link of the week: A bunch of monster models, all taken at a convention called Monsterpalooza. A bit grody, but still some very good construction work. (via)
Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:
I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.
DPorts is based off of FreeBSD’s ports, but it’s possible to add software packages to it that don’t exist in FreeBSD’s ports system and have them build as any other packages. This is briefly detailed in this GitHub bug report, along with a number of the ports that already exist that way.
Matthew Dillon wrote a note about SSDs, HDDs, and swapcache that may be useful for anyone building a system soon. Conversations about SSDs, swapcache, and so on have happened before.
For anyone who is a student considering Google Summer of Code this year: this timeframe we’re in right now is listed by Google as time for “students discuss project ideas with mentoring organizations”. This is the perfect time to find out what the people in an organization are like, and get early feedback on your project ideas.
Chances are, if you’re submitting a proposal for an idea from an org’s project list, you’re one of a number of students all trying for the same thing. The best way to get accepted instead of any other applicant is to be the person they already know.
BSDTalk 244 is Marshall Kirk McKusick and George Neville-Neil talking about the FreeBSD Foundation, for a generous half-hour.
The very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD (2nd edition), signed by Michael W. Lucas, is being auctioned off in a charity event for OpenBSD. There’s 5 days left to bid, though the price is already somewhere north of $2 per page.