Peter Avalos has updated ftp in DragonFly. It’s actually tnftp, which is the same base ftp client used in FreeBSD/NetBSD/Mac OS X/etc. It’s the 20121224 version, and the 3.4 release branch has it too.
The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)
If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)
We’re accepted! The application requirements, etc. will be up on the Google Summer of Code site as soon as I can fill out the forms.
It’s a week past Easter and I’m actually tired of eating chocolate. I never thought I’d say that.
- On fat men and jellybeans, about how the press is reporting DDOS attacks. Related: Reporting on tech stories is very difficult; there’s very little photogenic material. I’d love to have more pictures on the Digest, but what would I show?
- Lisp: A Language for Stratified Design. (PDF) There’s got to be a few readers that will find this a very enjoyable read. (via)
- If you’re using Google Chrome, check your extensions list. Even though it’s not supposed to be possible, I had an spyware extension auto-install itself, from a page that I was going to link here – but now will not.
- Music From Mathematics. Electronic music created with an IBM 7090. (via)
- At first I was like “Yeah, yeah, another terminal emulator”, but then I watched the demo movie for Terminology and was quite impressed. It doesn’t seem to exist in dports/pkgsrc yet. (also via)
- April 1st always leads to a number of announcements of varying quality. I like OpenBSD’s announcement, though.
- The Untold Story behind Apple’s $13000 Operating System. The article hypes up something that wasn’t that exciting, but I like the pictures of the old Apple ][ material. (via)
- Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me To Use Vim Was Wrong. Spoiler: he uses Vim. But: The author makes a very good point about how to get there. (via)
- How the Chess Set Got Its Look and Feel.
- HOWTO turn your shell prompt into a hamburger. The advice is for a Unicode-friendly Mac shell; don’t know if this works on DragonFly. (via)
- Start talking about nail polish, finish by talking about the limited 16-color palette of early PC computers. (via)
- Hello World cake. Based on a programming language called Chef where programs look like recipes. I can’t even make these things up. (via)
- Dragonflies are Monsters.
Your unrelated link of the week: nothing. I didn’t find anything off-the-wall enough to use here. Geez.
It looks like Postgres versions less than 9.0 are going to be removed from pkgsrc soon. Be ready to update, if you are running one of those extremely older editions.
The upcoming DragonFly 3.4 release will not include the USB4BSD port from Markus Pfeiffer; he’s hoping for it to become default in the next release after 3.4.
You can still try it, as it’s present in DragonFly but not on by default. Help with driver porting is always welcome, of course.
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin has put together a new site, bxr.su. His announcement to users@ goes into a lot of detail, but here’s a preview: it’s an OpenGrok site that has a forked version of OpenGrok that’s both speedy and takes BSD into account, along with other nice features.
Here’s the catch: it’s currently IPv6 only. IPv4 will be on as a test just today, and on for good shortly after. Read that announcement I mentioned for details.
John Marino has posted about the state of dports: over 19500 ports built, build logs available, and patches to add even more can be sent through github. XFCE4, KDE3, and KDE4 are building, though he could use some help with GNOME2.
Man, I’m stretching it to make that “Over nine thousand!” joke, now.
If you have a DragonFly 3.2 system and you want to try the 3.4 release candidate, you can delete your local source, edit the Makefile to pull down 3.4 instead of 3.2, and run it.
cd /usr
rm -rf src
vi /usr/Makefile;
(in vi) :%s/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_2/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4/g
(save, quit vi)
make src-create-shallow
… then proceed to make buildworld and so on, as normal.
The caveats: I haven’t tested this yet, and this assumes you don’t have any local changes in /usr/src that you want to save. The usual warnings about lighting your computer on fire, etc., apply.
The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.
If you have a mfi(4) device – in other words, a LSI MegaRAID SAS driver – you can now see/import/clear/etc. foreign configurations, thanks to this commit from Sascha Wildner, tested by Francois Tigeot, and originally from FreeBSD.
For the confused, ‘foreign’ means any disk hooked to a RAID controller that isn’t part of a configuration the RAID device already knows about. A replacement disk, or more worryingly, a good disk gone bad/unrecognizable. (I’ve had both.)
If you have an ath(4), wpi(4) or iwi(4) wireless network link, and you’re running DragonFly-master, please update. Sepherosa Ziehau has pushed Johannes Hoffman’s wlan_serialize branch, which means bringing up wlan0 is a bit easier – and less crashy.
It needs to be tested for wpi(4) and iwi(4), however, so if you have success or failure with those devices, please say so in reply.
(new post category starting now: “Please test”)
DragonFly 3.4 is branched – as a release candidate, with the current target for 3.4.0 release as the weekend of April 13-14. See the tagging commit note for a list of all the commit messages.
Note that in previous releases, we tagged “x.y.0” on branch, and “x.y.1” on release. I’m now tagging “x.y.0rc” for the release candidate at branch time, and we’ll tag with a more normal (to my ears) “x.y.0” for the release.
If you build a 3.4.0rc image right now, you’ll get an older quarterly release of pkgsrc. That’ll be changed tomorrow as the DragonFly pkgsrc git source is updated and I change where 3.4’s /usr/Makefile points.
The 2013Q1 branch of pkgsrc has been announced. Along with the normal quarterly material, there’s several notes: preliminary Cygwin support is present, ruby 1.8 will be retired in favor of 1.9 after this release, and the pkgsrc.org web page now has a very nice new look and logo.
I plan to branch DragonFly 3.4 very soon, and that version will have 2013Q1 as default.
Update: The 2013Q1 branch should be available by tomorrow on DragonFly’s git; the repository needs to update and convert from NetBSD’s CVS and that takes a little time. I’ll post when it’s ready.
I hope you like reading; there’s some very meaty links this week. Go get a cup of tea and settle in. You drink tea, don’t you? You ought to.
- Reading about KDE’s repository near-meltdown makes me think we need more checks for DragonFly. We have the advantage of Hammer, of course, which would help in the same way that the linked article names ZFS as a ‘fix’. (via multiple places)
- We know that Apple will reject apps it disagrees with. Google also will do so. Has there ever been a program rejected from pkgsrc or (FreeBSD/OpenBSD) ports on content grounds? Not that I know of – anyone remember differently? I’d argue that’s a favorable point for the BSD packaging systems, though it may just be that no application has tested those boundaries yet.
- Portscanning all IPv4 addresses on the planet. Possibly the largest distributed effort ever? The detail in the maps and returned services is especially interesting. (via)
- Scale Fail, a Youtube video of a 2011 talk about screwing up your services. Mostly about the humor, but the underlying points are valid. (via #dragonflybsd IRC)
- There’s still improvement possible to fsck, apparently based on this. That’s UFS2 fsck.
- What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? A very thorough explanation of verbs, marks, and registers. Holy cow, I wish I had known about ‘: … v’ before. It’s long, but worth it. (via)
- Matthew Garret’s description of Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot with UEFI, (via a coworker who went to Libreplanet 2013). I’m still not sure what DragonFly will need to do about this.
- I missed mentioning this earlier: 20 years of NetBSD. We’re coming up on 10 soon.
- Dragonfly drones. Unrelated except for name.
- That guy who starts to froth madly every time BSD is mentioned on Phoronix is still there (see comments).
- Mainframe computer supercut. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter asked people for their lists of webcomics that could go in a ‘Hall of Fame’. The resulting list is a lot of really, really good material. Go use up a few hours reading.
I saw this Hacker News post and figured I should emphasize: pkgsrc is still going to be available in the 3.4 release of DragonFly; we’re not suddenly switching to dports. I don’t want anyone to think they’re going to have to rip out all their packages and go to a new, untried system, all at once.
If you were thinking, “Hey, I’d like to try an early version of DragonFly 3.4 before it’s released”, I’ll just point you at the recent daily snapshots of 3.3. These are close enough to a release candidate, I think.
The next release of DragonFly will be 3.4, and it’s probably going to be mid-April.
EuroBSDCon 2013 is being held in Malta at the end of September, and the Call for Papers has just gone out. BSDCan 2013, which is the tenth BSDCan (!) and happening in May, just opened up registration. Same for PGCon.
OpenGrok is a source browser that I have not used extensively, but many people say is a great tool. The same people say it’s difficult to run. Zafer Aydogan just posted that DragonFly’s source is available now from his perfectly-functional OpenGrok installation.
(I’ll put it in the links sidebar here, too.)