The free download of the October issue of BSD Magazine is available. The theme this month is security, though of course there’s more covered.
I branched 3.2 tonight. That means 2 weeks until release, so sharpen your bug-poking sticks!
(I’m very tired and unable to think of good analogies, sorry.)
DragonFly 3.2 branches tomorrow if all goes to plan. Until then, I have a lot of reading here for you.
- Winners of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest for 2012. (via) The winning entries don’t appear to be listed yet, but you can look at previous years.
- “At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.” (via)
- This makes the D&D player in me take notice: A set of 12 sided dice that never tie. You can buy them, along with a bunch of other custom dice, right from the maker. (also via)
- “To understand the command line…” There’s some good UNIX history notes in there. Don’t hold the ‘User Friendly’ cartoon image against the author. (via)
- Dan Langille does it right when figuring out where his disk space went.
- Monthly Catonmat geek T-shirts. I know, I know, the last thing the world needs is more nerdshirts, but I like the first one on offer.
- Images to make perfectionists suffer. At first I laughed, and then I started to get irritated. (via)
- This networking change in Linux just makes me feel icky. (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
- An Interview with Brian Kernighan on C and the C Programming Language. (via)
- Statistics from 777 .vimrc files. (via) Hover your mouse over the ‘sparkline’ graphs for more information. That’s a very slick way to get more information into a small space. It also led me to this wonderful Solarized colorscheme.
- OCaml 4 will show up in pkgsrc soon.
- Bob Bagwill got DragonFly added on AlternativeTo.net.
- I link to this step by step sed explanation because I found it useful, and because it has this “perverse” example:
sed '/^g/s/g/s/g'
- The “dragonfly issue“. (thanks, Dean.)
- The Hall of Unwanted Dotcoms. Some of these are just fun to say. (via)
- 20 Years of Thinkpad. I have a Thinkpad x220 for work and I like the way it’s built far more than any other laptop I’ve dealt with.
Your unrelated link of the week: Dog Shaming. I have a parrot, rabbit, and lizard. They seem like easy, normal pets compared to some of these stories.
Cause it could be added. The new algorithm could replace SHA-2, in use now in DragonFly. SHA-2 has not been ‘broken’ yet, so it’s not an emergency… yet.
I mentioned open-sourced CDE here before, but it makes me happy to see someone planning to do a bunch of work on it that will hopefully make it upstream, and specifically include DragonFly.
David Shao posted a nice writeup of what works and what does not for DragonFly as a desktop, from pkgsrc. It actually sounds pretty good other than issues with a recent cairo update that I think affected multiple platforms.
I recreated the by-month thread and date listing from the old mailing lists, but for Mailman. It’s at lists.dragonflybsd.org.
Since the most recent branch of pkgsrc has been released, perl5 in pkgsrc has been updated to 5.16.1, and (ancient) python 2.5 has been removed.
Debian squished with DragonFly, sorta like Debian/kFreeBSD? Don’t know if it will work, but what the heck.
As I typed elsewhere, my general plan is to branch DragonFly 3.2 on the 8th, and release on the 22nd. That should give the recent scheduler and gcc work a chance to settle, and perhaps get a new version of USB support in too. It will probably be using pkgsrc-2012Q3, also, though we may not have binary i386 packages. 3.2 is shaping up to be a much more significant release than I expected.
John Marino has accomplished the difficult task of putting gcc 4.7 into DragonFly. Version 4.4 is still the default, and the older 4.1 version has been disabled. If you want to try this newer version, setting WORLD_CCVER=gcc47 will build kernel and world that way too. If you’re curious about what’s different in this version of gcc, there’s a 4.7 changelog.
Are we the only BSD with this new a version in base? I think so.
P.S.: You’ll want to do a full buildworld if you’re running DragonFly 3.1
P.P.S.: you may need to put ‘NO_GCC47=true’ in make.conf, going from IRC comments.
P.P.P.S.: Nope, now it’s fine.
Pkgsrc-2012Q3 is out, and there’s an extensive release announcement to go with it. It’s worth reading; there’s a few packages that will not be supported after this quarter’s release, and a whole lot of new ones.
The machine that runs www.dragonflybsd.org and bugs.dragonflybsd.org is currently down. While it gets figured out, Alex Hornung has a static copy of the dragonflybsd.org main website available.
It’s been an extremely busy week for me, but I still have a batch of links here.
- Thomas Klausner sent a link to some very pretty images of real dragonflies.
- Datacenter details, from Metafilter. I’ve been in places like that, and so has my brother.
- Bug report humor. (related to Ubuntu ads, previously linked here.)
- Sometimes this site/my domain gets weird spam. I got different versions of this SEO spam recently. No story here, just a thing that I’ve seen others fall for.
- Honoring Bill Moggridge. He designed the first laptop, pictured in that article. It looks like my memory of the Apple ][c, which is probably not an accident.
- It’s always nice to see mentions of DragonFly show up in Linuxish places.
- No, really. Use zsh. That’s the article’s title, not necessarily my recommendation. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas talks about logging only sudo failures. It’s mentioned in a throwaway paragraph, but he also makes the excellent security point of having a separate, inaccessible-to-most logging host.
Your unrelated link of the week: Did you know one of the original ideas was to name DragonFly “TortoiseBSD” “TurtleBSD”? Probably not the best name.
Sepherosa Ziehau has some suggestions for anyone looking for some kernel hacking. They’re mostly based around busdma(9).
dragonflybsd.org appears to be down right now so I’m linking to the MARC kernel@ post.
There’s a post on the mailing list tech-pkg@netbsd.org of currently broken packages for the next quarterly release. It’s not a lot of stuff, but if something you need is on there, don’t worry too much. If you follow the thread through its replies, there’s a lot of fixing going on.
Sascha Wildner’s added updatesfrom FreeBSD for the Areca arcmsr(4) driver; specifically for the ARC-1213, ARC-1223 and ARC-1882 models.
Remember how I pointed at BSDEvent’s collection of slides from 3 different BSD conventions? Well, now’s it is a lot more conventions. As in multiple years of convention slides.
MARC, which stands for Mailing list ARChives, has a lot of mailing lists. It now includes the DragonFly users@ list, along with the others. (It’s not linked in *BSD on the main MARC page yet, but it should be soon.) It’s worth digging through the massive, massive wall of text on that page to find a mailing list you didn’t know existed.
Google Code-In 2012 has been announced. I’m not going to be able to coordinate it for DragonFly this year… anyone want to step up?