DragonFly 3.0.2 is out, and you can update (see /usr/src/UPDATING) an existing install or download a new one. This release turns off I/O APIC when booting in a VM because it caused issues for some users.
Student applications for Google Summer of Code (and DragonFly) can now be submitted, until April 6th. Now’s your chance!
This is the week of in-depth items to look at. I hope you have some time set aside… Also, I’m doing something a little different; since Lazy Reading articles are built up over the week, I’m scheduling it for early Sunday (EST) so that you can read it in your bathrobe, drinking an astonishingly large amount of tea. Or at least that’s what I’ll be doing.
- Apparently there’s a Russian version of BSD Magazine, with a special Russian-only article. Anyone who can read it willing to tell me what it’s about?
- Did you know BSD also stands for something bike-related?
- 70 Roguelikes! The 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, just completed, has 70 games out as a result. This will keep you busy, and there’s a very good writeup on several of the games to help you pick from the options.
- 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop. (via) I link it because almost everyone, sooner or later, has used it or has used a program with a very similar tool layout. Though I suppose you could argue it all comes from MacPaint, designed by Susan Kare, who happens to have also originated Clarus the dogcow. Moof!
- Man, Apple used to really have a sense of humor, too. Maybe they still do. Companies still do funny things (caution, autoplay video), but it seems to be done with the company’s marketing image in mind these days. Also, get your ball out of my yard you darn kids etc.
- Michael Lucas is teaching a SSH class at BSDCan 2012.
- Lucas also has also disclosed numbers on his recent self-publishing venture. I love seeing numbers like this because self-publishing discussion usually brings a whole lot of biases to the table, and people come down on one side or another because of what they want it to be, not because of what it is. (Like discussions of the music industry, piracy, and software.) This is just the plain numbers. Also, Absolute OpenBSD, second edition, is definitely his next book.
- Still on ssh, This Undeadly article talks about using OpenBSD, make, and ssh to speed up research.
- 20 iconic tech sounds bound for extinction. (via) Something in there will make you feel nostalgic. I like the 8mm film noise.
- Speaking of noise, here’s Famous Sounds, mostly electronically generated or sampled. (via) I guarantee some of these will be instantly familiar even though you won’t have heard the original song.
Your unrelated link of the week: Traitor. (via) It’s a Flash space shootemup game. But dragonflies show up in one part! (to shoot.)
Matthew Dillon has posted a link to the errata for the AMD CPU bug that he found. Venkatesh Srinivas has followed with a test case for the bug.
Matthew Dillon also pointed out there’s a workaround to fix it, with no performance impact, it’s only found on revision 10h CPUs (not Bulldozer), and it’s extremely hard to duplicate. Why draw such a heavy line under that? The news of this bug rippled out through various news sites and was almost universally misreported, in a way that made it look bad for AMD without actually realistically quantifying the problem. Remember, it took 6 months just to find it – and he was looking for it!
This report from yours truly is using pkgsrc-current, so it reflects some of what will show up in pkgsrc-2012Q1. John Marino has already fixed some of the “top breakage” items, so the numbers should be even better for the next one…
It runs from now to April 6th, so nothing but bug fixes in pkgsrc until then. If you have any package fixes you needed, now’s the time to ask someone.
If you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly (meaning version 3.1), you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update. ‘make quickworld’ will appear to succeed but the kernel won’t work.
If you’re running DragonFly 3.0.x, this does not affect you.
Konrad Neuwirth is running Apache inside a jail, and getting some weird errors. Obviously I don’t know the fix, but Chris Turner knows what the settings need to be.
We have pkgsrc binaries still around for DragonFly 2.6/2.7. As I posted, I’d like to get rid of them. Would that inconvenience anyone?
We don’t have a set expiration policy. We probably should.
Carsten Mattner wrote out his notes on EFI booting on a Mac. This gets you closer to booting DragonFly on there, but I don’t think it is completely working yet.
Update: Carsten Mattner has a better summation than what I wrote.
That’s pkgsrc-2012Q1 I’m talking about. It appears KDE will jump from 4.5 (what’s there now) to 4.8, and Zope/Plone will be removed. This will make you happy or sad depending on whether you have these things installed.
If you do, acpi_hp could use some testing. Sascha Wildner just brought some improvements in for that module. I’ve seen discounted HP laptops show up in various places, recently.
I’m making sure I post this Lazy Reading on the right day. A nice full week’s worth of stuff.
- Bandwidth used when loading different web pages. (via) The largest one is also the most surprising.
- Do you have an IBM x3550? Turn ACPI off.
- The recent TCL presentation at NYCBUG is available in audio form.
- Did you want to know a lot of detail on how to do journaled soft updates in UFS? You want detail, you got it. (via, via) (Is that a repeat link? I don’t think so…)
- This is totally useful if you’re using ssh from a Windows machine.
- SSH is used as a noun and a verb, I just realized. No link, it’s just me noticing verbification.
- BSDCan 2012 registration is open. (via Michael Lucas’s Twitter feed) Conventions are awesome. You should go.
- Michael Lucas talks about book promotion with his recent book. There’s a graph, so it’s automatically great.
- Speaking of books, Modern Perl: The Book is free to download in PDF form.
- A story about _why. (via) I’m not so interested in his identity, but in what he did to get people to program.
- My git habits. (Not mine; that’s just the title.) Speaking of learning, I’ve always thought the next steps past learning the basics of anything is to then see how experienced people approach it, idiomatically.
- Why Juniper Gives Back to the FreeBSD Community. I link to this because I like what they are doing, and also because in a perfect world I would rather have a BSD-ish interface on my networking equipment than fiddle with IOS. Oh well.
- Bunnie Huang always builds neat stuff. This time it’s a Geiger counter. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Neo Scavenger. (via) It’s a game, in Flash, and in beta. If you like postapocalyptic survival, it may be for you.
BSD Magazine is looking for articles – specifically DragonFly articles, though I imagine it doesn’t have to be. I’m stretched too thin to write anything right now, but if you have something, contact them.
The freeze for the next version of pkgsrc, 2012Q1, will start March 22nd and end with the quarterly release being released on April 6th.
(I hope someone gets the joke.)
Here’s the page, with a convenient mentor application note at the bottom. That’s the next step, so if you were thinking of mentoring, now is the time.
John Marino’s updated DragonFly’s version of GCC 4.4 to 4.4.7, apparently the final version of GCC 4.4. What’s next? I imagine GCC 4.6 at some point. It’s always a fun (maybe bikeshed-ish) conversation on which compiler to install, and which to have in base.
For the curious, I recently sent a bulk build report for pkgsrc-2011Q4 to the lists. Other than ruby-193 (which is fixed in pkgsrc HEAD thanks to John Marino), we’re looking pretty good! I’m curious if KDE or Gnome could actually get installed via binary; that’s sort of an ultimate goal due to the number of packages involved.
Speaking of Ruby, the default in pkgsrc may change soon, along with some of the involved Rails packages.
If you’re trying DragonFly 3 in a virtual machine, you may have noticed some issues in booting in (for instance) Qemu. Sepherosa Ziehau committed a change that sets the sysctl hw.ioapic_enable to 0 in virtual environments. It can always be turned back on, but the recent MSI/MSI-X improvements seem to cause trouble in some virtual environment. You can also set that tunable at boot to get an initial install going.
(I haven’t had trouble in Virtualbox or VMWare, so you may or may not need this.)