Note that it’s branched, not released. I’m building and uploading binary pkgsrc packages for it now, and hope to have a ‘release candidate’ very soon. This is the prep work before the release, really. There’s a catchall ticket for tracking remaining work.
There’s a whopping 250 euro bounty up now on the DragonFly Code Bounties page. It’s for supporting the newer Intel video chipsets, and there’s already examples in FreeBSD to start with.
(David Shao, where are you? If you’re reading this, hop into #dragonflybsd and tell us how things are going with your GEM/KMS work)
I even have some comedy in here this week.
- Here’s some interesting ideas on improving the standard terminal window. (via)
- Hey, a Windows Phone application that aggregates BSD news! Including this one, I think. No way to test it because Windows Phones are rarer than hen’s teeth.
- This article about Bruce Perens has some good quotes in it – especially the Mark Shuttleworth one. (via)
- I think these computers all predate the integrated circuit. (via)
- How Google Code Search Worked. (via)
- The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing. (via) I don’t think the numbers used are accurate, but the trend is correct: a lot more people are computing through devices that are “walled gardens”, where they can’t install what they want.
- The App Store Guide – Take Two. It boils down to: Curated information on what programs to run is very useful. Someone could do this with pkgsrc or ports, easily. pkgsrc.se is sorta there, but not really with any sort of authorial voice.
- Variable typing can be surprisingly funny. (via) The final punchline is great but may not make sense unless you’ve seen where it comes from.
- Network jokes are the bestest jokes. (via)
Your unrelated comics link for the week: Tom Neely‘s Doppelganger. Page 11 is my favoritest.
Another unrelated thing: David Shao, are you out there? Can you get on IRC (EFNet #dragonflybsd) and help some people out with GEM/KMS questions? Nobody’s been able to find you.
I’m going to have at least 1 book review up next week, 2 if I can make it. I’ve done this several times now, so I’ve added a ‘Book review’ category so that they all can be found together.
‘Live dedup’, where a DragonFly system makes a deduplicative reference to copied data instead of actually copying the data, is now off by default. There’s no definite issue linked to it yet that I know of, but it never hurts to be careful just before a release.
John Marino has added support for RELRO in DragonFly, which makes it the first BSD to have it. That’s great news! What is it? Apparently a guard against memory corruption or overflow in the linker. His commit message gives better details.
Matthias Schmidt found a discussion about DragonFly’s password encryption. The result, if I am reading it correctly, is that brute-forcing the password from available hashes is quicker than it should be. Matthias also found a contributed fix. Samuel Greear updated to match the reference SHA implementation also in Linux, with this very pertinent warning.
If you liked KDE3, you may like Trinity. Matthias Drochner would like you to help get it in pkgsrc.
Matthew Dillon has a very detailed commit message with changes to make sure Hammer will run overnight cleanups in situations as low as 256M of RAM. I think you can find that much RAM in breakfast cereal boxes these days.
The answer is “not very”. As I wrote in a post to kernel@, DragonFly 3.0 will be tagged soon, and released when there’s pkgsrc-2011Q4 packages to go with it. Probably a week if everything goes to plan.
Chris Turner reports success building JDK 1.6 on DragonFly x86_64, though it requires a bit of fiddling. Building 1.7 on x86_64 is getting closer but not yet, as far as I can tell.
If you install CUPS, or know that you will never print using lpr(1), you can make sure thatyour DragonFly system never builds lpr again by putting NO_LPR=true in /etc/make.conf.
What if you have a DragonFly system that you want to use for an wireless access point? Andrey N. Oktyabrski did, and he helpfully listed his solution.
What happens when you break enough things in DragonFly that you become a source of test cases? As Antonio Huete Jimenez (AKA “tuxillo” on IRC) found out, you get a stress test named after you.
I need to catch up on some older stuff, so here is a longer list of recent updates: libarchive to 3.0.2, xz to 5.0.3, mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) (LSI MegaRAID driver) updated, ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 AHCI devices (on motherboards I assume) updated, and the PHY ID for the Atheros F1 added. Thanks to everyone who did the work! I bet I missed something.
Getting back into the rhythm, here…
- Jeff Vogel, who is a funny and smart guy, wrote this article, essentially about crowdsourcing. It’s another way of saying “bikeshed“. Plus: D&D!
- Michael Lucas, sometimes BSD author, has a new fiction collection out. He’s working on a SSH book too.
- Hey, AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, BSDCan in May. I don’t know about EuroBSDCon or NYCBSDCon, though. Plan ahead!
- Did you know there’s a bsd.org? Very old-school: here’s a list of commands, get going.
- GNU Tar doesn’t have a man page. (via) Weird. I didn’t verify that, but I’m not sure how to.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: there’s a Freddy, and a dragonfly, but it’s not DragonFly BSD. It’s still fun though.
John Marino has pointed out, with a number of examples, that gnat-aux is the best pkgsrc-based compiler for DragonFly right now, in terms of compatibility and support. It’s certainly good news if you are an Ada programmer. He lists some interesting numbers to demonstrate this superiority, though you can’t buildworld with it yet. (gcc 4.4, on DragonFly as part of the system, will do this normally.)
Matthew Dillon has the mailarchive working again. It pulled from the NNTP version of the DragonFly mailing lists, and when NNTP broke, so did the archive. NNTP isn’t working, but at least the mailing list archive is functional.
I’m hoping to try out Mailman (with NNTP) as a replacement soon…
There’s a Youtube video showing how to set up a virtual kernel on DragonFly. I don’t think I linked to this before. (via)