Sascha Wildner is looking for the donation of a Intel Raid Controller RS25DB080. If you were able to give him access to one, or even purchase it (ow my wallet), that would greatly assist development on DragonFly.
Hey, it’s snowing here! Finally.
- I remember when fractal zooming would bring a desktop computer to its knees. Now, you can do it in a web browser. (via) This exists as a standalone application (x11/XaoS) too.
- I see content from here get splogged, from time to time, and I think that’s what’s happening here. Someone throws “BSD” into a content generator, with ads slapped on top of it? Honestly, I’m not sure what it is. (via)
- Hammer 2 work is starting, as noted earlier this week. Let’s see some details on a similar filesystem project, btrfs. (via)
- You should quit Facebook because privacy etc. you’ve heard it from me before. The arguments are getting more thorough, though.
- Here’s an article from independent game developer Jeff Vogel about serving a niche with your independent work. I like his writing, plus if you squint your eyes and sorta look at that article’s point sideways, you could construe it as relevant for BSD.
- For fun, spot the two things I mention/link to here frequently, in this somewhat hypey article about Tumblr. (via)
- An Economist article about shifting from computer to computer. I read that and realized the one computer constant for me isn’t my desktop – it’s “~”.
- If you ever played games on the Amiga, you may want to watch this movie. It’s clips from a lot of Amiga games. By a lot, I mean an hour and a half of footage total. There were some really advanced games for the time there. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Shut Up About Cats. The rest of that site’s good too.
Also! On a related link, Venkatesh Srinivas, one of the DragonFly developers, is participating in a bike ride to raise cash for the Ulman Cancer Fund. If you’d like to pledge some money, he’ll feel better as he cycles a ridiculous 4,000 miles across the US.
There’s 7 bug reports to close before releasing DragonFly 3.0. Most of them have dumps to go with them, so each one should be solvable. Please take a look if you have the time and inclination,
John Marino has added support for preinit, init, and fini arrays. DragonFly is the first BSD to do so, apparently. What are they for? I’m not sure. The commit message points to more documentation, but not simple enough for me.
There’s a Hammer 2 branch in the DragonFly git repo now, for the next generation of DragonFly’s native file system. Don’t get too excited; as Matthew Dillon explains, it won’t be operational for months, and features won’t get added until much later this year. It’s neat to see the work happening, though, and there’s a new design document to show what’s coming.
Sascha Wildner has brought in improvements to the mps(4)driver from FreeBSD. It’s for LSI Logic Fusion-MPT 2 SAS controllers, and apparently didn’t work very well… until now. Sascha’s commit message details what’s new, including RAID support that is not yet mentioned in the man page.
If you were thinking about implementing DNSSEC, Michael Lucas did it himself and wrote down his notes. You can read them and either follow along to implement it yourself, or just spectate. The one disadvantage is that it uses BIND 9.9, and I only see 9.8 and 10 in pkgsrc.
Nick Prokharau’s project for Google Summer of Code last year was “Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD”. Sascha Wildner has now committed that to DragonFly. It’s experimental, so the normal caveats apply.
Here’s several things to look at:
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube. I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk. Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.
Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.
John Marino has made it possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using GCC 4.6 in the form of gnat-aux. (We’re currently on GCC version 4.4) Note that version 4.6 isn’t included with DragonFly, so you would need to download and compile GCC 4.6 a very recent version of lang/gnat-aux, and set CCVER=gcc46 before building world and kernel to try this out.
Update: John Marino points out in comments that you need to set WORLD_CCVER, not CCVER as his original message said.
BSD Magazine for February 2012 is out, and the feature item is BSD Certification.
It’s like early spring here in the northeast US. Which would be fine if it was actually spring. I miss snow.
- An explanation of the classic UNIX hierarchy. (via thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd) I’m behind any explanation that uses the phrase “accretion disk” to describe an organization.
- Hipster BSD. If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s based on this.
- Would you like to have DNSSEC upgrading explained to you?
- Hooray for Unicode! (via)
- What Commons Do We Wish For? I was, briefly, technically, an AOL employee after the Time Warner merger in 2000. I didn’t like the notion of working for a walled garden then, and I think that’s why Facebook and other companies irk me now. Anyway, read that article for a good explanation of why that feeling is important.
Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf 2.0. A small comics publisher that has put much of their comics online to read. Their stuff on paper is worth buying too, as I have been doing for a while now.
It’s on, again! Not that there was any doubt. I need to collect potential mentor names before DragonFly can be involved, so you can guess what I’ll say next…
Edward Berger found that using a LG/Hitachi DVD drive kept him from successfully booting a DragonFly install CD. Using other manufacturers worked out fine. What causes the problem? I don’t know, but it’s worth mentioning it out loud in case someone else gets bit by it.
There’s a NetBSD Hackathon going on February 10th through 12th, mostly online. I mention this because it may have some effect on pkgsrc, used by both NetBSD and DragonFly. Hackathons for pkgsrc usually happen separately, but no harm in keeping an eye out for any positive benefits.
I’ve reviewed Michael Lucas’s book here before, so when he offered a chance to read his newest, SSH Mastery, I jumped at the chance. Michael Lucas has published a number of technical books through No Starch Press, and started wondering out loud about self-publishing. This is, I think, his first self-published technical volume.
It’s a very straightforward book. The introduction opens with a promise not to waste space showing how to compile OpenSSH in text. Chapter 2 ends with the sentence, “Now that you understand how SSH encryption works, leave the encryption settings alone.” This stripping-down of the usual tech-book explanations gives it the immediacy of extended documentation on the Internet. Not the multipage how-to articles used as vehicles for advertising, but an in-depth presentation from someone who used OpenSSH to do a number of things, and paid attention while doing it.
It’s a fun read, and there’s a good chance it covers an aspect of SSH that you didn’t know. In my case, it’s the ability to attach a command to a public key used for login. It even covers complex-but-oh-so-useful VPN setups via SSH.
If you’re looking for philosophical reasons to buy it, how about the lack of DRM?
The physical version is not available yet, but the electronic version is available at Amazon (Kindle), Barnes & Noble (Nook), or from Smashwords (every other format ever, including .txt). The Smashwords variety of formats means that you’ll be able to read it on your phone, one way or another; I’d like to see more books that way in the future.
There’s a single day between BSDCan and PGCon, May 13th. That day will be the 2012 Joint Documentation Summit. People from BSD projects and Postgres will get together to discuss documentation tools, projects, and so on. If you are going to either convention, I’d recommend visiting this too. This sort of cross-project pollination leads to good things.
ISDN support has been removed from DragonFly. It was not useful at this point, because it’s rarely used any more. It does make me feel a little sad; this was the technology everyone said was the future before cable modems and DSL were figured out.
I’m posting this because it will save someone (possibly me) an hour of aggravation someday. If you are updating Samba from version 3.0 or 3.3 to a later version, it’ll take your existing config but possibly silently break on user authentication.