Sascha Wildner has updated ndis(4), the wrapper that makes Windows network drivers usable on DragonFly, with an extensive description of what’s changed.
It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America. About time, too! I don’t like the heat. Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…
- Yet another git cheatsheet, this time for KDE. (Via TGEN on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What’s wrong with sort and how to fix it. I will enthusiastically link to any article that mentions letters like þ. (There’s others that this stupid blogging software just eats when I write out the HTML entities.)
- Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wonder if I could run some really old software. Like 4.1c BSD?” Well, today’s your lucky day.
- Creating new Linux base and infrastructure ports on FreeBSD. Interesting to see just how complex it can be.
- Distributed computing at Google. (PDF, via) I like the description of the error/failure rates and how they escalate as an architecture scales up.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday. I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.
Sascha Wildner updated time zone files again. It’s a regular thing, but I wanted to draw attention to this little change:
Samoa moves from east to west of the international date line (changes from UTC-11 to UTC+13). It will skip December 30, 2011.
2011/12/30 in Samoa will never exist or have existed, which is entirely odd.
Brills Peng has written up a nice description of his scheduler work for Google Summer of Code, with details on what it does, and how to try it out. Best of all, he plans to keep working on it!
Another batch of code has arrived from Google Summer of Code student work. In this case, it’s code from Adam Hoka’s “Implementing a mirror target for device mapper” project, committed by Alex Hornung. I think there’s potentially more to come.
Ferruccio Zamuner is doing a lightning talk about DragonFly at the sixth annual Italian Perl Workshop, September 9th in Turin, Italy. I mentioned this back in May, but now there’s a concrete date, and it’s about a week and a half away.
If DragonFly/x86_64 fails to install on your system, but DragonFly/i386 works, try again. Sepherosa Ziehau has a fix for the keyboard controller that may make x86_64 systems boot DragonFly when previously they did not.
The next release of pkgin, the binary package installer for pkgsrc, is imminent. I link to the note about this because the new features list sounds good, including a significant speedup.
This week has taught me one thing for sure: Always make sure your backup generator is working. And over-plan battery capacity. That’s actually two things, but what the heck. I’m tired, for reasons that can probably be inferred! I’m not the only one suffering these problems, it seems.
- There is a certain subset of readers here that will find this fascinating: a video of a game postmortem. Specifically, Elite. (via) Needs Flash.
- This is as good an article as any I’ve seen describing where the tablet computer market is going, at The Economist.
- Remember RetroBSD, mentioned here previously? Here’s some discussion of it.
- EuroBSDCon’s 2011 conference is open for registration, but the early bird discount only lasts until the end of August, so jump on it soon if you’re thinking of going. It’s the 10th anniversary of the event!
- PHP 5.3 is coming to pkgsrc as default, soon? The PHP 5.2 -> 5.3 transition seems to mess up a lot of code because of some changes in the way things are handled, or at least that’s my experience, so watch out.
- Make sure you aren’t running mod_deflate on your Apache 2.x server.
- Kristaps Dzonsons, the fellow behind mdocml (which is in DragonFly now and mentioned here before) is working on a mdoc manual. It’s an actual book, with examples. It’s titled “Practical UNIX Manuals: mdoc”, which sounds like part of a series, though I don’t know if there’s anything else. I’d sure like it if there was. (via Undeadly.) Look very closely at the mdoc web page and you will see the markup, too. Neat!
- Breakout treated as a musical instrument, in 1983. That’s too glib a summary of this explanation of an old book studying the game Breakout and playing it. Really, read the article, and remember that the book described would just be lost in a sea of
blog postsnoise today. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella. This is the comic that ruined Batman for me. I can’t unthink it.
Google Summer of Code for 2011 just finished, and there’s already source code from it showing up in DragonFly. In this case, scheduler work, including multiple schedulers. I’ll have a more detailed report soon…
There are only 45 packages out of over 10,000 in pkgsrc that do not support being installed by people who aren’t root, or in different locations. Thomas Klausner has that list of 45 packages. It’s very close to zero packages with this problem at this point, so if you want to make a big difference…
As part of a larger thread, Chris Turner went into a longer explanation of how PPTP connections work. Do you have PPTP working on DragonFly? Please share details!
If you’re committing something to DragonFly, or even just working on your own Git repository so as to submit a patch, the new-to-me-and-not-actually-secret committer(7) man page has a lot of tips. I’m linking to it because it holds a lot of information that otherwise would be something you’d have to soak up over time from the community, maybe.
Tim Bisson has posted a new batch of patches putting TRIM support into DragonFly. He has a graph in there too!
Anton Panev is working on a Google Summer of Code project for NetBSD, adding support in pkgsrc for RPM/Debian package formats. He posted a status report recently; will this come to DragonFly via pkgsrc? I don’t know!
If you have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4321 or 4322 model, Sascha Wildner’s just added support for them in the hptiop(4) driver, taken from FreeBSD.
Ah, August. The month where everybody goes on vacation. I’ve been gone off and on for the last few weeks, so my link collection has been slower, but I’ve been able to keep up something.
- Friday was whyday. (via) I can certainly agree with the sentiment.
- Panic panic panic panic panic panic panic
- Not BSD or even software, but good to see: a kid, math, and solar power. (via Tomas Bodzar)
- More BSD videos, this time from BSDCan2011 and Google Tech Talks.
- The future’s gone meta: there are now game modifications which emulate real computer hardware in that virtual world. (via) It’s not turtles all the way down; it’s emulators.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nedroid. “Beartato” is one of the best names ever.
Yeah, unrelated links seem to always be comics. They offer the most reading.
Assertions, in DragonFly, are places in the code where the programmer lists a condition, and tells the system to panic if the condition doesn’t exist. It’s a good way to guard against weird situations, when something ends up with a strange value. Do you actually use them while programming? Then Adam Hoka’s patch to print file name and line number when the assertion hits will be useful to you.