Justin Sherrill – Page 231 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/05/23

NTFS vs. battlestar

Apparently the mail(1) and battlestar(6) source code caused a problem when checked out onto a NTFS volume. Sascha Wildner fixed it, and Alexander Polakov found an explanation as to why. How long has this problem been around? Well, look at the email addresses at the end of the man page for battlestar(6), for instance, or guess how long mail(1) has been around…

2011/05/23

IOAPIC all the time

The I/O APIC is now always on unless you say otherwise. This may not make a clear difference to you, but enabling that kernel option has always been a somewhat iffy thing; working for some configurations and not others. Now, it’s one less thing to worry about.

2011/05/232011/05/22

EuroBSDCon paper deadline looms

EuroBSDCon 2011, which is being held at Maarssen, The Netherlands, is October 6th through 9th of this year. If you want to get a paper in, the deadline is in a week – May 30th. Get a move on if you want to present!

2011/05/232011/05/22

OpenJDK to try

As noted by reader eirik in a previous story comment, OpenJDK 7 is supposed to run on DragonFly (i386). Anyone want to try this?

2011/05/222011/05/22

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/22

This week, the links are generally fun.

Hey, can this work on BSD? Cause this. (yeah, I know, hype.)
PC emulator in Javascript. Here’s how. From the same fellow who produced qemu. Here’s another level on top of that.
Michael Lucas has a summary of his experience at BSDCan 2011. His third point – anyone can experiment and publish results – is something I’d like to see. I love graphs, and I love being able to see quantifiable results.
The many slides for ’10 years of pf’, also from BSDCan 2011, are online. (via) The background images are entertaining, though it’s using that font. Slide 78 mentions that other BSDs have much older versions of pf. I think DragonFly’s running the newest old version of any of them, actually, though the slide doesn’t mention it.
There’s Gnome people saying “Ignore everything that isn’t Linux“. No, wait, it’s not that bad!
The history of the computer mouse. Something I’d always heard about, but not with this detail.
Git aliases. I don’t think it’ll save you hours of your life as the author claims, but it may be handy.
How to build your own gaming PC. The author went for funny and true, rather than the multipage exposition of out-of-date numbers and graphs that usually make up these articles.
Where the octothorpe came from. It has to do with Unix and telephones, which are close to the same thing if you go back far enough.
Speaking of Unix-ish stuff, here’s an interview with Ken Thompson, who recently won the Japan Prize for the creation of Unix, along with Dennis Richie. (via) Yes, it’s their fault!
“First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook.“

2011/05/21

Java and DragonFly

Here’s some recent notes on running Java on DragonFly; I may have posted something similar before, but it doesn’t hurt to keep the information out there.

2011/05/21

Updates: binutils, drill, Chromium

Several updates, all at once: Jan Lentfer has updated ldns/drill (changelog) to 1.6.9, John Marino has updated binutils to 2.20.1 (changelog), and Matthias Rampke has built Chromium 11 for DragonFly, and has a package available. I assume the Chromium version posted about here before was version 10?

2011/05/20

SMP kernels all the time

I posted something about this before, but now it’s definite: bleeding-edge users of DragonFly can boot a multiprocessor kernel on a single-processor machine.

2011/05/20

NICs and how to go through them all

If you’ve ever wanted to really make sure of all the network interfaces supported on your DragonFly system, you can create an exhaustive (and exhausting) list.

2011/05/19

Sendmail, updates

Sendmail in DragonFly is now at version 8.14.15, thanks to Jan Lentfer. (Have you seen this new MeTA1 thing?) See the changelog changes for the nitty-gritty.

2011/05/19

LibreOffice for DragonFly

Francois Tigeot has got LibreOffice working for DragonFly. See his post for build/download details. LibreOffice, if you haven’t heard of it, is the recent offshoot of OpenOffice, with much less Sun/Oracle involvement.

2011/05/18

New gold linker

John Marino has made it possible to use ‘gold‘, the new linker in binutils 2.21, on DragonFly. His explanatory post outlines the benefits (much faster C++ compiling), and caveats (does not work yet for building world/kernel).

2011/05/18

NVIDIA card driver update

Samuel Greear has a totally untested update to the NVIDIA video driver available. It may not work, but it’s not like that’ll be any different than the current state of the driver.

2011/05/17

New pkgsrc bulk build results

I have them, for DragonFly 2.11/i386 and DragonFly 2.11/x86_64 (see pkgsrc-bulk), on pkgsrc-2011Q1. I think I even uploaded them correctly this time.

2011/05/16

DragonFly in Turin in September

Ferruccio Zamuner will be doing a talk about DragonFly at the Italian Perl Workshop in Turin, in September. It’s a free event. He’s working on slides, and is looking for feedback on them (I assume once he has them.)

2011/05/16

Device Mapper mirror page

Adam Hoka, a student in Google Summer of Code for DragonFly, has created a wiki page for his device mapper mirroring project. Not a lot there, but I’m happy to see the reference.

2011/05/152011/05/14

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/15

This week: lots more reading!

Michael Lucas describes an extra layer of protection for when you can’t force public key usage on every SSH user.
Cool, but obscure Unix tools (via) The screenshots are all from a Mac… How many of the 24 tools listed are in pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip? Almost all of them. (tpp sounds entertaining.)
NYCBUG, in addition to having a really fun convention, has been regularly posting audio of the presentations they host. The most recent is “William Baxter’s NYCBUG presentation on The Unix Method of Development Management”. See the BSD Events tweet for the download.
What Ubuntu means. (via)
Here’s a nice explanation of Intel’s new Tri-Gate design and with it, an incidental explanation of the processor market.
This ycombinator post about Hammer2 work has an in-depth comment from Venkatesh Srinivas about DragonFly’s network setup, memory allocator, and token use. (Ignore the trolling in other comments.)
Michael Lucas’s next No Starch Press book is Absolute OpenBSD, second edition.
Pictures and video are starting to show up from the just-passed BSDCan 2011. (via this and also thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
My first experience of The Internet was very similar to this. It should be bizarrely unfamiliar to anyone under 20 or so. (via) Get this: I typed ‘exit’ instead of just closing the browser window when I was done messing with it, because some habits cannot be broken.

2011/05/14

Finding free memory

If you’ve used ‘free’ on Linux to find available memory, Steve O’Hara-Smith has described the way to do the same thing on DragonFly.

2011/05/14

SMP kernels on uniprocessor systems

It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on getting multiprocessor kernels able to boot on single-processor systems. This makes life a bit easier, since there’s only one kernel needed for any given processor. I don’t know if it’s in a finished state yet.

2011/05/13

Intel vs. AMD: a speed shootout

Matthew Dillon did some tests building both with an Intel i7 2600K and AMD PhenomIIx6 1090T CPU, and posted the results. He follows up with a note that the lower electricity cost of the Intel i7 makes it price-comparable with the AMD chip within a year and a half.