Sepherosa Ziehau has a firmware update for bce(4) (Broadcom NetXtreme II) cards. He’s been doing a lot more incidental network hardware updates I haven’t linked; thanks, Sephe!
I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.
You probably heard of this already, but hey, look! DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.
Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front. This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.
While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself. It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up. Yeah, that worked out just dandy. There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).
The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places) Here’s my story. It was, and still is, “Fupjack”. Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack. Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway. He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.
Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!” I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one. People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out. The putative theme is “BSD Security”, but there also happens to be an article featuring Hammer deduplication on real-world data, by yours truly.
I posted before about changes to the commit template for DragonFly, but Alex Hornung has written up exactly what he did, with better details on how to use it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been committing a bunch of changes for em/emx(4) and bce(4). You may have hardware that has suddenly become supported, for instance. Also, credit is due to David Christensen and Broadcom for sending hardware to test out.
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado really wants a port of DragonFly to Xen. He can’t do it himself, but he did a nice job of writing up the problem, and even found resources to help any developer wanting to take on this task.
BSDTalk 206 is 17 minutes with Peter Losher of the Internet Software Consortium. I don’t think people realize how much ISC does…
Somehow, I ended up with the most concise link listing I’ve ever done, even though I have a pretty good batch here. Go figure.
- Who doesn’t like the taste of BSD? Mmm, delicious.
- “redundant array of inexpensive crap”
- The invention of email. (via, via) It predates Unix.
- The worst ‘hacking’ scenes ever. (via) Starts funny, then you get angry.
- A nice explanation of the Lorenz Attractor, which I had only ever experienced as a screen saver. (via)
- Possibly the smallest roguelike ever.
Two completely separate and unrelated changes:
First, Alex Hornung has added a check to look for certain lines in a commit message, and add a MFC reminder note to the commit message if they are found. MFC, if you haven’t heard it, means ‘merge from current’, or moving a change from dragonfly-current to the last release version.
Second, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc coming up, there’s some old packages that will get dropped. Speak up if you need them to stick around.
If you’ve had a lack of emails from the DragonFly mailing lists lately, this SORBS listing event might be why.
Do you have a Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG, 2225BG, or 2915ABG wireless card? The driver is iwi(4). It requires a kernel module and some downloadable firmware, which makes it slightly more troublesome to set up. Luckily, ‘ferz’ has written up just how to get it working.
Jeremy Chadwick donated an SSD to DragonFly developer ‘josepht’. Thanks, Jeremy!
Normally I’d take this moment to point out the other donations that could be useful for DragonFly developers… but there doesn’t seem to be any pending requests. Anyone working on a hardware driver that needs something physical to test against? Here’s the moment to note that.
There’s an update on Stéphanie Ouillon’s Google Summer of Code project, working on the virtio block device driver.
Pkgsrc bmake bootstrap, that is. There’s a new version of bmake, and it needs to be tested on every platform possible.
A light week. School’s nearly out in the States, so I expect the Internets to be quieter.
- Another open-source compiler suite. Maybe parts of it were open before? I don’t know; all I have to go on is a press release. Remember when there was GCC or nothing?
- Read this; it will show you just how amazingly intricate the Telehack project is. If that doesn’t convince you, read this.
- Incomplete man pages are no fun. Not this bad, but close.
- Do you use PuTTY as a SSH client on Windows? This PuTTY shortcut creator may be really handy. It also saves your settings in a sane location, instead of buried somewhere in the registry as PuTTY does.
- The origin of Pong. (via) It debunks some of the legends.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to AHCI support; if you have an Intel motherboard with an SSD drive that occasionally doesn’t want to co-operate on a cold boot, this recent update may fix it.
Do you have a Via CPU? Do you use padlock(4)? (The driver for cryptographic functions, which Via processors support with hardware acceleration) Alex Hornung made some untested changes to support the hardware random number generator, but he needs people to test it.
Audio recordings of the events at BSDCan 2011 are now available, in mp3 form. If the file names aren’t descriptive enough, you can go through the speaker list and match up. (found indirectly via Facebook)
The pkgsrc ‘freeze’ in preparation for the pkgsrc-2011Q2 branch is coming up, starting this Sunday the 19th. This means the quarterly release will be tagged in about 2 weeks, and I’ll probably have binary packages built for DragonFly about a week or so after that.