Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin posted his work on fan control, involving Winbond Super I/O Hardware Monitors. He’s had a series of commits up to this point, and this message nicely sums up the work done, including the presentations for it at BSDCan last year and AsiaBSDCon this year. Even if you aren’t planning to adjust your system cooling, it’s a surprisingly in-depth writeup, with more details available.
In an effort to catch up…
- Matthew Dillon made a change to how material in memory is paged out; it may improve things depending on how much paging your system already does.
- The AsiaBSDCon OpenBSD papers are online, with mention of video of the presentations.
- Use keys for your SSH login, cause this will only get worse.
- Ten Shell One-liners. The first one, using your favorite editor on the command line, is one of those things I knew about, but didn’t know to do. (caveat: some Linuxisms)
- Want to test a big xorg update for pkgsrc? Of course you do.
The next release, 2.6, will be branched in the next few days. The official release: next week, with some last-minute benefits.
The naming convention for the daily snapshots of DragonFly has changed, to make the file names more readable. This may lead to some confusion as the mirrors settle, but it’ll pan out. If you run a mirror, double-check your downloads.
Stephane Russel was having trouble printing with OpenOffice and lpr on DragonFly. He fixed it, and I’m linking to his explanation because someday, someone will have the same problem and be looking for the solution…
Every time a bulk build of pkgsrc packages is completed, a report is uploaded listing what built and what didn’t. Since there’s so many reports from the now-automated build, I’ve sorted it by architecture and release, to make lookups faster.
This is handy if you’re looking to fix pkgsrc apps on DragonFly, and you need a target. It’s also a good way to see if a desired module exists as a binary.
Alex Hornung is working on a new version of the Handbook; my hat is off to him. I brought along the FreeBSD handbook SGML to DragonFly, and converted it through to the current wiki, so I know just how much there is. Check RecentChanges for the new work, and join in if you like.
We actively need more people to do the small but plentiful fixes to make sure as many pkgsrc packages work as possible. Are you interested? Speak up.
There’s a lot to read, so if you understand it, that’s great. I’m passing it on without other comment.
We’ve got a third year in Summer of Code!
The timeline shows about a week and a half for planning, and then student applications begin on the 29th of March, and run to April 9th.
If you want to participate as a student, start planning now by talking with people on IRC (#dragonflybsd on EFNet) or on the mailing lists. You cannot be over-prepared.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s host for DragonFly, chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de, is down for good. Since it had excellent bandwidth, it was frequently used as the source for a lot of the DragonFly mirror sites out there.
If you were using it for your own mirror, switch to mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, and tell Matthew Dillon at @dragonflybsd.org your contact info so you can be notified of changes. (If you’re not mirroring, please download from the nearest site that is.)
PHP version 5.3 has some differences from previous versions, so there’s now a lang/php53 port. Use this if you want to upgrade right away, or stick with lang/php if you want to play it safe.
Newegg is running some specials: a 64G Kingston SSD for $140, a 256G (yikes!) Crucial SSD for $660, and a Sans Digital port multiplier for $110. The SSDs are good for using swapcache(8), though 256G is probably overkill. Doesn’t make me want it less, though…
The port multiplier’s SiI3726 chipset might be supported, or potentially supported, by the sili(4) driver. Someone have $110 to spare to try this out?
The BSD Conferences channel on YouTube now has updated captioning, which will be useful if you don’t follow spoken English too well.
As if Alex Horning wasn’t busy enough with his Linuxulator update, he’s also made it possible to have a vinum root volume in conjunction with using devfs.
Alex Hornung has committed his initial work on Linux support, which is over 6,500 lines so far. (Thanks, Alex!) He’s continuing to work on it, though going by his commit message, Java, Opera, Tomcat, etc. are supported so far. The only major item missing at this point is Flash. There are other followups, such as this note about chrooting into the Linux subsystem.
I’ve been building this one up:
- Marc Espie’s post about autoconf holds true; Linux is in danger of becoming a monoculture in itself, similar to Windows.
- The BSDCan 2010 schedule has been posted. (via) Will this be the year I finally make it to BSDCan? Maybe.
- This post about communities (in general, online, not just software) is interesting. So far DragonFly has managed to avoid the drama-with-a-capital-D that afflicts other communities over time. Here’s a reason to not want growth…
- Always have working backups. ALWAYS. (via)
- I once went through almost exactly this, except it was a phone system that spanned several U.S. states and China/Mexico. Asterisk is awful, except that every commercial phone system is worse.
- A very on-target assessment of the iPad from a longtime Apple developer makes me think of something: will the iPad be good for open source? Not as a platform, but as a way to push developers to open source systems, where program development doesn’t require approval from a single company with unclear guidelines. Even the single interface port on an iPad is proprietary, and requires licensing.
- It’s really nice to read about a successful open-source software business that did not hinge on investors or being bought out, but rather on, you know, actually doing business, as seen in this writeup of OpenNMS. (via)
“Device initiated power management” via AHCI is now possible, thanks to Johannes Hofmann. If I understand it correctly, it lets the computer handle power reductions automatically, which is more efficient than setting by hand.
Damian Vicino has posted about plans for an expanded second “BSDDay-AR” (a BSD event in Argentina) this year. If you want to show and give a talk, let him know. It’s always good to hear about a BSD event expanding.