Aggelos Economopoulos has committed Jan Lentfer’s update of BIND to 9.5.2-P1. It fixes CVE-2009-4022, though that bug never affected DragonFly by default.
The end of year shopping season is on many of us again. I did this last year, and it seemed useful, so here’s another geeky holiday shopping guide.
For DragonFly material, there’s a number of places that will ship you a CD/DVD.
If you want a computer hardware gift, but your friends/family don’t know that much about hardware, point them at Newegg. Tell them the general type of item you want, and the reviews can help them pick.
For general geek gifts, there’s the ever-popular ThinkGeek. Wandering farther off the beaten path, there’s American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear. Creepier: The Bone Room or Skulls Unlimited.
A good gift for the technically minded: a Leatherman Wave. I’ve tried Gerber multitools and Swiss Army Knives, but I’ve been carrying a Leatherman Wave for so long people turn to me whenever something needs to be cut or opened, because they know I’ll be able to do it.
I’m linking to this even though it’s completely unrelated to this blog’s normal content: The Comics Reporter Holiday Shopping Guide. It’s comics, through and through, and some wonderful stuff is noted there.
Unlike many other blogs, I don’t get kickbacks or commissions off this. You can ascribe this to me “keeping it real” or that I’m bad at monetization. You pick.
It’s a dry-sounding topic, but the articles are interesting: The December issue of the Open Source Business Resource is now available, with “Value Co-creation” for a theme. I’ll point out “A Social Vision for Value Co-creation in Design“, because it has charts!
BSDCan 2010, coming up the 13th-14th of May, has put out the call for papers. The website says proposals start December 19th, but I suppose that’s just the day you start handing them in.
BSDTalk episode 180 is a 25-minute conversation with Girish Venkatachalam about … stuff. (I am posting before listening.)
Thunderbird, in pkgsrc, has been updated to version 3. This means that if you don’t want to make the upgrade right yet, you’ll want to follow mail/thunderbird2. This won’t affect binary package users until the next quarterly release.
Alex Hornung pointed out that getting the Linux Test Project to work on DragonFly (using the linuxulator) would be a very helpful step in that same Linux emulation. Running the LTP does not require programming skills, incidentally.
Updated pkgsrc-2009Q3 packages for DragonFly 2.5, for i386 and for x86_64 are available.
Welcome DragonFly’s newest developer with commit access: Antonio Huete Jimenez, also known as ‘tuxillo’ on EFNet #dragonflybsd via IRC.
Jon Birrell, a contributor to a number of BSD projects (primarily FreeBSD), has died. His friend and coworker Craig Rodrigues has posted a notice about his death, along with some memories. It’s always awful when someone dies, but it always strikes me about how when an open source contributor dies, it’s noticed, quietly, worldwide.
That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? There’s a fresh build of pkgsrc packages for 32-bit DragonFly 2.4, from pkgsrc-2009Q3, on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Utilities like pkg_radd should find it automatically. New builds for i386 2.5 and 64-bit 2.5 are on the way. (though pkgsrc packages built on 2.4 should work fine on 2.5.)
I like linkblogging, especially because there’s been a lot of good stuff floating about:
- Matthew Dillon detailed some of the problems he had using hardlinks to create backups – problems Hammer solves.
- The History of the Internet in a Nutshell: pretty good, though it says Unix “influenced” Linux and FreeBSD. Influenced is right for Linux, but there’s parts of the different BSDs that are from UNIX directly.
- From O’Reilly: The War for the Web. The walled garden that failed in the long run for Compuserve and AOL and so on is being resurrected. (via)
- Along the same lines: The Death of the URL.
Thomas Nikolajsen came up with some ideas for making the configuration files for a given Hammer volume accessible, even when that volume is being presented over NFS. He’s looking for more ideas.
SSH, on DragonFly, now defaults to allowing root logins, but does not allow plaintext password logins. This is on new installs only, so any existing installations won’t be affected, even after upgrades. Plaintext passwords are under constant brute-force attack for some years now, so this is probably safer.
YONETANI Tomokazu wrote up a nice bit of explanation about compiling src and pkgsrc as non-root. He even explicitly names some useful variables to set.
Several people have been working on having DragonFly compile with clang. Alex Hornung’s updated the clang page on the DragonFly site for details; if this interests you, a conversation on EFNet #dragonflybsd may be in order.
Sascha Wildner has added pkgin to the base DragonFly system. It’s still present as a pkgsrc package, so it’s manageable and upgradeable with the normal pkg_* tools. See prior discussion here for the history.
Did I already make that joke? Oh well. less has been updated to version 4.3.6 from a patch by Jan Lentfer.
Linkbloggy, briefly:
- A view of Bell Labs, where that other Unix flavor came from, in the 1960s. (via) Best sideburns ever.
- IRC, as explained by American prime time television. (YouToooob, via) Remember, #dragonflybsd is available on EFNet.
- Stallman, Torvalds, and Knuth walk into a bar… (via)