There’s more people showing up for DragonFly at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress, in Berlin December 27th-30th. I’ve posted about it before , but it’s worth mentioning as the end of the year draws close. Speak up if you can join in.
A number of recent changes will be important to you if you develop on DragonFly:
- Sascha Wildner has added a indent(1) profile that matches what is usually done in DragonFly.
- Also, there’s a dragonfly.el for emacs users.
- Now new, but worth mentioning again: there is an excellent development(7) man page.
- Alex Hornung has ported and modified FreeBSD’s minidumps, so crash dumps can now be kept smaller than your total physical memory size.
Matthew Dillon has made version 4 of Hammer the default; the upgrade is a relatively painless ‘hammer upgrade’ command. This new version cuts out a chunk of the disk syncs needed, speeding up Hammer disk operations.
Please welcome the newest committer for DragonFly: Jan Lentfer.
If you can produce an article on open source success factors by December 20th, the Open Source Business Resource would like to hear from you. Also, the audio of a recent NYCBUG meeting is available online. Both of those links come from Dru Lavigne’s excellent BSD Twitter feeds. It’s worth watching the BSDEvents one because there’s literally daily BSD-themed events coming up, and she seems to catch every one.
Alexander Polakov has imported OpenBSD’s hotplugd(8). It monitors for hotplug-style events, like disk additions and removals, and executes corresponding scripts to handles those events.
AsiaBSDCon, which is happening the 11th through 14th of March, 2010, has issued the normal call for papers. (and they nicely posted it to users@) This looks to be the 4th year of this convention – have any readers here been to it?
It’s now possible to boot a vkernel using an NFS share as the root. Now, you can have a networked virtual system!
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.)