If you are often offline – voluntarily or involuntarily – there’s some changes coming to pkg_rolling-replace to deal with spotty online access.
This has been around for a while, but I’m re-mentioning it because it’s not really linked anywhere: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA video driver that should work on DragonFly: http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/~corecode/nvidia.git. It should be possible to clone from that link, build the code, and use it. (Untested by me – if you’ve done it, some explicit instructions would be helpful to others.)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has changed 64-bit DragonFly to be tagged “x86_64” instead of “amd64”. It seems most other operating systems use that for 64-bit system architechure names. So does pkgsrc, which may fix some recent builds on amd64 x86_64
OpenBSD developer Jacek Masiulaniec gets 14 minutes of airtime in the most recent BSDTalk podcast.
Alexander Polakov has a further update for his new ACPI code. He now even provides a DragonFly ISO image and USB image so that a new system can be installed for testing. There’s already one positive report. It will probably go in this weekend.
Saifi Khan ran Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s make parallelism test on a dual-cpu system, and the theory holds up: ‘make -j N’ where N == the number of CPUs, plus 1, will give the fastest build time. (graphed again!)
If you use any sort of BSD product at work, the BSD Certification group wants you to take a survey. They are building a cross section of what people are doing with BSD, and this will show what requirements should go with the certifications. Any BSD use applies, not just DragonFly. The more results, the better the tests, and the more value to the certifications, so we all benefit.
Do you have a SMP system, running DragonFly 2.5? Stathis Kamperis needs you to test something, to see if another set of system calls can be made multiprocessor-safe.
Update: An additional step.
If you’ve previously had problems in DragonFly with AHCI and a DVD drive, there’s a potential fix available.
The first one of the Open Source Business Resource Co-Creation issues is out. Read this if any of the open source software you use has a commercial component. (Chances are, yes, it does.)
The pkgsrc packages ghostscript6 and ghostscript-esp are probably going to be removed. Do `pkg_info | grep ghostscript` to see if this affects you.
Any readers involved with Python source? There’s two extant Python patches that Hasso Tepper put together for Python 2.5 and 2.4, languishing.
On a more positive note, an upstream fix for Perl was added promptly.
BSDTalk 178 is all about Evil! Well, Internet evil. It’s an hour-plus-long conversation wtih Richard Clayton at EuroBSDCon about phishing, spamming, and other things that didn’t have a name a few decades ago.
The next theme for the Open Source Business Resource was to be “co-creation”, focusing on commercial companies and relationships with open source development. There were so many articles that it’s now covering 2 months.
It’ll be sporadic.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has updated gcc 4.4 to version 4.4.2 (not used by default), and binutils to version 2.2.0.
I’m suddenly having trouble with the machine that hosts this site (random crashes, hardware disappearing), so there may be some surprise downtime over the next few days until a replacement motherboard arrives…
dragonflybsd.org will be going down for work somewhere in the next two weeks. The package archive at avalon.dragonflybsd.org is located elsewhere, so pkg_radd and similar programs will still work.
Sascha Wildner has added mandoc(1), an OpenBSD product. I like the HTML output. (I’ve said it before, come to think of it.)