If you use NFS, especially with vkernels, you may be interested in the latest round of NFS changes recently committed.
The next quarterly release of pkgsrc should be released by next week. Normally it is released 2 weeks after starting a freeze period, but this release was slightly delayed for some structural changes and for KDE4.
Matthew Dillon solved a performance problem that was most noticeable when doing intensive I/O while performing other tasks; downloading a large collection of files while opening another application that read a lot of initial data, for example, would have a noticeable startup delay. His recent VM change seems to have solved it, and the commit message has an in-depth explanation of how.
Sdävtaker has reported success booting DragonFly on a Clevo TN120R, which is almost more of a tablet/nettop than a laptop.
Two items, picked from RSS feeds:
- People get really excited when software on Windows or a Mac manages to automatically install software. BSD systems have been doing this for years.
- What’s the first license mentioned when Palm opens up free access to open source software? BSD.
Greg Troxel, on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list, shared a script he wrote for automatic maintenance/update/cleanup of his installed pkgsrc packages, via pkg_rolling-replace.
Alex Hornung has added support for a bunch of hardware to enable a Soekris 5501 to run DragonFly. We now have a watchdog and gpio framework as a side effect.
The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Arts and Media as the theme. The article about film production using open-source tools is especially good, as articles like that tend to be a list of application names only, while this article goes into the whys and wherefores.
Sdävtaker has created a new blog, similar in design to this one, at http://dfbsd.trackbsd.org.ar/. It’s in Spanish!
It’s been mentioned before, but it’s moved: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA graphics driver that works on DragonFly.
Mentioned here for completeness: tcsh has been updated, along with libarchive and opencrypto.
DragonFly 2.4.1 has been released; this is recommended for any users of 2.4.0, as there’s a lot of little bugfixes. (Check the tag list to see all the fixes.) Next time, we may make a release candidate first.
A build of pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.4 and DragonFly 2.5 has been completed. The 2.5 packages are on avalon.dragonflybsd.org, and the 2.4 packages are about halfway there.
DragonFly 2.4 1 should be out Thursday. There’s a few bugfixes to add, still.
Seen via Richard Bejtlich’s excellent Taosecurity blog: the 6th issue of BSD Magazine is out.
Don’t forget, the first 3 issues (scroll down on that link) are free to download in PDF format.
Installation of pkgsrc packages that were built on a different version of DragonFly than the one running during that installation will cause a warning. This can cause some confusion, since the tool appears to be warning that something may not work, but there’s no further output. I’ve seen users think it means the install failed, for instance.
There’s potential ways around this, but the best would be this pkg_install modification suggested by Jeremy C. Reed. Anyone who implements this gets my eternal gratitude.
Yay, another BSDTalk! Will Backman talks about where he’s been for the past month in BSDTalk number 177, and plays back a talk with FreeBSD developer Giorgos Keramidas.
DragonFly 2.4.1 is slated for release this Wednesday, 2009-09-30. This will have fixes for the installer and 64-bit DragonFly, among other things.
Do you have a recent ASUS system? Constantine Murenin has a patch for you, for hardware monitoring.
If you’ve got a really, really old DragonFly installation that been upgraded from… 1.8? Perhaps earlier? The system will be using libc_r instead of lib_xu. If you want to change to lib_xu, which is the long-term goal, Hasso Tepper has the simple steps listed.