A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Alex Hornung posted a summary of how his work on devfs is going, and Jordan Gordeev posted a summary of how much AMD64 is functional.
If you want to try either one (warning: many parts still broken!), use a vkernel for the devfs so a physical system doesn’t get broken. There’s build instructions for pulling together AMD64 DragonFly.
Update: manual instructions for AMD64, too.
Not one, but two roguelike items! Close your eyes and click randomly if you have no interest in my little obsession.
Dru Lavigne’s excellent book ‘BSD Hacks’ is available at Scribd, and a chunk of it is readable through the preview at that site. A good chunk of what’s in there applies to DragonFly.
My copy is sitting on the shelf near by, inbetween ‘Perl Best Practices‘ and ‘The Mythical Man-Month‘.
I linked to articles from last week’s issue of the Economist before, but now that I made it to the other end of the magazine, there’s another one of interest that doesn’t mention open source but still relates to it: An article on intellectual property that covers how to handle antitrust legislation and companies where the property is mostly virtual. Useful to anyone who has dealt with the GPL and/or Microsoft. (i.e. everyone)
Also, not really open source related, but computer games can be good for you. I really like this magazine – not because I agree with them, but because they at least examine things in depth, and avoid the usual computing blunders you see in print.
If you don’t want to read the whole magazine yourself, there’s a nice summary available. (that link covers the previous week; recap of this issue possibly this weekend.
A useful BSD item from the Howling Void: BSD jails found to be more efficient than VMWare in given situations. I am both pleased and not really surprised.
The DragonFly mirror at dragonflybsd.kiev.ua went down due to hard drive failure some time ago, but it has returned. It’s an honest-to-goodness DragonFly system now too, I think. It’s (re)listed on the mirrors page.
The newest issue of the Open Source Business Resource covers Women in Open Source, with a larger-than-normal variety and length of articles.
As Hasso Tepper says, please don’t bring in any major changes until after DragonFly’s 2.4 release. This is mostly for the benefit of pkgsrc, so that we can have as complete a working set of packages as possible at release time. 2.4 will probably be in July.
BSDTalk 174 is up, with 16 minutes of conversation with Kris Moore of iXSystems (neé PC-BSD), from BSDCon 2009.
While asking some questions, Alex Hornung let drop some of the details of his Summer of Code devfs project. Sounds like he’s making good progress.
Huawei modems, often available as USB attachments, have been problematic on DragonFly. However, it looks like it’s fixed. (I dont have one to test.) There’s a lot of names involved, so I’ll just point to the commit message.
This arrived in my mailbox in dead tree form today, but it’s also online: My favorite magazine has some good thoughts on open source vs. cloud computing, plus one on open source variety, or lack of it. It’s interesting that mainstream articles talking about open source software have moved beyond the forms ‘gee whiz there’s Linux’ and ‘here’s what a software license is’.
Subversion isn’t being used for DragonFly, but it is available via pkgsrc. If you’re one of the people using it, the pkgsrc version has been updated to 1.6.2 which may have some upgrading issues.
When DragonFly was moving away from CVS, the votes were split pretty evenly between Git and Mercurial. DragonFly went to Git, but it’s apparently now possible to use Mercurial with a Git repository.
Statis Kamperis is working on POSIX conformance for DragonFly as his Summer of Code project; he’s posted some questions about the agreement he is given for the Open Group’s test suites. If you’re curious, he links to a copy of the agreement. (I have an I-am-not-a-lawyer-but-have-worked-on-a-number-of-contracts followup)
Matthew Dillon has put together some new test machines, in preparation for porting the OpenBSD AHCI driver to DragonFly. Check his message if you are thinking about building a new system, as they appear to work well.
Well, I’m not sure if it’s out, or the new thing is the release announcement and 2009Q1 has been out for a while. Usually, the quarterly releases of pkgsrc are available 2 weeks after freeze, which was back in March. Either way, it’s available.
Hasso Tepper has a “BIG FAT WARNING” about two new issues: threaded programs are broken on bleeding-edge DragonFly because of a possible GCC bug that was only recently exposed, and Xorg in pkgsrc has issues with the Intel driver.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert already has one change in that may fix the issue with threaded programs, and is working on the Intel driver issue.
Update: more threading changes.
Sdävtaker is giving a “Hammer administration” presentation at BSDDay, May 29th and 30th in Argentina. (His presentation is the second day.)
Jordan Gordeev posted installation instructions for his ‘BTX Halted’ fix. It may not be the final answer, though.