The pkg_radd(1) and pkg_search(1) utilities defaulted to pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org. They’ve been switched (by me) to point at avalon.dragonflybsd.org, which has much more bandwidth.
Matthew Dillon’s added AHCI as a kernel module, and has directions for testing. It’s not done, but he has basic hot-plug support in, among other things.
I’ve been posting a lot of “hey test this new technology” items, lately. That’s good. Since I haven’t done it already, here’s a description of AHCI.
Here’s some lazy Sunday reading about software licenses. Before you panic and quickly click away to something more fun, these are not flamewars.
This InformIT interview with David Chisnall of Étoilé talks about various things, but has an interesting note about BSD code and Apple about halfway down.
I think this is a much better way of encouraging corporate involvement in open source than legal bludgeons like the GPL. The BSD license is easy for even a non-lawyer to read and understand, so there is no confusion when using BSD-licensed code.
I’m thinking about this because there are people who still can’t figure out the difference.
Along the same lines, I was surprised by the number of open source programs found just by license listing in the new Palm Pre. I wish I had a spare $200.
Wandering even farther off topic, is Étoilé what Windowmaker should have evolved into?
An entertaining diversion: a fantasy map of C++. It’s huge; give it time to download. (via)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for various power states on AMD Phenom and Turion-series processors. He has some specific notes that mention there’s more processor family support on the way. Good news for anyone with an AMD-based laptop.
Matthew Dillon has committed the start of his AHCI work, taken mostly from OpenBSD. He described what he’s doing in a separate post, along with the welcome news of the enhanced performance that comes with AHCI support.
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.
- The newest @Play column has more 7DRL coverage, with screenshots and nice little summaries that mention whether a game is fair or not.
- Also at GameSetWatch, mention of a new roguelike called MnemonicRL, with a video preview. It’s planned to be a MMORPG, of all things.
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.