Antonio Huete Jimenez reports that DragonFly now can install and run without issue on VirtualBox 2.2.0; it had been unable to work in previous releases.
Matthew Dillon is trying to track down a Hammer bug where directory entries (files, usually) are missed, whether it’s with ls or find or similar. Has this happened to you? It’s apparently very hard to duplicate, so please speak up if it has.
Hasso Tepper reported on the results of Peter Avalos’s major libc changes; someone retiring libc_r would help, as would someone figuring out why unistd.h isn’t found on DragonFly.
Naoya Sugioka has some preliminary patches for kqemu on DragonFly. In testing, he found it made qemu run slower, which is the opposite of its purpose, so he’d appreciate suggestions.
Can someone who uses git more heavily than I do look at Tig, a git viewer, and mention if it is useful? It looks interesting, as one of the features that git ‘lacks’ is a visual client other than at the command line.
BSDTalk has interviewed Dan Langille, a driving force behind the yearly BSDCan event. The convention is coming up on the 8th and 9th of May. (13 minutes)
Two recent pkgsrc changes that won’t directly affect how your packages are installed, but are still worth knowing about:
- Thomas Klausner made some adjustments to license handling for pkgsrc. It’s possible to prevent packages with or without certain licenses from installing, even as a dependency. His post contains details of the by-default accepted licenses.
- Joerg Sonnenberger has removed most instances of NO_CHECKSUM. This will help people with poor network connections, and (I would imagine) will be better for security, too.
My apologies, folks – the site is going up and down, along with my network connection. It’s probably because of Time Warner (my network provider) trying and failing to correctly implement bandwidth measuring tools for their upcoming volume cap. (I keep getting passed a private IP.)
Peter Avalos has made major changes to DragonFly’s libc; you can look at the commits page or check out his git repo for details. If you are running 2.3, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update.
You may also need to rebuild pkgsrc packages; I’m build a new binary set for 2.3 now.
Have you installed Drupal on DragonFly? How well did it work for you? Colin Adams would like to know. (I’m 99% sure it will work.)
Update: Yes, it works.
If you’re a student with a Summer of Code application, make sure to subscribe to it. Doing this will ensure you are automatically notified of any mentor requests for more information.
There’s also some recent stats published by Google on the applications so far; DragonFly is one of the surveyed orgs it mentions, and the results are the same – less applications, better quality.
My plans for building binary packages for pkgsrc are detailed in this message to the mailing lists. No timeline yet…
The due date for the Summer of Code proposals is past, and DragonFly has 18 proposals. The consensus from other SoC organizations is the same: less applicants everywhere this year, but the proposal quality is up.
Potential mentors can now discuss the proposals and ask for more detail from the students, until April 15th.
19:00 UTC today is the deadline for all student applications for Google’s Summer of Code program. You can revise applications up to April 15th based on feedback, but the initial proposal has to be in the system as of tonight. That’s 5 hours from now, if I have my time calculations correct.
DragonFly has 15 applications at this point, and general application quality looks to be better this year than last.
Matthew Dillon and Jordan Gordeev have done further work on AMD64 support; it’s progressing quickly. Check that first link for a hint on how to install correct boot code.
I’m going to mesh together two unrelated items in this post:
The April OSBR is out, with this issue being a focus on Open APIs.
The newest @Play column covers winners of the 7DRL, or “7 Day Roguelike” contest, where contestants build a new roguelike game in a week. There are some real oddities, like Decimation. I’m not sure how many of these will build on DragonFly, darnit.
An interesting tidbit turned up by Google searches: the invention of ping, from the man who wrote it. The ping -> vocoder story near the end is entertaining.
If you’re a potential student for Google’s Summer of Code, please get your application in ASAP. All student applications are due by 19:00 UTC April 3rd. You can revise a submitted application, even after the April 3rd cutoff, but it has to be in.
This story popped up last year, focusing on Kip Macy’s legal issues. Kip is a BSD developer, contributing to FreeBSD and having worked on checkpoint support in DragonFly. Another side of his story has come to light. He and his wife could use the support, but there is (that I know of) no immediate way to help.
It would be nice if there was some common news source for BSD topics, instead of being an also-ran for Linux; this is an example of where an online community can support its own members, instead of that negative story that has been out for months.
Hammer’s ‘undo’ now has the ability to index and automatically diff historical versions of files for you, thanks to a patch from Joel K. Pettersson. (He’s got more ideas, too.