A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
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.
Mathtew Dillon has added an automatic building and testing environment for AMD64 support. This one command will build an entire boot image, along with qemu to run it in, though some issues with compiling qemu remain. (Related)
Hasso Tepper has updated the DRM code (from FreeBSD) with some caveats.
Please welcome our newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Stathis Kamperis
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a student working on a Linux port of Hammer. This will lead to a breakout of Hammer from the DragonFly tree, too.
Peter Avalos has a large number of changes to libc in his tree. He’d like to have other eyeballs looking at them, so please read over and comment.
If you’re a student, you have from now until the 3rd of April to apply for a Summer of Code slot.
There is, of course, DragonFly project ideas for Google’s Summer of Code. There are also idea pages up for FreeBSD and NetBSD, both also participating this year.
Joerg Sonnenberger is making some structural changes to pkgsrc, the result of which is that you should not mix pkgsrc-wip and pkgsrc-2008Q4 packages.
The next branch, pkgsrc-2009Q1, won’t have that issue. In fact, the preparatory two-week freeze for that branch starts today.
Here’s an article on chiptunes. (What’s that?.) The writing is very exacting, but the page has been liberally sprinkled with video examples of the source material. Read the dry text while being serenaded. Highlights: comparisons of Metallica to a 1988 C64 game, and compilation of crack screens. (via I lost track of it, sorry)
Thanks to Archimedes Gaviola, I’ve changed out the slide presentations (that didn’t work) on the Presentations page.
I’ve also linked all 5 BSDTalk interviews of Matthew Dillon on that page – previously, only one was linked there.
Not only is Hasso Tepper doing regular bulk builds as he fixes up more pkgsrc packages for DragonFly, he’s also posting diffs that show progress. (Every line prefixed with a – is another working package.)
Dmitry Komissaroff has posted a port of wlan, ath_hal and if_ath from FreeBSD. It’s not finished because he lacks the hardware. If you’ve got the hardware, the inclination, or both, please assist.
If you’d like to mentor for DragonFly, as several people have expressed interest, sign yourself up at the Summer of Code site and request mentoring for DragonFly. If you sign up before the 23rd, when students can start applying, you’ll get added to the private mentors mailing list.
DragonFly BSD is a participating organization in Google’s Summer of Code 2009. (See the lists of participating organizations at the Google site.)
I have an announcement message with more details on the mailing lists; the next important date is the 23rd, when students can apply. If you’re a student, start putting your proposal together and talking with others. If you can mentor, sign yourself up on the Google site and request a mentoring spot.