A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Rob Pike, one of the people responsible for UNIX, among other things, has a photo blog. (via)
Incidentally, his wife’s books are good, and wierd, and I read them long before I had any real idea who Rob Pike was, in a wierd bit of synchronicity. Early computer science history would be a good topic for Jim Ottaviani to publish, come to think of it… (also recommended)
For anyone interested in profiling: I posted details on a bulk build of pkgsrc that seem to imply it’s limited by something other than CPU. The ensuing discussion had some ideas on how to speed up the whole process.
I’ve set up another mirror at df.v12.su, on some equipment/space/bandwidth kindly donated by GP Internet.
Freddie Cash has an interesting writeup of how he put together a very capable and cheap backup system using ZFS; this is part of a larger discussion on Hammer, ZFS, performance and solutions.
Do you use em(4)? Sepherosa Ziehau has an improved version for testing. What’s changed? Dunno.
I’ve updated the website section of the Projects page on the DragonFly website; if you were looking for some things to clear up, some of them are relatively trivial.
“Desktop NetBSD” – with the DragonFly LiveDVD and installer, we’re almost able to do the same thing now – a skim of that project page seems to imply we just need to add some more packages. (via)
As I try to catch up with a large backlog of messages (I was traveling), I’ll note that Sepherosa Ziehau has done a lot of work on network card support and Sascha Wildner on WARNS cleanup; both of them have made so many commits in the last few days I’m just going to throw up my hands and point at the date index for this month’s commits.
Another one of those tools that can be handy to know: netcat. Here’s a nice guide about it.
DragonFly 2.2 is released! Visit the release page for details. As always, please use a mirror when downloading.
This IBM developerWorks article about screen goes into a lot of detail about how screen works, and has some nice examples of usage. (via)
One of the problems with screen is that it has a lot of settings and changes to use, which makes initial adoption difficult. However, it’s very useful…
This post on Blog Pseudoaccidentale described, by way of a parable, how many people think, incorrectly, they can’t contribute to open source. (The article says “FreeBSD”, but the rule applies to any open source project) It’s a matter of doing something, no matter how small, consistently.
I’d even use that analogy differently and say, “How do you eat an elephant?” Hint: see title.
(Thanks, Matthias Schmidt, for the link)
From O’Reilly: a love note for UNIX. Today’s the day for it, after all.
The wiki from Summer of Code 2008 has been opened up to the world and is being treated as a general resource for mentors and students, so please consult it if you are thing of being either one of those things.
Also, a FAQ for the 2009 session is together. Applications start in March, so get yourself together…
Update: Dates mentioned here, by me.
A vulnerability in telnetd code common to FreeBSD and DragonFly was just discovered; it’s been fixed in DragonFly using code from NetBSD in 1995, strangely enough. (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)
‘Sdävtaker’ posted a note about BSDday-AR, happening in Buenos Aires on May 29th and 30th. There’s a Spanish version of the site; no English yet.
There’s an extensive article on “Unix’s Magical Moment” up on the O’Reilly site, with more details about that upcoming 1234567890 epoch time. That moment is probably happening very close to the same time you are reading this.
Hiroki Sato has posted that the schedule for AsiaBSDCon 2009 is now available. It’s happening in March, and registration will be available soon. There’s still time to get a paper in, if you hurry…
Matthew Dillon has updated pkg_radd to download based on the uname of the system where it’s run. This means binary downloads can be keyed to the appropriate release, instead of just whatever’s most recent on pkgbox or any of the mirrors.
There’s a new issue of BSD Magazine out, and it’s (almost) all NetBSD. Apparently there’s been several issues, and I’ve been slack in covering them. (via)