The default version of Python in pkgsrc is now version 2.5. Be ready for this on your next upgrade.
Not only is there going to be BSDA exams available at AsiaBSDCon, but there is now a permanent testing facility for the BSDA in Brazil.
BSDTalk 170 has Marshall Kirk McKusick (His first name’s Marshall? Thought it was Kirk.) talking almost an hour of BSD history at the recent DCBSDCon. I’m assuming it’s going to be the first of several recordings coming from that event.
Matthew Dillon posted another summary of the road to the 2.2 release, scheduled forFebruary 15th. Among other things, this release will be available in a LiveDVD form which looks to be about a gigabyte in size with all the added packages.
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to give people money to work. (pdf) Specifically, they have USD $30K to give to people wanting to work on FreeBSD subsystems. Fight global recession!
EuroBSDCon 2009 is being held September 18-19th in Cambridge, UK. That’s a long way off, but they just opened their call for papers.
Art & Code is March 7th, at Carnegie Mellon. “Programming for Artists” – it’s cheap, and the output should be interesting. (via)
I’ve updated the images page on the DragonFly site. It now has some added wallpaper and DragonFly badges for you to use as needed, and it’s all thumbnailed to make it easier to browse.
I like the smaller font size on the DragonFly website, because it packs in more information, but it throws off the visual balance of the sidebar. How about: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/testblock/ ?
Matthias Schmidt has created a page for DragonFly project ideas, for Google’s Summer of Code 2009. (Nobody’s accepted yet, but we were last year and I’m optimistic we can be again) If you would be available to mentor, add projects you’d enjoy mentoring. If you’ll be an eligible student, give it a read.
Dru Lavigne was at DCBSDCon, and her initial notes mention Robert Luciani’s talk on threading in DragonFly.
Was it really this painful to program a PDP-11? I can only imagine every other alternative was worse. (via)
@Play has a new column up, this one about “Spelunky”, a tile-based underground exploration game. This game’s new and has been getting some buzz; it’s a sidescroller game that has aspects of roguelike play.
Also, this column is the 50th @Play column and, at the bottom of the page, has a nice list of past articles by topic.
One last build of pkgsrc 2008Q4 is complete on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; 2008Q4 packages for 2.2 will be available at time of release.
The epoch time is going to reach 1234567890 near Valentine’s Day, as noticed by Hubert Feyrer. The extreme nerdiness of that moment makes it that much more entertaining.
Thanks to Matthias Schmidt donating some machine time, I have pkgsrc 2008Q4 packages built for a recent DragonFly 2.1 system but labeled 2.2 already built. They’re uploaded to pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org and should be available on a mirror by the time of the 2.2 release.
As Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert notes, DragonFly is now in a ‘Feature Freeze’ for two weeks. Please work on bug fixes in the intervening timeframe, and push them to the ‘master’ branch. Changes for the release will be pushed to the 2.2 release branch. Matthew Dillon has more details.
This has been all over the Intarwebs at this point, but: there’s a good rumor that the next Sidekick phone will be running NetBSD on the inside. Danger, the company that makes the Sidekick, was bought by Microsoft, which makes this a BSD-based phone produced by Microsoft. I never thought I’d type that sequence of words together.
The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on “Commercialization”.
A post from Matthew Dillon notes that development will go into a ‘mini-freeze’ for two weeks while the 2.2 release is put together, along with news of a DVD release for 2.2 that includes many prebuilt packages, and some Hammer details.
Dru Lavigne has an article up at Wazi talking about open source alternatives, on a product by product basis. I’m looking forward to part 2, where she will look at Visio alternatives. (via)
The Wazi site has some other interesting comparisons, too, on databases and licenses.
There’s new busdma fixes (see man pages) by Sepherosa Ziehau available in his git repo; these will show up after the 2.2 release.