Matching the UNIX history quiz from a few posts ago, George Rosamond sent along a note about this NYCBUG talk from Issac Levy on “The Real UNIX Tradition”, which is conveniently available in audio form.
Assuming your DNS has caught up, www.dragonflybsd.org has been updated using ikiwiki to merge the wiki and the regular site.
Everything that was in the wiki is now present in the Documentation area, and can be edited in the same way. Enjoy! Please tell me if you encounter problems, especially as this is my fault.
Now this is a convention idea I can get behind: DCBSDCon will have a Frack Room, with Quake-series games and bzflag running. Or, you could work with others to collaborate and debug, but let’s be serious here.
Also! There’s two weeks left to register, and three weeks to the event.
There’s an oldest file meme, first seen here, where you find the oldest files in your home directory and figure out where they came from. The page I linked to uses a Linux-specific search, but some other pages have a scripted way to do it that should work on DragonFly.
I also found a link to a Unix History quiz from the same location, with some answers. It’s a tough quiz.
Something I’ve been holding onto for a while and only got around to looking at tonight: A Git introduction at a Google TechTalk, via YouTube.
Anecdote: I saw Randal Schwartz, the speaker, at a Perl conference back in… 2000? He was a decent speaker, and I went up after his talk to tell him how I was (successfully) using two programming practices he specifically deprecated during his talk. Not that it was any better an idea because of that…
Want to look at old computer museums? There’s a number of them to choose from. (via) While you’re at it: Apple ][ in a browser, now via Java (via).
In the ridiculously rare event that my old-school credentials are ever challenged, I will just point to my store-bought 5.25″ floppy of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple ][, complete with typewritten label.
- SysV init must die (via) Someone mentioned runit in IRC the other day, I think...
- V7 Unix for x86 (also via) Put on the bellbottoms.
- This blog has been running various sed and awk one-liner demonstrations, among other things; very useful tricks to remember. Go through the history; there’s fun and useful stuff.
It makes me happy to see code spread across multiple BSDs.
OnlineDirect has a new DragonFly mirror up in Bulgaria; it’s hosting the official ISOs at this point.
- This Coding Horror article talks about garbage collection and happens to mention an entertaining common BSD function in shutdown.c: die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog()
- The DCBSDCon Blog has some notes on the facilities – there will be wireless, and Jason Dixon will be giving his “BSD Is Dying” talk, too.
- An hour of Marshall Kirk McKusick’s FreeBSD kernel class (based on his book) is available now on Youtube. (via) Plus, more videos on other open source topics at the FOSSLC. (via)
- This new column on GameSetWatch, The Amateur, titled “Why You Should Pay for Free“, gets into free software (like BSD) from a giveaway gaming point of view (not like BSD). It’s an interesting take.
- ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack is a new Rock, Paper, Shotgun article about playing a tiled roguelike, and quite enjoyable to read. Check the comments for some interesting links.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to fix problems with memory alignment when doing tasks like burning optical media. Try it if you’ve had this problem, or wait, as it will probably be committed soon.
For those of you thinking of installing DragonFly on a EeePC 901, Christopher Rawnsley tried, with some booting problems. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has an easy fix, however.
pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has a set of packages for pkgsrc 2008Q4 on DragonFly 2.0.1. The bulk build was started after the freeze for 2008Q4 but before the actual branch was released, so it’s not exactly the 2008Q4 release, but it’s pretty close. It’ll be updated as soon as the next build completes. Please, use a mirror as soon as they update.
For those going to DCBSDCon but not yet having rooms to sleep in, a cheaper Days Inn has been found a few metro stops away from the convention.
(Hotel costs kept me from making it to NYCBSDCon, for instance.)
Dmitry Komissaroffis doing a very useful thing and producing code to support more ACPI stuff – specifically, HPET timers, the mysterious Smart Battery, and Asus systems.
Hasso Tepper is looking for other people with experience and/or interest in porting FreeBSD’s mmc(4) support for SD cards greater than 2G in size. Contact him is that describes you.
The 2008Q4 release of pkgsrc is out, with a number of improvements: pulseaudio, OpenOffice 3, and perl 5.10, among other things. The announcement mentions using audit-packages and pkgsurvey, too.
There’s a build of pkgsrc from just before the 2008Q4 ‘freeze’ finishing now on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; a build will happen soon. Hasso Tepper noted a higher failure rate in package building for that release…
Peter Avalos has committed a new version of OpenSSL – 0.9.8j. (New version caused by a recent security issue.) Also, the vendor branches are no longer versioned, since git has made that unneccesary.
I have a number of items that are all going to get posted together:
- Antonio Huete Jimenez has a binary build of pkgsrc 2008Q3 for DragonFly 2.1.
- Michael Neumann has integrated his “USB stick image integration” code; check the commit message for notes.
- Matthias Schmidt has added IPv6 support to dntpd(8).
Some extra reading: Hasso Tepper posted a link to an article talking about non-uniform memory access (NUMA). Any article that can have diagrams labeled ‘hypercubes’ must be worthwhile.