A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Google’s planning a Summer of Code again for 2009, according to the still-running mailing lists from last year’s SoC event. More will be announced at FOSDEM.
DragonFly may or may not be participating; it’s dependent on the application process same as every year. If you’re a student, start thinking about what to do, now.
Michael Neumann came up with an interesting script that creates a bootable DragonFly USB drive. This makes it possible to boot up and install on a netbook that lacks a normal CDROM, for instance.
The DCBSDCon Blog announces the last 3 speakers at DCBSDCon:George Neville-Neil, one of the authors of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Ken Caruso of SchmooCon Labs, and our very own Robert Luciani, talking about DragonFly and threading.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. (via) Dru Lavigne posted a list of the contents, earlier.
The bleeding edge version of DragonFly broke for a short while on Tuesday night. It was quickly fixed; I’m linking to it because Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s explanation of his fix is interesting.
Sascha Wildner posted a clarification: ISA and EISA support in any card will be dropped after the 2.2 release is out.
The hotel discount for DCBSDCon 2009 expires this Friday, so now is a good time to register. Registrations for the convention itself closes at the end of this month.
Also, Kurt Miller will be talking at DCBSDCon about his work in OpenBSD on Position Independent Executables.
Michael Neumann brought up the idea of using C++ in kernel programming, which has been suggested before. Reactions were generally negative, but there would be some possibilities.
Hasso Tepper posted a note detailing some of the troubles with the recently branched 2008Q4 quarterly pkgsrc release. The 2008Q4 release has some issues on DragonFly 2.o, and some recent changes in DragonFly caused issues, though that’s been patched for now. The result of this is that DragonFly has a ‘soft freeze‘ around end- and mid-year release time for the ABI, to keep problems down.
Peter Avalos has added pam_passwdqc, a simple password quality checker (hence the ‘qc’) to DragonFly.
pcc appears to have had some significant updates due to funding; has anyone tried it on DragonFly recently?
The newest @Play column talks about yet another roguelike I’ve never heard of: Incursion. (Too much Zangband on my part.) Apparently it follows 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules quite carefully, which is different than the usual vague Tolkienish/D&Dish look that most roguelikes keep. Check the supplement at the bottom for some literary history.
Are you using any ISA-based network cards? Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to remove support very soon after the 2.2 release; speak up if this is a problem. Or, spend a few dollars and buy a card made in the last 10 years.
You get to hear me blather on for 22 minutes about this Digest and how important/easy it is to contribute to BSD projects, in BSDTalk 169.
If you feel frustrated that big (>100G) solid state disk drives are still relatively expensive, well… It has been much worse. (via)
Vincent Stemen posted a note about his homemade tool, called ‘partition’. It has some interesting features, though it would require some documentation and cleanup to use in DragonFly, where it could serve as a replacement for fdisk. If anyone’s interested in making that happen, contact Vincent.
Sepherosa Ziehau has also added age(4) support, a network chip common to Asus systems. Load the kernel module and report your results.
Two UNIX-centric items for end-of-week reading: “The History of Unix *dump programs” and “Roll your own toy UNIX-clone OS“. (via)
Thanks to Matthias Schmidt, the installer now supports Hammer, meaning you can install an all-Hammer DragonFly system. Well, almost.
Michael Neumann has replaced suser(9) with priv(9), taken from FreeBSD, for fine-grained priviledge control.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added OpenBSD’s in_addprefix() and in_scrubprefix() from OpenBSD, which makes it possible to add two addresses within the same subnet to two separate network interfaces. Read his post for a more descriptive synopsis. Hes also made some original fixes.
He’s also added support (from FreeBSD) for the Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe ethernet controller, via ale(4), prompted by some Eee PC 1000H issues that were highlighted here before.