Author: Justin Sherrill

Peter Avalos has a patch that moves DragonFly from using portmap to rpcbind.  (Ha ha!  HP-UX man page!)   He”d like to get some extra testing before he commits it, next week, so speak up if you use portmap.

Sepeherosa Ziehau has a patch for carp(4) users; it apparently removes some unneeded complexity.

The FreeBSD Foundation has 66% of the money they need to raise for the year; chip in, if you can.  It gets you a tax break (at least in the U.S.) and they do good work.

Hiroki Sato has posted a reminder: the deadline for AsiaBSDCon 2009 paper submission is December 20th.

So, if you’re holiday shopping, here’s some last minute suggestions. Everyone knows the usual target, but there’s more esoteric choices. However, start dropping some science if you want to get something different.  Also, the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD options.

InsideSoCal‘s Click column has a nice review up of DragonFly; I remember reading this before and somehow not thinking to publish it.  In my defense, I’ve been running a serious news backlog, from all these Git events.  Anyway, I was reminded by the DistroWatch newsletter, which has an image of that very pretty LiveDVD desktop.

There’s a BSD Conferences channel on YouTube, which is a very good idea.  As others have noted, there’s a deficit of non-FreeBSD videos – please help, if you have some audiovisual material to upload.

XHomer, a Linux (and possibly BSD; it’s untried) emulator of the DEC Pro 350 computer, is not that exciting unless you happened to own one way back when. However, look at the last of the screenshots, using the phrase “trans-cranial shock therapy“. Keep that in mind next time you’re thinking of taking a screenshot of an X desktop with the typical IRC client, music player, web browser, and widget display: be surprising. (via)

Jason Dixon’s doing a good job of publicity, so you’ve probably already seen this, but: BSDTalk 167 is Jason Dixon talking about DCBSDCon, happening this February.

The newest @Play column describes the general types of items found in roguelike games, and also covers the winners of the recent NetHack tournament.  It’s a more enjoyable read than how I’m making it sound,

Some miscellaneous links I’ve been saving:

• Undeadly has some recent notes on the status of pcc; does this run on DragonFly yet?
• Occasional DragonFly user _why has released Shoes 2.0, an entertaining Ruby-based GUI toolkit.  Or maybe it’s a vehicle for him to tell stories.  Or both.
• The preview of the December issue of the Open Source Business Resource has, among other things, an article from Leslie “Google Summer of Code 2008” Hawthorn, which DragonFly particpated in. Oh wait – it’s up as HTML or PDF.
• Asciio, a GUI program to draw charts in ascii that you can then cut and paste anywhere.  Nothing earthshaking other than a very good idea.

If you feel like updating netgraph in DragonFly to match what’s in FreeBSD 7 (a task that has been partially accomplished), Alexander Motin will be able to answer questions to help out, as he’s already supporting it in FreeBSD.)

The DCBSDCon site, for the BSD convention in Washington, DC, Feb 5th-6th, now has a separate blog.  The very first post lets slip the name of their first speaker and the fact that they will have 2 separate BSDA exams at the convention.

Michael Neumann created a patch that can get VirtualBox to run DragonFly, kinda sorta.  The underlying issue in Virtualbox is not fixed by this, however..

Stumbled on via Google Alerts: Freebench, a new benchmarking program that has already been tested on DragonFly.  (Scroll down to “Freebenchin'”.)