Stephane Russell pointed at work bringing the OpenJDK to the BSDs – anyone want to help out?
Thomas Nikolajsen turned the slides from Matt Dillon’s NYCBSDCon talk about Hammer into a PDF.
Marc G. Fournier reported hitting 25,000 BSD systems checking in to bsdstats.org; most of that is PC-BSD, where the bsdstats client is on by default. (It’s present in DragonFly but not on by default.) Some cross-posted acrimony followed, thankfully not from DragonFly users.
OpenBSD 4.4 is out, and OnLAMP (as usual) has a developer interview to match. They touch on a number of products that are also used in DragonFly, like the sensors framework and pf. (via)
Hey, there’s a part 2 to the @Play coverage of the the devnull NetHack Tounament! (Part 1 mentioned here if you missed it.)
txtfiles.com is having its 10th anniversary. Read up on Jason Scott’s history, which parallels the development of computer and the Internet for a lot of people (myself included), and then waste your afternoon browsing through all the data he has saved. If I had encountered something like this at 14 on my local BBS, it would have been amazing. For fun, look at the Hacking UNIX section, or perhaps Programming. (via)
Since it was mentioned on the mailing lists, I’ll mention it here: instructions on building a vkernel are in the Handbook. I may not have linked that before.
Matthew Dillon has made a scheduler change that apparently improves responsiveness when CPU load is high, to fix an issue reported by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert. Please test if you are running bleeding-edge code.
The latest @Play column on GameSetWatch talks about something I didn’t know existed: a NetHack tournament. Given NetHack’s difficulty, the scores it describes are insane.
I don’t recall if I mentioned this before, but the Google Summer of Code software (the part that Google manages) is now an open source project, for anyone to participate in. If and when DragonFly participates next year, this application is how it will be managed.
Hasso Tepper has posted a patch that brings DRM code in DragonFly to the very latest version, right out of the DRM repository. Give it a try; it adds support for a number of recent chipsets that may have only worked poorly before.
“Rumko” found that after upgrading clisp to version 2.47, pkgmanager stopped working for him. Watch out if you’ve been using pkgmanager to handle pkgsrc.
On an entirely personal note, I was having a conversation with my coworkers today about the change in technology within my lifetime; when I was young, there was no world wide web, no digital music, no timeshifting of TV programs, etc. etc. My workplace has an intern young enough to have never encountered these things.
Now, I noticed this musicmaking tutorial on Youtube. In 1985, this would have been done in a room filled with electronics, probably hand-built, with cabling run all over the place. Now, the software that accomplishes that, with a single computer, is expressly designed to simulate those old analog connections. It’s very wierd, and probably meaningless to those under 30.
Also, yay dubstep.
The discussion over Git vs. Mercurial continues; Jeffrey Hsu has even volunteered himself to maintain and synchronize the two repositories. He also pointed out that there is precedent for this already: the git-using Linux kernel work has a Mercurial mirror.
Via Google, I found this Linux blog where the author installs DragonFly vith the new LiveCD; his install stops probably because of network issues, but it’s worth looking at just because you get to see a screenshot of the very pretty desktop wallpaper used on the LiveCD.
Matthew Dillon’s posted the results of the Git vs. Mercurial voting, which worked out to an even tie. (Darnit, I didn’t think to vote!) He’s posted a followup, proposing to make both available.
Also, discussion of Git vs. Mercurial for DragonFly spread to comp.version-control.git, which led to a very technical and surprisingly even-handed (for the Internet) discussion of the virtues of each program. (via Hasso Tepper in EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Thomas Nikolajsen just noticed (I missed it) that Matthew Dillon’s Hammer slides from NYCBSDCon 2008 are now available on the Hammer page.
“Voting” is closed on the source control system question; the immediate result is that people could use both Git and Mercurial read-only repositories, since both systems have a lot of users.
Dru Lavigne went to the Free Software and Open Source Symposium in Toronto; she has writeups from every session she attended:
- CSIA and Copyright Policy
- Komodo: Making Proprietary Products Open Source
- Teaching Open Source: Community’s Perspective
- Teaching Open Source: Next Steps
- Enabling Healthy Open Source Communities
- The Convergence of Open Access and Open Source
- Creative Commons and Creative Copyright Licensing
- Innovation in Open Source Development
- Subverting Proprietary Economics
- Community Building and the Architecture of Participation