A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The mid-term evaluation for Google Summer of Code work is coming up for the week of July 7th – meaning it starts tomorrow. If you’re a student or a mentor, read my post on the kernel@ mailing list, and make sure you complete your evaluations befoer the 14th.
(side note: TGEN, where are you?)
‘Rumko’ has posted a 75 euro bounty (that’s something like USD $150 a bunch of dollars) for anyone who updates nataraid in DragonFly; it should be a straightforward change from FreeBSD. The details are available on the Code Bounty page on the wiki, as referenced on the mailing lists.
Hasso Tepper has been doing a lot of work updating pkgsrc packages for DragonFly; look at one of his recent bulk reports to see the details.
Another week, another @Play column talking about roguelikes. This time, it’s about Izuna, a Japanese ‘JCRPG’.
Also, Sascha Wilder (I think – lost the email, sorry!) pointed out that the ultimate roguelike may actually be Dwarf Fortress, a theory I have heard before. (links to go Rock Paper Shotgun, one of my favorite game sites.)
The 2.0.0.15 update to Firefox seems to have broken it on DragonFly. Hasso Tepper asks: can someone work on a fix? He lacks time, but this needs to work in pkgsrc for our upcoming release.
Matthew Dillon’s posted another update on the state of Hammer. It’s mostly about adding mirroring support now, along with a mention of the 2.0 release coming in 2 weeks.
Jeremy C. Reed pointed at a recent article quoting Intel staff as warning developers to “prepare for thousands of cores”. Matthew Dillon had some thoughts on the issue.
Mayur Bhosle has posted details about his Proportional Scheduler project for the Google Summer of Code.
By the way, Firefox 3 is out but not in pkgsrc… officially. If you want to move to 3 right now, you can find it in pkgsrc-wip.
Update: As several people commented, it is out, though I wasn’t seeing it in the normal place I look.
This Wired article on Android is worth reading. Not because it’s directly related to DragonFly, but because it’s a open source platform. If you’re interested in DragonFly, you must have at least a passing interest in open source software.
We’re all used to being able to install and configure (and break) our BSD systems the way we want, when we want, without having to seek permission or necessarily pay a fee to someone who isn’t the author of the software we want. This is not generally possible with phones, which, after all, are specialized computer systems. Keep an eye on this.
(Via)
Matthew Dillon’s latest Hammer update prevents data corruption when the disk is full. Update, if you are following the bleeding edge.
Hasso Tepper has added Objective C support for gcc 4.1.2.
Just because I don’t think I’ve mentioned it specifically yet: it will not be possible for Hammer to serve as a bootable volume in the 2.0 release. 2.2, definitely.
Undeadly has an article noting that OpenBSD is getting in on the LiveCD game with BSDAnywhere.
I’ve been traveling for a few days, so it’s time you break out the bullet points again in an effort to catch up.
Matthew Dillon posted a Hammer summary and warning on the 25th, along with another update today, mostly about mirroring and very large (terabyte!) files. Michael Neumann is also adding to Hammer functionality.
He also did some initial porting work on netgraph from FreeBSD, though there’s some objections. The purpose is to make updating certain utilites easier.
This minor update to ATA support leads to a page with some interesting details about how ATA works.
FreeBSDNews.net has set up a Google calendar for FreeBSD events, though I daresay many of the events will have multiple BSDs represented.
You know how I always post about roguelike games here? The ultimate form of the roguelike has been announced.
Dru Lavigne says “Grs!“. A bonus point to whomever figures out that reference…
Gergo Szakal asked some questions on usage scenarios for Hammer; Matt Dillon answered the questions with enough details that I’m linking to it.
Matthew Dillon’s posted another Hammer update, this one looking forward to pseudo file systems and mirroring, and perhaps a bit farther.
Here’s some BSD and Linux comparisons that happened to come up recently:
First, NetBSD is moving to a 2-clause BSD license. Hubert Feyrer has mention of this, along with a small graph contrasting the word count of the GPL vs. the BSD license used in NetBSD, over time.
KernelTrap has a post up about a position statement from the Linux Foundation that “urge[s] vendors to adopt a policy of supporting their customers on Linux with open-source kernel code.” Compare that to the OpenBSD position on binary blobs.
The @Play column at GameSetWatch has another article on roguelikes. This covers early roguelike software that has become lost; a strange concept in today’s world where everything is saved somewhere out there on the Internet. For an added bonus, the column has a link to a newspost from Moria’s original author, which includes this interesting quote:
I plan to download it and Angband and play them… Maybe something has been added that will surprise me! That would be nice… I never got to play Moria and be surprised…
Is that perhaps the worst part of game development? You always know how the story ends.