A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Larry Wall’s most recent State of the Onion on perl.com gives an interesting rundown of his experience with scripting languages. No Perl experience required to get the history lesson. His description of PHP is especially good:
We’ve also seen the rise of PHP, which takes the worse-is-better approach to dazzling new depths, as it were. By and large PHP seems to be making the same progression of mistakes as early Perl did, only slower.
Dru Lavigne has a review of The Book of PF up. PF, for those late to the party, is the stateful packet filter that originated in OpenBSD but is also used in DragonFly.
If you still have any applications using PHP 4 on your system, you should upgrade to PHP 5.x soon.
Hasso Tepper has been looking at the bugs database for DragonFly and started to categorize some of the remaining issues. If you posted any of these bugs (i.e. through a mail to the bugs@ mailing list), please check through his message and mention if the issue is still current.
Matthew Dillon has committed Matthias Schmidt’s pkg_search program to DragonFly, so the tool will always be accessible.
Robert de Bock has a number of OpenSSH tricks up on Undeadly. The first one, ‘Using SSH Keys‘, should be required reading.
Dmitry Komissaroff has a new version of his Bluetooth port available for testing.
The Call for Papers is out for the 2008 USENIX technical conference, and registration is open for Software Development West 2008. The papers for USENIX are due in early January.
wrote a ‘pkg_search‘ utility that runs a bit more easily than ‘bmake search’ for finding packages in pkgsrc. It’s available from his site, which has a number of other utilities and papers on it worth reading.
It was recently noted that the BBC created their own version of an “On Rails” system, using Perl. While it’s not that dramatic, as similar and highly polished systems already exist, it’s interesting to see that larger corporations seem to always progress towards, not away from, open source and sharing code.
Hasso Tepper has committed all the recent changes to sound infrastructure in FreeBSD-6 to DragonFly; this improves sound support on a number of different laptops.
Dmitry Komissaroff has created a new version of the Bluetooth stack, with a version ready to test.  Among other changes, it’s now possible to use a cellphone via Bluetooth to establish a PPP connection. There are other caveats.
AsiaBSDCon 2008 is scheduled for March 27-30 in Tokyo. The deadline for paper proposals has been pushed to December 11th, and there is a mailing list for further announcements – check the official website for more information.
According to Google image search, this very Digest has something to do with boobs. If this trend continues, I predict a significant increase in traffic. And disappointed visitors. (via Joerg Sonnenberger, who is apparently the common thread)
Matthew Dillon has posted another of his (apparently regular?) HAMMER updates.
It starts with trying to install BSD, and goes downhill from there. (Check the image properties for more of the joke.)
This AP news story seen in several places describes how the BSA has been vigorously obtaining money in and out of court for pirated software, and it appears to be procuring more money than the actual value of the pirated software. … Another good reason to use open source, which the article touches on, by the end.
If you have a laptop with bleeding-edge DragonFly and an ExpressCard slot, please test it out, as Sepherosa Ziehau has made them supportable.
I like super-small computers as much as anyone, and I’ve been watching for the new Asus Eee PC. It uses Linux, though there’s been issues with it conforming with the GPL license.  You know, if the device only ran a BSD, there wouldn’t be these licensing problems… (BSD link via hubertf)
