The latest BSDTalk has no interview; it instead goes into using one-time passwords for a 6-minute talk.
Seen linked on Blue’s News: Kahvipapu articles on Linux gaming with first person shooters, and strategy games parts one and two. There’s more sections promised, and it covers some games I’ve never heard of.
I link it here because some subsection of these games run on DragonFly; they can be found in pkgsrc or may compile directly. DragonFly’s biggest hurdle for many games is the lack of 3D support through DRI. Now that we have modular xorg, it’s probably not too complex a project. Admittedly, I’d mostly be using it for fancy screensavers, but it’s still a project I’d like to see.
If someone wanted to fill a niche site need, there’s no site that exists for BSD games. Admittedly, it’s a subset of a relatively small audience, with a limited quantity of games, but that just means that such a site could be built with sheer willpower, rather than funding.  Kind of like this one!
Joerg Sonnenberger has posted the results of his new pbulk system, for bulk builds of pkgsrc, on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list.  His test bed is building DragonFly, so the results show just how many packages build on DragonFly. The report comes in text and graphical (warning: big!) versions too.
An interesting corollary to this, from reading the reports, is that out of 7,213 packages in pkgsrc, only 167 actually fail to build on DragonFly – that’s only 2% broken. There are other packages that fail due to dependencies on those broken packages, but it’s still a remarkably good percentage.
How big a disk can DragonFly’s new 64-bit disklabel support? Very.
Two warnings: the compatibility slice is changing, and disklabel is going through extensive changes. If you run bleeding-edge code, you will want to do a full rebuild.
Steve_- on #dragonflybsd and others sent along a link to an article on DragonFly on InformIT.com. It’s pretty in-depth, though there are some minor errors.
Videos of the talks from the most recent pkgsrcCon are up now. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer)
Chris Turner wrote up an interesting summary of what he’s seen in terms of the need for ‘realtime’ audio and how it’s been dealt with in the Linux world as well as BSD. There’s some mailing list links in there that can be used to eat up an hour or two of reading on a weekend…
Welcome Joe Talbott, who by this change appears to be our newest committer.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added his patch to allow separate volume control for each application. Also, Hasso Tepper has produced a patch for sound that includes changes taken from FreeBSD 6, which improves device support.
pkgsrc has a temporary freeze coming up, where only fixes will be committed in preparation for the 2007Q2 branch, for release this Saturday, June 16th. (No link, cause netbsd.org is apparently unreachable for me right now.)
Matthew Dillon asks that 1.9 users test using USB memory devices; he’s recently committed a large number of fixes related to physically removing mounted USB drives. Also, automatically mounting reconnected drives is a small, easy project enabled by this recent work. (See linked article for details.)
Hey look! netbsd.org has been redesigned.
NATA, the ‘new ATA’ disk system, will be in the next release of DragonFly, but it will still be called ‘NATA’, not renamed to ‘ATA’. Keep this in mind when eventually updating with a custom kernel file.
Do you have a leaf.dragonflybsd.org account? Now is a good time to clean it up.
Jeremy C. Reed has updated the wiki with a (long!) list of the new technologies that have arrived in DragonFly since branching from FreeBSD.
Matthew Dillon, while investigating a separate problem, ended up improving the separation between CPUs in a multiprocessor system. The Big Giant Lock is still there, but it’s a move in the right direction.
elekktretterr@exemail.com.au is offering $50 Austrailian dollars ($35 USD) to whomever can make net-snmp work. He needs it!
“Yair K” sent along a note mentioning that, as described on the OpenSolaris forums, 4Front Technologies (also involved with XMMS) is making their OpenSound system open source as of June 14th.
OpenSound was previously available for DragonFly, though support for it was quietly dropped probably around the same time 4Front stopped supporting FreeBSD 4. In any case, it is possible it could go into contrib/ now, if it has benefits – hopefully they will make it available under a more BSD-style license.
Network driver code has been shared between the BSDs a great deal lately, with a flowering of available drivers and support. Having a shared sound model too would also lead to benefits greater than the sum of its parts.