Opensolaris.org is up, where Sun is releasing a large quantity of code for Solaris. Neat! Solaris is based off of BSD4.1, if you look back far enough. Way, way far. (Thanks Slashdot.)
FreeBSD 4.11 has been released. This is probably the last release in the 4.x series, though it will be updated for some time yet with needed security fixes. The next DragonFly release is slated for before the USENIX Technical Conference in April, so there’s an upgrade path available…
UnixReview.com has three new articles up: one on using the man page editor ManEdit, one on the security tool Samhain, and a review of the No Starch Press book “Write Great Code — Understanding the Machine“. Incidentally, the No Starch Press book Absolute BSD (covering FreeBSD, by excellent writer Michael Lucas of Big Scary Daemons fame) is a rare thing: a book about an operating system that’s fun to read.
Guillermo Garcia Rojas has created Spanish translations of Installing DragonFly and Laptop Installation.
There’s now a Lithuanian translation of the DragonFly FAQ, on the wiki. There’s also a Polish translation out there, too, that I managed to previously miss.
ONLamp/BSD has a new BSD News report up, this time summarizing December 2004.
Google Alerts told me about a new article on OSNews titled “Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom” that mentions, among other things, DragonFly being a fork from FreeBSD. While on the forked product idea, BSDNews has a nice link up to an explanation of Xorg’s 3D support (somewhat Linuxy) in the form of DRI, which also has a wiki.
If you’re feeling particularly Gallic, there’s a Paris BSD meeting on 02/02/2005. (Thanks BSDNews.)
For some lazy weekend reading: the Cell architecture. The article’s partially hypothetical, but interesting. If consumer-level PCs using this architecture were built, DragonFly would be a good fit.
Matthew Dillon posted two lengthy messages; one about SMP handling on DragonFly, and the other on kernel threading models and how they work.
So as to not conflict with other CVS repositories, the DragonFly repositories are going to change in name. Matt Dillon detailed it.
Anreas Hauser, with Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, has managed to create a Xorg 6.8.1 port and package that does not the weak thread library problem. ‘pkg_add -r’ the package file he mentions in his post, and you’ll be set.
As promised, DragonFly_Stable is just now matched up with the newest DragonFly source. It’s a good time to update!
Matthew Dillon’s planning to synchonize the stable DragonFly code with the newest code, since there’s been so few problems lately. It’ll happen tomorrow!
ONLamp/BSD has two new articles up. One is an interview with Scott Long of FreeBSD about FreeBSD 5’s SMP implementation – DragonFly is mentioned in contrast. The other is a report of November’s BSD news. Both seem a little late – November is no longer last month as mentioned in the article, and the interview places FreeBSD 5.3 in the future. I’m nitpicking, as they are both good articles.
A few people posted that they could not build world. Matthew Dillon suggested cleaning out the object directory.
‘Piet’ posted a link to a “Walk Through the PicoBSD Kernel“. This would be FreeBSD-based, but still relevant to DragonFly.
The Sitetronics wiki page for DragonFly has undergone a DNS makeover – it is now “http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/“.
‘nega’ posted some additional info about RSA vs. DSA encryption.
The latest addition to Dru Lavigne’s “FreeBSD Basics” column on ONLamp.com is “More FreeBSD for Linux Users“. It’s oriented towards FreeBSD and Linux, but it generally applies to DragonFly and Linux, too. Also, there’s a nice link collection at the end of the article.