Sascha Wildner submitted a whole bunch of changes to vidcontrol(1); among other things, the colors/modes you can set in your terminal are more flexible, and it handles problems a lot better. This hasn’t been committed yet, and I usually don’t mention code until it’s in, but Sascha posted some nice photos of some of the possible modes:
David Rhodus has removed the system notes and checks for performing an a.out to elf upgrade. Old cruft, gone.
Here’s seven pages of a mixed-media comic by Souther Salazar. This has nothing to do with DragonFly other than the title, but it’s a fun link.
It might be worthwhile to get a artist to do some logo work for DragonFly; it’s been done for other operating systems.
There’s a new ‘known good’ installation ISO on the dragonflybsd.org download page.
Devon H. O’Dell has been creating a whole set of premade packages for DragonFly. Instead of working with ports/dfports, you can pkg_add these file directly.
Matt Dillon’s changed the UPDATING document, separating the “Upgrade from FreeBSD” and the “Upgrade DragonFly” sections into separate passages.
‘esmith’ linked to another project that handles devices, used in Linux: “User-Space System Device Enumeration” (uDSE).
Looking for things to do? Here’s Hiten Pandya’s list of possible merges from FreeBSD. There’s a lot of tasks there of varying length and difficulty, so if you feel like trying something out, go for it and post your patch to the dragonfly.submit list.
Thanks to Matt Emmerton’s conversion work and my commit, the logo_saver KLD now shows the DragonFly logo instead of the BSD beastie. (Chuck’s gone to “bsdlogo”.)
Eirik Nygaard has added less version 381.
Jonathon McKitrick asked about “last known stable” tags, and the June release date for 1.0. Matt Dillon replied that a known stable tag will appear once the networking code is stable, and that a late June release is still planned
‘esmith’ asked about udev/hotplug in contrast to FreeBSD-5’s devfs, listing these links for more info.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev-FAQ
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1893
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml
Eirik Nygaard has updated the One True awk in DragonFly to version 20040207. This temporarily broke the buildworld process, so if you tried a buildworld this afternoon and it failed with awk, it should now work. (Fixed by David Rhodus.)
David Rhodus has added the twa(4) driver, for the 3Ware Escalade 9000 series storage controller, based on Vinod Kashyap’s version in FreeBSD.
Joerg Sonnenberger is merging some FreeBSD 5.x changes to kobj, which changes the ABI. This means rebuild all modules on your next kernel build. That includes your nvidia driver, too, if you have it.
Matt Dillon found that using short-form names in /etc/fstab would cause the DNS resolver to return “host not found”, even if there was just a timeout (which should result in “try again”) when first looking up that name. This is now fixed. If you found you could not mount NFS volumes at boot, but they worked when done manually after boot, this should fix it.
Eirik Nygaard has committed diffutils 2.8.1 into the tree. This is similar to previous third-party software additions in that DragonFly-specific changes are managed through additional patches to original code, not by creating a DragonFly-only version of diffutils. Future upgrades are made much more easy using this method.
Based on a patch from Tobias ‘ibotty’ Florek, Eirik Nygaard has set DragonFly to build only Brian Kernighan’s One True awk. gawk, the GNU version of awk, is out. I’ll just take a geek moment here and point out Kernighan’s “The Practice of Programming” is one of my favorite computer books ever.