February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.
Chris Turner went off into some extra detail on how the rc system works, with extra links for anyone interested in some history.
The theme for this month’s Open Source Business Resource is “Recent Research“. The topic’s broad, so there’s something for everyone. The article on licensing (BSD and otherwise) is of interest.
Entertainment, this week. There’s several items here that will be more entertaining if you’re over 25. Or maybe 35. Get clicking!
- If O’Reilly was to publish any of the various parody books out there, it should be this one.
- Also, looking for those image links led me to this programming language suggestion. Oh! And that led me to this treat for people who remember Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
- A good game critic talking unabashedly about his love of roguelikes? I am so linking it!
- An update on the OpenBSD IPSec backdoor kerfuffle thing.
- OK, back to entertainment. A magic number!
- Wierd: new NetBSD platform support… from Microsoft.
- Huh. Apparently there’s some other meanings for BSD.
- Among other things, this article describes some Ruby tests that work so vigorously to make the tests like natural language that they become harder to write. No big story there; I’m sharing my sense of surprise.
- BSD: it’s tough. (link fixed) The complaints these people make are valid, though.
‘file’ has been updated to version 5.05 by Peter Avalos. file(1) is one of those utilities that I forget is a contributed, external piece of software, even though it’s been in Unix since 1973.
(file is one year older than me!)
The latest BSD Magazine is “BSD’s and Solaris“, and it sets my teeth on edge to write that apostrophe. Seen via FreeBSDNews, though I haven’t seen it noted in BSD Magazine-sourced email/RSS yet.
Stuff!
- I find this erasure of the separation between remote code repository and local code editor very interesting. It may upset more traditional people.
- If you haven’t been watching the BSD Events Twitter stream, Dru Lavigne’s written a nice summary of the next few months, including BSD Exam dates/locations.
- The XFCE 4.8 release announcement hinted at some problems with BSD. It’s apparently because udev, a Linux-only product, is the only consistent way to access various items, so XFCE’s power and volume controls use it. There’s no udev on BSD, so we get left out. I’d normally end this with a call for a compatibility layer, but udev is the latest in a series of jumps from framework to framework in Linux, so I don’t know if it would actually do any good. (Thanks, sjg on #dragonflybsd for the link)
- The Economist has an article on open-source that does a hype-free job of describing the state of open source today. It points out two trends that I don’t think are covered enough: the large amount of open-source work funded by companies, and the hidden costs of training and integration. One downside of the “software is free, training costs money” model for open source is that it creates an economic incentive for byzantine configurations and difficult setups. That idea could use some exploration, but I don’t think many people want to, precisely because it’s negative. The article doesn’t go that far, but they should.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is titled “The Business of Open Source”. The first article, titled “Cost Optimization Through Open Source Software“, explains why iXSystems is all BSD, all the time. There’s also an eye-opening breakdown of the dramatic cost savings from going with open-source rather than Windows.
MirBSD is apparently also interested in pkgsrc as an alternative to the exclusive-to-MirBSD Mirports. The more the merrier, I say.
The latest(?) version of BSD Magazine is out. Among other things, it has an intro to pkgsrc. The site lists November 2010 for this issue, but it just showed up on the Twitter feed, so I’m not totally sure I have this right. In any case, it’s a free download.
Marius Nünnerich posted a call for papers for FOSDEM 2011. Submissions need to be in by December 20th; the Brussels conference itself is happening in February.
(Has anyone been to this? What was it like?)
My NYCBSDCon 2010 summary, or How I Spent My New York City vacation:
This is just based on what’s shown up in my Inbox lately:
- AsiaBSDCon has a Call for Papers for the 2011 event, next March.
- ECI in Argentina has a Call for Course Proposals.
- MeetBSD 2010 is in a few days. (The conference with a paraplegic woman as the logo?)
- BSDDay 2010 is happening in Hungary later this month.
- NYCBSDCon has added BoF sessions to the schedule. (Early registration ends soon!)
Of course, for about a zillion more events, watch the BSDEvents Twitter feed.
The November issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Economic Development.” I like the microcredit article, but perhaps that’s just my special interest.
The December issue’s theme is “Humanitarian Open Source” and the guest editor will be Leslie Hawthorn. She’s currently Open Source Outreach Manager at Oregon State University Open Source Lab, but some may remember her as the face of Google Summer of Code for the past several years.
The BSD Show! has a 20-minute interview with John Hixson, known for working on pc-sysinstall. (See also)
There’s still no support for KMS/GEM on any most BSDs, though there are people interested in it for FreeBSD. One of DragonFly’s Summer of Code projects was just that, though it’s not in a state where it can be really used.
Scott Ullrich, who has worked on several BSD-related projects, including DragonFly, has something called vCloudBSD, about which you now know as much as me. It looks to be a FreeBSD auto-installer for virtualization, though I’m sure I’m overgeneralizing.
Hasso Tepper helpfully forwarded announcements for the Call for Papers for both EuroBSDCon 2011 and AsiaBSDCon 2011.
Also, there’s probably going to be DragonFly people at 27C3, and I know there’s going to be some at NYCBSDCon 2010. The early registration discount for NYCBSDCon only lasts about 10 more days, so jump on it while you can; it’s crazy cheap.
Something for everyone this week.
- Via sjg/IRC: The next platforms for DragonFly: Dragon 32 and Dragon 64.
- chmod -x chmod: a slideshow of possible solutions. (via) As ‘blinkkin’ pointed out on IRC: “hammer history /bin/chmod” and “cp /bin/chmod@@0xtransaction_id” would also fix it.
- 328 slides of git-wrangling tips (also via)
- How to pretend to be busy. I wish I had time for this.
- The first MUD, as a solution for class conflict, and not the fighter-vs-mage-vs-cleric type. (via)
Found via a random Google search: SSHGuard. It’s not available in pkgsrc, but it’s in other BSD packaging systems, and it lists DragonFly on the site as a possible host. It monitors various services and blocks access to overly aggressive connections using (on DragonFly) pf. This is similar to scripts discussed here in the past. It also may be useful in light of the recent FTPd problem.