BSD – Page 90 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2009/11/082009/11/07

Messylaneous for 2009/11/07

Where I get more linkbloggy than usual:

According to the 5th slide in this presentation, Android’s libc, “Bionic”, is BSD-derived. Anyone know which BSD? It looks like “whatever” is the answer.
There’s a video out about BSD Certification.
Hubert Feyrer has a note about NetBSD’s not-necessarily-intended moves towards a microkernel architecture. Other “move things to userland” steps have happened in DragonFly; it seems a trend.
Giorgos Keramidas talks about font substitution in Firefox. This should work on any platform.
Vim plugins: a.vim lets you switch between .c and .h files with a single command.
I should have linked to this yesterday: Epitome, a “deduplication engine” for OpenBSD, was mentioned a bit in the most recent BSDTalk. (via)
Gopher: not dead yet. (also via)

2009/11/072009/11/07

BSDCan 2010: May 13-14

BSDCan 2010 will be May 13th and 14th in Ottawa, Canada, with 2 days of classes beforehand. Maybe I’ll actually make it this year, like I wish every time…

2009/11/062009/11/07

BSDTalk 179: Jacek Masiulaniec on OpenSMTPd, Epitome

OpenBSD developer Jacek Masiulaniec gets 14 minutes of airtime in the most recent BSDTalk podcast.

2009/11/042009/11/04

BSD working survey

If you use any sort of BSD product at work, the BSD Certification group wants you to take a survey. They are building a cross section of what people are doing with BSD, and this will show what requirements should go with the certifications. Any BSD use applies, not just DragonFly. The more results, the better the tests, and the more value to the certifications, so we all benefit.

2009/11/01

OSBR: Co-creation part 1

The first one of the Open Source Business Resource Co-Creation issues is out. Read this if any of the open source software you use has a commercial component. (Chances are, yes, it does.)

2009/10/31

BSDTalk 178: Eeeeeeevil!

BSDTalk 178 is all about Evil! Well, Internet evil. It’s an hour-plus-long conversation wtih Richard Clayton at EuroBSDCon about phishing, spamming, and other things that didn’t have a name a few decades ago.

2009/10/30

OSBR: Co-creation for the rest of the year

The next theme for the Open Source Business Resource was to be “co-creation”, focusing on commercial companies and relationships with open source development. There were so many articles that it’s now covering 2 months.

2009/10/252010/02/13

Summer of Code conference

Matthew Dillon went to the Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Conference at Google’s offices in California, and took some pictures. It’s all available on Flickr. He was the only DragonFly attendee, but check to see what developers on other open-source projects look like in person. There’s even the not-related-to-me Joel Sherrill (on the left).

2009/10/13

More pkgsrc by git

There are now official but experimental git repositories of pkgsrc available. One’s already available for DragonFly, but either should work.

2009/10/06

BSD influences

Two items, picked from RSS feeds:

People get really excited when software on Windows or a Mac manages to automatically install software. BSD systems have been doing this for years.
What’s the first license mentioned when Palm opens up free access to open source software? BSD.

2009/10/042009/10/03

October OSBR: Arts and Media

The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Arts and Media as the theme. The article about film production using open-source tools is especially good, as articles like that tend to be a list of application names only, while this article goes into the whys and wherefores.

2009/09/282009/09/27

BSDMag 6 in stores

Seen via Richard Bejtlich’s excellent Taosecurity blog: the 6th issue of BSD Magazine is out.

Don’t forget, the first 3 issues (scroll down on that link) are free to download in PDF format.

2009/09/27

bsdtalk177 – Giorgos Keramidas

Yay, another BSDTalk! Will Backman talks about where he’s been for the past month in BSDTalk number 177, and plays back a talk with FreeBSD developer Giorgos Keramidas.

2009/09/11

Another aggregation site

Mahdi Montazeri sent in the URL to another new BSD site: irbsd.com. It’s a generic web framework reposting RSS feeds from other people, without linking back to the originals, so nothing new.

2009/09/10

More BSD News

Dru Lavigne has found a new cross-BSD news site, BSD News Network. I would like to see it get away from a generic blog layout and hold something other than RSS feed data, since there’s already TheDailyBSD and BSDNews and BSDPlanet for that.

I may be a bit grumpy about it since sites that aggregate BSD news feeds often end up being something close to 50% composed of words originally typed by me, because of the Digest’s regularity. I’d like to see BSD news sources with at least a hint of authorial voice, not machine-operated copying. FreeBSD – the unknown Giant is close to that, for instance.

2009/08/232009/08/25

Another BSD fork

ÆrieBSD; a fork from OpenBSD. (via) It appears to be GNU-free.

Update: Steven Rosenberg has some further research.

2009/08/232009/08/22

More BSD Magazine

BSD Magazine’s 3 previous issues are all available for download. If you like what you see, please subscribe. (via)

2009/08/15

Messylaneous: books, lawsuits, git, more

Dear universe, including DragonFly people: stop doing so much stuff. It’s hard to keep up.

Git in One Hour, an O’Reilly webcast. You need to register (free) and so on, but what the heck. O’Reilly doesn’t show crap.
Poul Henning-Kamp is suing to recover the cost of Vista on his Lenovo laptop. (He’s installing FreeBSD.) I hope it comes out in his favor, though it will have little legal effect here in the U.S. (via)
I didn’t realize this until I chimed in on the mailing lists, but one of the best books about file systems is freely available as a PDF.
Another benefit of Hammer: you can’t run out of inodes, nor is it possible to have too many hardlinks.
Some notes on pf usage in DragonFly. I know some parts have been mentioned before, but it’s good to sum up.

2009/08/132009/08/12

BSD licensing, in a number of ways

Well, technically, the title is “Twenty questions about the GPL“, but I read it more as reasons for using the BSD license. (via)

Also, I was going to link to this article about increased BSD(ish) license adoption, and then I wasn’t, and then I found that Dru Lavigne had managed to pull out the quote that summarized the idea perfectly.

While I’m on this theme, this Coding Horror “Digital Sharecropping” article complains that people are effectively doing free labor for companies that plan to profit from that labor. There’s a parallel between free software and the activity he’s worried about. Not that he’s wrong, mind you, but there’s more to the story.

2009/08/092009/08/06

Donation time

The FreeBSD Foundation is seeking donations – not that they aren’t always open to it, but they’re asking now instead of at the end of year rush. The Foundation does excellent work getting developers to conferences and sponsoring projects, all of which increases the amount of free code in the world. If you’ve got some spare cash, please donate. It doesn’t have to be a lot, as having a large pool of donors is almost as valuable as total donation size.