It’s now possible to pick which sort of compression you want to use for dsynth packages – xz is the default, but you can go gzip for speed.
The Digest and TeleVideo
Thanks to Erik Blomberg and the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, I now know the Digest has reached a whole new operating system: CP/M. This entertains me.
(It’s the Digest being browsed in text mode on a TeleVideo TS-803, if you can’t see the screen well enough.)
msdos fixes, of all things
Tomohiro Kusumi has been bringing in a large number of fixes to the msdos filesystem, mostly from FreeBSD, but from other sources. I’m not going to link to them all, cause there’s many over the last few weeks, but the good news is that there’s performance gains for this lowest-common-denominator filesystem.
Reminder: set hostname
You should set hostname in /etc/rc.conf. I am mentioning this now because not doing it kept me from running X apps from a DragonFly system on a Windows 10 system with vcxsrv, and I wasted half an hour of my life figuring that out. Apparently this is a lesson I need to keep relearning.
Watching dsynth go
dsynth(1) has a new ‘monitor’ command, which watches log output and tells you what it’s doing. I haven’t tried it yet, so I am only guessing. A screenshot would be nice.
Default jail variables change
The default variables for jails on DragonFly have changed; obviously this only affects you if you are running jails. Adjust your rc.conf as needed.
HAMMER2 and fsck for review
HAMMER2 is Copy on Write, meaning changes are made to copies of existing data. This means operations are generally atomic and can survive a power outage, etc. (You should read up on it!) However, there’s now a fsck command, useful if you want a report of data validity rather than any manual repair process.
dsynth: you’re building it
dhcpcd 8.0.6 added
A quick entry: dhcpcd(8) 8.0.6. committed to DragonFly.
utmp out, utmpx in
The headline is a little misleading; umtpx has been in DragonFly forever, but now utmp is really retired and programs adjusted to match. The change is not that user-affecting and utmp data is still accessible; this is part of the ABI change alluded to over the past week.
If you are not familiar with utmp(5) and utmpx(5), they are databases in /var that track user logins and system restarts. utmpx is of course better cause it has an X.
New packages for DragonFly-current
If you are on DragonFly-current, the ABI changes of the past few days are complete and new dports packages are built, so now is a good time to do a complete build and install of world and kernel, and then a pkg update.
5.6 users can keep on keeping on; no breakage there.
Keep rebuilding
ABI breakage continues, so continue the full buildworld/buildkernel cycle, if you are on DragonFly-current, and continue to ignore it, if you are on 5.6.
Update: yeah aim for next week.
ABI breakage in DragonFly master
There’s commits being made in DragonFly that will break binary compatibility. If you are running DragonFly-master, that means you will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel when updating, and you will either have to rebuild packages or wait some days until a new set are built.
If you are running the 5.6 release, you are unaffected.
openresolv now in DragonFly
Roy Marples has imported openresolv 3.9.2 to DragonFly. This is a replacement for the old-style /etc/resolv.conf file. The more complicated your network, the more you will appreciate this tool.
msdosfs updates
route updates in DragonFly
New dhcpcd for DragonFly
Roy Marples has brought in version 8.0.4 of dhcpcd(8); it’s definitely up to date since he’s the author. It does DHCP, DHCPv6, and IPv4LL/ZeroConf, the last of which I’ve only seen on Apple machines before. Someone want to try Network Configurator with it?
Scrolling in X
I’ve seen a similar config other places, but it never hurts to note: scrolling in X requires just a few xorg config lines.
Synaptics touchpad notes
Jails, individualized
Jails on DragonFly now have their own sysctl tree, inherited from defaults. And are no longer MPLOCKed.