Naoya Sugioka had trouble booting DragonFly on his Dell M4400. He updated ACPICA with this patch, and was able to boot. I link to it in case someone else with a recent Dell model (or perhaps just a laptop with the same chipset?) has the same issues.
Another point release for DragonFly 2.8 is planned, with a bunch of small updates, some of which have been covered here recently.
Jan Lentfer, who apparently has a high tolerance for pain, has now brought the kernel part of pf up to the equivalent of the OpenBSD 4.4 version, available for testing. It’s not yet committed. pfctl’s updated too.
Francois Tigeot was able to get wip/jdk15 to build on DragonFly, from pkgsrc-wip. Unfortunately, the package has been removed, but he’s looking to put it back.
If you have any last-minute suggestions for Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly, pass them along now – it starts Monday! Post them here, or in #dragonflybsd on EFNet IRC, or on the kernel@ mailing list. We have 34 already, but you can never have too many.
A number of people have encountered this: while installing some larger pkgsrc package, the process stops on a strange DocBook error. Alex Hornung has a fix: symlink /usr/pkg/etc/xml/catalog to /usr/pkg/share/xml/catalog.
It has multiple authors at this point starting with Chris Turner and moving to Siju George, but: the Flash setup is in the quickstart document. As I recall, someone put together a changed library for it that fixes a audio/video sync issue. Oh wait, I did find that before.
Alex Hornung is having trouble getting his power consumption as low as it could be on his DragonFly laptop. A side effect of this problem is that when he posts about it, he also manages to enumerate all the various ways you can reduce power consumption and heat usage on a laptop. (Follow the thread for more.)
If your system has trouble when APIC_IO is enabled, and you’re tracking DragonFly 2.9, you may have trouble on your next build. The fix is putting this in your loader.conf:
hw.apic_io_enable=0
I know this has already been covered, to some extent, but one can never be too clear with solutions.
Ilya Dryomov’s work on deduplication for Hammer has been committed to the tree in an early test form. I guess I need to pay up as part of the code bounty. If you’re wondering how much space it will save, but don’t want to try non-production code yet, there’s a ‘hammer dedup-simulate’ command that will estimate the saving ratio.
This is great news – deduplication is so valuable it adds an extra zero onto the price of any storage device that can do it.
Another day, another BSDTalk item: this time it’s 15 minutes with Matthew Dillon at MeetBSD, talking about the 2.8 release. It was recorded either today or yesterday – quite fresh.
Matthew happens to mention that experimental deduplication support will arrive next week in Hammer.
We’re part of Google Code-In! One of 20 organizations, this time.
If you want to contribute something right now, we can always use more Code-In ideas on our project page. (Follow the categories on the Code-In page.) Applications start on Nov. 22nd.
Update: my mailing list post with details.
Posted by ‘blinkkin’ on IRC: this SVG test using DragonFly facts. Click on it; it zooms.
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.
Swapcache is normally used with a SSD, but Matthew Dillon was able to set it up using a separate, ‘normal’ hard disk on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. This reduced pressure on the machine’s existing disk, especially with the recent release causing much traffic.
If you have trouble building Cairo or gstreamer or some other X-related packages, check this page from Dave Shao. It came in useful for me. (linked by Steve O’Hara Smith)
Pratyush Kshirsagar has added a howto page on setting up a ftp server, among other services .
The longer I work on this Digest, the harder the names are to spell.
Edit: Link fixed.
I updated the projects page for DragonFly with some labeling of potential work for Google Code-In. Pratyush Kshirsagar suggested porting busybox, which Chris Turner countered with flashdist/flashrd. ‘joris dedieu’ followed with beastiebox.
The early bird registration (a cheap $95) for NYCBSDCon has been extended an extra week to match how long they ran it previous years. November 7th, it goes to $125 and walk-in will be $145.