If you’ve got a really, really old DragonFly installation that been upgraded from… 1.8? Perhaps earlier? The system will be using libc_r instead of lib_xu. If you want to change to lib_xu, which is the long-term goal, Hasso Tepper has the simple steps listed.
If you’re setting up a DragonFly workstation, and you want to use two monitors, here are some suggestions on what video card to use.
The general plan for binary pkgsrc packages are to keep them around for the current release and the previous release. Some people say “delete now!“, some say “No, wait!“. What’s your opinion?
This Internetnews.com article makes a good point: DragonFly has thrived since splitting from FreeBSD 5+ years ago, and the difference between the systems is more apparent now, with the introduction of DevFS and Hammer.
The freeze period for the 2009Q3 release of pkgsrc has started, and should result in a release around the end of September.
Binary packages built from 2009Q3, for DragonFly, should be available approximately a week after that.
Edit: See? Definitely started now.
A script I was running on avalon.dragonflybsd.org yesterday afternoon removed the packages, iso images, and snapshots stored there. (Sorry!) Hammer saved my bacon, with a snapshot of the 182G of missing files immediately available.
If you were bit by the bug where the 64-bit version of DragonFly wouldn’t boot from CD/DVD on your system, Matthew Dillon has some test images of DragonFly 2.4 for testing. Please use and report if it was successful.
Stathis Kamperis, as part of his Summer of Code work, ported NetBSD’s POSIX message queues to DragonFly. He has a writeup of all the details, and even has test cases! It should be showing up in 2.5 soon.
The utilities pkg_radd and pkg_search now support a BINPKG_BASE variable. This variable can point to alternate binary download sites, in case the defaults aren’t working well for you.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.4 on amd64, you may have noticed trouble with USB drives or separate issues with ACPI. Both seem to be fixed by the same commit. It’s been merged to the 2.4 branch, so updating on that branch will get the fixes without moving to 2.5.
Some months ago, Nikita Glukhov started working on a port of tmpfs to DragonFly. It’s incomplete, but Alex Hornung has put together a nice summary and is looking for someone to take it up again. I’d sure like to see it active again; it’s much better than mfs.
DragonFly’s newest committer is Jordan Gordeev, whose name may already be familiar. He’s the student behind the 2008/2009 Summer of Code projects for AMD64 support in DragonFly. You’ll notice the 2.4 release has a 64-bit version, in no small part due to his effort. Welcome Jordan!
There’s now a Git repo of pkgsrc. This is just a copy from cvs every 15 minutes, so it won’t allow changes back to pkgsrc, but it’s much faster to download via git than it is via cvs.
If you had any trouble with the dramatic changes in the 2.4 page, there’s a page on the DragonFly BSD site that lists possible workarounds.
The 2.4 release of DragonFly is out. This is a major release, with a lot of new features packed in, so read the release notes carefully. There’s a 64-bit experimental version, too
By the way, please use a mirror. Avalon is a good one, as is chlamydia.
Updating steps I used after the cut.
Well, technically, they are 2.3.1+ packages, but they will work fine on 2.4 and can be installed via pkg_radd.
The 2.4 release has been branched, and the release ISO should be available Wednesday.
Alex Hornung has ported FreeBSD’s kbdmux, making it possible to run multiple keyboards. This can help if a system has a built-in virtual keyboard, as some newer HPs do.
If you’re running 10G Ethernet, Matthew Dillon’s turned on the inflight limiter by default, which should help keep your system from being overwhelmed if it’s not handling the greater volume of packets. If you’re not running 10G Ethernet, this shouldn’t affect you. If only we all could be so lucky.