‘william opensource4you’ posted a summary of the steps he took for setting up a DragonFly system with XFCE4, using dports. It’s pretty straightforward, and thanks to dport’s binary nature, should be exactly reproducible.
John Marino brought up a point every operating system project will have to think about: when does support for i386 (i.e. 32-bit x86 processors) stop? Follow the thread for details. There’s no final answer, yet.
As posted in my email to users@: Version 3.4 of DragonFly is officially out.
The release ISO/IMG files are all available at the usual mirrors:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/mirrors/
The release notes have details on all the changes:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release34/
If you are planning to try the new dports system for installing third-party software, check the DPorts Howto page:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToDPorts/
If you have an installed DragonFly 3.2 system and you are looking to upgrade, these (not directly tested) steps should work, as root:
cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
… And then go through the normal buildworld/buildkernel process found in /usr/src/UPDATING. If you are running a generic kernel, that can be as simple as
make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade
(and then reboot)
If you encounter problems, please report them at bugs.dragonflybsd.org. I get better at testing for each release, but I also get better at discovering new problems just after release.
Are you using hotplugd? If you are, this post from ‘william opensource4you’ about a small patch he made may be useful to you.
John Marino has committed updates for libmpfr, diff utils, grep, and libexpat/libbsdxml. Libmpfr, the one item that I suspect doesn’t spring instantly to mind, is a library for floating-point computation.
As I described in a post to the kernel@ mailing list, the DragonFly 3.4 images are getting uploaded for mirroring and downloaded for testing. Assuming no surprises happen, we will be able to release very soon.
Now’s the time to put in your application for Summer of Code projects, if you’re a student. The application period runs until May 3rd. There’s already been some proposals on the mailing lists; now they can be put in officially.
I’ll point out the last link is from a returning GSoC student, and has a lot of detail; use that as an example if you’re thinking about your own application.
If you administer one of the DragonFly mirrors, there’s a new /dports directory that can be mirrored. See that second link for details.
Ivan Uemlianin expressed a desire to read about the boot process, and how BSD works in general. I made a short list of suggestions.
John Marino published a ‘cheatsheet‘ (also, typo fix)for DragonFly 3.5 users who want to try dports, using DragonFly 3.4 packages.
John Marino has a concise explanation of why dports mostly uses gcc 4.4 still to compile, even if you’re building DragonFly itself with the default 4.7. It’s a reason to not use NO_GCC44 – yet.
Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:
- We have the ability to use pkgsrc or dports (building from source in either case) now
- Several people have committed the remaining last-minute fixes
- I’m not going to have pkgsrc binaries built for the release.
- dports binaries – John Marino and Francois Tigeot are uploading now.
I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.
DPorts is based off of FreeBSD’s ports, but it’s possible to add software packages to it that don’t exist in FreeBSD’s ports system and have them build as any other packages. This is briefly detailed in this GitHub bug report, along with a number of the ports that already exist that way.
Matthew Dillon wrote a note about SSDs, HDDs, and swapcache that may be useful for anyone building a system soon. Conversations about SSDs, swapcache, and so on have happened before.
Peter Avalos has updated ftp in DragonFly. It’s actually tnftp, which is the same base ftp client used in FreeBSD/NetBSD/Mac OS X/etc. It’s the 20121224 version, and the 3.4 release branch has it too.
The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)
If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)
We’re accepted! The application requirements, etc. will be up on the Google Summer of Code site as soon as I can fill out the forms.
The upcoming DragonFly 3.4 release will not include the USB4BSD port from Markus Pfeiffer; he’s hoping for it to become default in the next release after 3.4.
You can still try it, as it’s present in DragonFly but not on by default. Help with driver porting is always welcome, of course.