Category: Goings-on

There’s a post by the ZDNet Technical Director, George Ou, talking about the recently found issues with the Core 2 Duo processor.  Rather, he’s talking about people’s opinions about it.

I’m not linking it because it necessarily has more information, as it’s already been covered here, but rather to show the difference in speed and depth that can be found between what more annoying people like to call old media (print magazines) and new media (this Digest).

FreshBSD is a new site that collates commits to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly, and pkgsrc in a web interface, along with filters, thank goodness.  (Via hubertf)  Alright, maybe not every BSD flavor and variation, but still a pretty comprehensive slice.

Leonardo Baldelli posted a link to a number of DragonFly desktop backgrounds he created.

Noah Yan has volunteered himself for porting DragonFly to AMD64; Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, who has worked previously on this, suggested using git for handling changes, what with the next release coming soon.  Simon even gave a short writeup on git.

Joerg Sonnenberger asks: could someone fix the Java 1.4 (or later) JDK so that it builds on DragonFly? Many would thank you.

Matthew Dillon asks that people concentrate on fixes for the next few weeks as we get ready for the 1.10 release.

I’ll take a moment to point out that Joe “Floid” Kanowitz wrote up a lengthy analysis of the parts of GPL v3 as a comment to an earlier story here.  I’ve posted a bunch of stories since then, so I’d hate for people to miss it after he did all that typing.

Michal Belczyk has been experimenting with ways to make his Core 2 Duo system run less hot; he’s had some success. His patches should make it into DragonFly.

If cvsweb isn’t enough, Csaba Henk has updated his OpenGrok site of the DragonFly source code.

The Gnu Public License has reached version 3. Generally, everyone seems indifferent or, in Jem Matzan’s case, apathetic. (Links via hubertf) Everyone’s more interested in the Jesusphone. While we’re being mean about GPLv3… that’s one ugly logo.

Here’s two slightly tangential things that involve DragonFly: The first is a thread about large (64-bit) file support in Apache, and how it is treated as a special case because of poor planning under Linux – it’s not a problem in BSD. This led to an excellent quote from an excellent book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg“, by Clifford Stoll:

“We’re watching someone who’s never used Berkeley Unix.” He sucked in his breath and whispered, “A heathen.”

Also, “_why” posted a question about checkpointing to the users@ list, for an issue that Matthew Dillon later fixed. I recall that this _why is the same fellow who wrote “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby“, a programming book that is unlike any other.

Theo De Raadt’s description of bugs in recent Intel processors has made it to Slashdot, where in the comments, Matthew Dillon went through each bug and listed his opinion on each.  (two comment entries, starting here)  In contrast, Linus Torvalds’ general response was much more subdued.  (Thanks, Wiger Van Houten, for links)

According to these reports from the OpenBSD-misc mailing list, Intel’s Core Duo is buggy, and upcoming features on Intel motherboards create a second running environment accessible even when your computer is off, both of which create security risks. (Thanks, Hasso Tepper)

Before anyone starts to hyperventilate, keep in mind: 1: this is a warning of potential problems, not an assessment of existing problems. 2: It’s an OpenBSD mailing list, which can be described as ‘adversarial’.

Sascha Wildner posted a patch that allows direct use of WPA and DHCP commands within ifconfig for wireless connections, along with some other changes.

It is indeed possible to watch every file access made on your system, everywhere, by attaching ktrace to the init process.  It’ll generate a lot of data, though.

Here’s an entertaining possibility: Brian de Alwis, on the port-i386 NetBSD mailing list, noted that he was able to get ATI’s proprietary drivers for XFree86/Xorg working on NetBSD, at least for Xinerama support.   I daresay this would work for DragonFly too – anyone have a recent ATI card to try out?  (Original link from Greg Troxel)

A recent post here on the Digest attacted a lot of comments – some trolling, some useful.  Read at your leisure.

BSDTalk, which has a working RSS feed again, has a 9 minute interview with Sidsel Jensen from EuroBSDCon.

This week, UnixReview.com has a full arrangement of the usual topics: “Certification Changes and Updates“, a Regular Expressions column on “Python’s Mechanization“, a Shell Corner column continuing “Littera Delenda Est“, along with “Elements of Efficient and Secure Service Provisioning with Solaris“, and “Test Your Knowledge of Users and Groups“. Strangely, no book reviews this time.

The latest BSDTalk has no interview; it instead goes into using one-time passwords for a 6-minute talk.