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.
Seen linked on Blue’s News: Kahvipapu articles on Linux gaming with first person shooters, and strategy games parts one and two. There’s more sections promised, and it covers some games I’ve never heard of.
I link it here because some subsection of these games run on DragonFly; they can be found in pkgsrc or may compile directly. DragonFly’s biggest hurdle for many games is the lack of 3D support through DRI. Now that we have modular xorg, it’s probably not too complex a project. Admittedly, I’d mostly be using it for fancy screensavers, but it’s still a project I’d like to see.
If someone wanted to fill a niche site need, there’s no site that exists for BSD games. Admittedly, it’s a subset of a relatively small audience, with a limited quantity of games, but that just means that such a site could be built with sheer willpower, rather than funding.  Kind of like this one!
How big a disk can DragonFly’s new 64-bit disklabel support? Very.
Steve_- on #dragonflybsd and others sent along a link to an article on DragonFly on InformIT.com. It’s pretty in-depth, though there are some minor errors.
Chris Turner wrote up an interesting summary of what he’s seen in terms of the need for ‘realtime’ audio and how it’s been dealt with in the Linux world as well as BSD. There’s some mailing list links in there that can be used to eat up an hour or two of reading on a weekend…
Welcome Joe Talbott, who by this change appears to be our newest committer.
Hey look! netbsd.org has been redesigned.
NATA, the ‘new ATA’ disk system, will be in the next release of DragonFly, but it will still be called ‘NATA’, not renamed to ‘ATA’. Keep this in mind when eventually updating with a custom kernel file.
Do you have a leaf.dragonflybsd.org account? Now is a good time to clean it up.
Jeremy C. Reed has updated the wiki with a (long!) list of the new technologies that have arrived in DragonFly since branching from FreeBSD.
elekktretterr@exemail.com.au is offering $50 Austrailian dollars ($35 USD) to whomever can make net-snmp work. He needs it!
“Yair K” sent along a note mentioning that, as described on the OpenSolaris forums, 4Front Technologies (also involved with XMMS) is making their OpenSound system open source as of June 14th.
OpenSound was previously available for DragonFly, though support for it was quietly dropped probably around the same time 4Front stopped supporting FreeBSD 4. In any case, it is possible it could go into contrib/ now, if it has benefits – hopefully they will make it available under a more BSD-style license.
Network driver code has been shared between the BSDs a great deal lately, with a flowering of available drivers and support. Having a shared sound model too would also lead to benefits greater than the sum of its parts.
For once, I remembered to check up on BSDTalk and see what was new: A talk with Rick Macklem, specifically about NFSv4.
Matthew Dillon wrote a long message on how things are progressing with DragonFly; some projects like improved SMP support and 64-bit processing are almost ready for prime time, and just need someone to step up and complete them. The track record so far for DragonFly has been astoundingly stable; major changes in threading and process management have gone into the tree and it’s happened completely without destabilizing the system – e.g. it’s been safe even to run bleeding-edge code.
Also: the upcoming release will be 1.10, and hopefully GCC4.x can be made the default by the time 2.0 arrives.
Matthew Dillon wrote up two notes – one describing how he launches remote ssh sessions in an xterm under FVWM2, and another on handling TCP timeouts using NAT.
From the DragonFly mailing lists: Matthew Dillon posted a list of what will and won’t be in the next release. Rahul Siddharthan pointed out that there hasn’t been much user-visible improvement since FreeBSD-4, speaking specifically about 64-bit processors and SMP. Steve O’Hara-Smith added some less well known benefits we already have, while Michael Talon described the speed boost a 64-bit operating system gives. Matthew Dillon said “someone just needs to do it“. I daresay the conversation is not over.