On UnixReview.com: “Test Your Knowledge of Regular Expressions and Shell Basics“, a book review of “Scripting VMware Power Tools“, and a product review of Komodo 4.0.
pkgsrc now has the new modular version of xorg. There isn’t yet a single meta-package to pull it all in as there was for monolithic xorg, but you can find the packages pretty easily by just looking at what Joerg Sonnenberger is working on. If you want to build packages using this latest version, set ‘X11_VERSION=modular’ in your mk.conf file. (Thanks to Joerg for cluing me in to this.)
Someone want to get DRI/DRM working? NetBSD just started getting it together, and it would be handy to take advantage of some of the xorg features with it.
Mike Wolman posted some benchmarks using a virutal kernel, and Matthew Dillon followed up with an explanation on what affects speed in the virtual environment.
Matthew Dillon has written up some details of how he wants the syslink protocol to deal with a variety of situations, like asymmetrical bandwidth, or having to discover the network path when the state of the network is changing or broken. I see some similarities with other successful protocols you may have heard of.
Steve O’Hara-Smith has managed to get nspluginwrapper working. This program acts as a wrapper for FireFox plugins compiled for other platforms, most notably Flash. The changes have been submitted (and already included!) upstream into pkgsrc, but you can get details from him now, if desired.
Rumko posted a kdebase patch to the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list. This patch corrects kdebase to work with the recent 1:1 threading changes in DragonFly.
From an anonymous post: dragonfly clusters.
From a discussion on users@: if you’re thinking about a UPS, look at what apcupsd can support. (hint: apparently, almost anything)
dragonflybsd.org has been down for a good chunk of today; it was due to a blown transformer.
Google Alerts told me of two links: “Baby Steps with DragonFly BSD 1.8.1“, and “Review: DragonFly BSD 1.8.1“. Both excellent reviews, in that they describe an accurate picture of the good and bad points of the recent release.
I’ve given the main page of leaf.dragonflybsd.org a slight update, to show more of the resources available to developers.
A task where much of the heavy lifting has been done: making a kernel boot no matter how many processors are in the system. (notes)Â Right now, SMP kernels can’t boot on a system with 1 CPU, so the LiveCD runs only a non-SMP kernel.
On UnixReview.com this week: “Test Your Knowledge of Ethernet Topics“, two book reviews: “Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference” and “Building the Perfect PC“, along with a product review of “The Ultimate CompTIA Network+ Resource Kit” and the host integrity tool “Osiris“.
A recurring argument that pops up from time to time is replacing Sendmail in the base system with something else – Postfix , qmail, or a similar product. Licensing, complexity, or user preference usually lead to a long discussion that doesn’t change the matter. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has come up with an answer: none of the above. He’s writing a simple MTA that will handle delivery on the local machine, which is enough for a system that doesn’t handle normal mail. For people who need more, sendmail and Postfix and others are all in pkgsrc.
Matthew Dillon pointed out a relatively easy vkernel exercise: making them run without being attached to a terminal. You could spin off multiple virtual systems, all from one command line.
There’s a new Estonian mirror up for DragonFly, in IPv4 and IPv6:
ftp://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/DragonFly
http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/DragonFly
rsync://ftp.estpak.ee/DragonFly
Doubly useful right now, because dragonflybsd.org appears to be having slight network issues.
Hasso Tepper has produced an interesting patch that allows for notification on network link state changes.
Early registrations for the Sys Admin Technical Conference for 2007 are due by the end of March. It’s being held in a nice town (Baltimore, MD) and has some interesting speakers, including security talks from BSD user Richard Bejitlich.
Jonathan Buschmann has posted an initial patch to get a much-requested feature onto DragonFly: CARP.
With Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s recent 1:1 threading work, a recent conversation exposed future plans to experiment with M:NCPU support in DragonFly. (That’s M kernel threads supporting N userland threads, where N == number of CPUs.)