There’s a preview of the upcoming KDE4 available; it may even work on DragonFly. In any case, shiny pictures to look at. (Thanks Slashdot)
Jeremy C. Reed wrote in to announce a new book. He’s created this wiki for the purpose of writing the “Quick Guide to BSD Administration”, which uses the BSDA Certification Requirements Document as a guideline. There’s regularly generated PDFs to show progress.
From OpenCon 2006, a presentation on OpenBSD Culture. I link to this in part because soft of the community ideas apply to DragonFly, and also because what makes up an open-source development group is rarely discussed beyond the code level. (Thanks Undeadly)
A few of the mirrors out there have DragonFly source available through rsync; Peter Avalos describes the correct command to retrieve it from theshell.com. (Note: read that post for details before trying it yourself.)
One of the eternal chicken-and-egg problems is kernel modification. Sometimes, a freshly installed system requires a different kernel, but you can’t download the source to build that new kernel until those changes are made. However, kernel source will be included with the 1.8 release, so this should theoretically not be a problem.
Matthew Dillon posted a list of the various ways testing could be done over the next 4 weeks for the 1.8 release. Help out, if you’ve got the inclination.
Matthew Dillon has announced that the next release will be branched in two weeks (Jan. 14th), with the 1.8 release scheduled for Jan. 28th. Get stuff in/tested now if you want to be in 1.8! He’s also updated his online diary with the extensive list of what’s gone in since 1.6.
Petr Janda linked to a review of the open-source ‘Nouveau’ NVIDIA drivers, which plan to have 3D support.
Also, Gergo Szakal found that a recent poll on the Hungarian Unix Portal listed DragonFly as the 4th most popular BSD-based operating system – more popular than NetBSD.
If you could use over $100 USD, Petr Janda needs someone to port the getcontext and swapcontext calls to DragonFly’s libc, and he’s willing to pay the aforementioned money for it. Hop on now and make some quick money.
Undeadly.org has a review of “The OpenBSD Packet Filter Book“, which is Jeremy C. Reed’s version of the PF FAQ and other material, in printed form. It’s available through Lulu.com print-on-demand. DragonFly is mentioned in there, as we (along with I think pretty much every other BSD) also use PF.
User ‘Haidut’ wrote up some notes on how he got DragonFly to boot from a USB stick. (Summary: it just worked.)
In an effort to prevent spam messages from showing up in bugs.dragonflybsd.org via the mail gateway, some work is being done on the bugs site. This may cause some bounce messages to show on the bugs@ mailing list.
In addition to the recent BSDCan 2007 call for papers (mentioned previously), the USENIX 2007 Technical Conference has issued its call for papers.
UnixReview.com has updated again with articles like “Test Your Knowledge of MySQL Topics” and “Reliably Multi-thread Calculations with Erlang“, along with 2 reviews: “Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer“. That last one sounds like a good geek gift.
BSDCan 2007 (note to self: go) is happening May 18-19th in Ottawa, Canada, and the initial call for papers is out.
bugs.dragonflybsd.org has seen a lot more activity lately, with the number of reported issues down by a third, to around 100. If you want to help out, try to replicate an older bug (especially ones from DragonFly 1.4), and mention if it doesn’t seem to be around any more. If you’re a developer, there’s a number of small patches under ‘feature’ that would be easy to check and commit.
Dru Lavigne has a new article up on ONLamp.com/BSD, called “Fun with X.org“. Not all of it applies to DragonFly, but it covers some interesting utilities like xnest, DMX, and xwatchwin.
Something that a lot of people could find useful: an extra multiprocessor kernel on the LiveCD. It’s apparently easy to add. (with tweaks) Any takers before January?
Vlad Galu posted jemalloc, noting that it performed well when freeing many small objects. (Along the same lines, Thomas E. Spanjaard brought up Google’s tcmalloc, though it’s not complete.) A benchmark showed good results, and Freddie Cash pointed at prior discussion for use in FreeBSD. It’ll take more persuasive numbers to get it in DragonFly, though.