If you’re concerned about (or involved in) device documentation, there’s a new wiki site called Vendor Watch, which lists the state of efforts to get different hardware vendors to document their hardware in a way that makes it usable for open source efforts.
BSDCertification.org has a new logo and a new competition where the best fundraising idea from a user group gets a prize (passes to BSDCan 2007). June 10th is the cutoff for registering your group. (thanks, BSDNews)
I missed this before: BSDTalk has an interview with Scott Ullrich, who has worked on DragonFly and the BSD Installer, among other things. There’s lots of other recent interviews, too.
Matthew Dillon’s starting/continuing work on that aforementioned clustering by breaking out the journaling protocols into a module he’s calling “SYSLINK“.
Matthew Dillon, while following up on comments on his recent clustering post, managed to summarize the whole thing in much less space.
Matthew Dillon’s decided to use the journaling work that was done previously on DragonFly to handle communication between the kernel and a VFS, and also between machines in a cluster. He typed up a very detailed explanation that shows where a lot of the groundwork has been done. (Plus, a followup.)
This week on UnixReview.com: Reviews of Unix in a Nutshell, C in a Nutshell, SQL in a Nutshell, and a description of the LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld Conference.
Marcin Jessa pointed out that since it’s possible to compile the DesktopBSD tools on FreeBSD, it may also be possible on DragonFly.
‘walt’ has an patch for kdemultimedia that may make KMix, the KDE mixer, work on DragonFly. It’ll be in the pkgsrc binary soon.
Some trivia about shutting down your DragonFly system: ‘shutdown -p now’ is the preferred way, though the rare laptop needs some tweaks. It’s also possible to get KDE to issue the command. While on the topic of power management, YONETANI Tomokazu is planning to update ACPI in the next month.
Sascha Wildner’s removing a whole lot of kernel options. Speak up if you are using them… though if you are, they probably don’t work.
Anyone want to write a new devfs? (That’s device file system, if you haven’t seen the term before.) A discussion about tracking disks and their appropriate mount points ended with Matthew Dillon noting that at this point, the DragonFly system is cleaned up enough that this would be an approachable task for someone with experience.
This week on UnixReview.com: Security+ test review, plus examples, and a look at CherryPy, a Python framework. (Programming frameworks are all the rage lately, what with Ruby on Rails defining an otherwise nearly-unused language.)
DragonFly is (one of?) the first to plan for ZFS, but it appears another BSD – Mac OS X – may also take it up. More information is (unsurprisingly) on the Wikipedia ZFS entry. Gee, it’d be nice to have ZFS across all BSD platforms, wouldn’t it?
PC-BSD, which is FreeBSD 6 with KDE 3.5 and a GUI package management system, is now at version 1.0. I can only describe it as the way a BSD should be packaged.
One of the design goals for DragonFly is creating a BSD with clean, clear code. Here’s one example.
Matthew Dillon would like feedback and perhaps even testing on his BUF/BIO separation patch.
Oliver Fromme noticed that the cheap DVD sold at Lehmanns for LinuxTag 2006 now contains FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD – and DragonFly.
2 weeks until BSDCan! I won’t be able to make it, but there will be a few DragonFly people up there…