Sascha Wildner sent along a link to “The Daemon, the GNU & the Penguin“, a many-part history of Unix.
A recent post on undeadly.org highlights the need for OpenBSD to find new funding sources to support the various hackathons held around the world for OpenBSD. It appears that the normal funding source, selling CDs of each release of OpenBSD, has become much less lucrative. OpenBSD also has a donations page.
With the growth of broadband access, the need to order a separate CD has dwindled. It appears the OpenBSD Project is going to have to supply some different form of services in order to continue the same revenue stream. According to the article, they previously generated US $80,000 each year for the last two years, and still came up $20,000 short.
Along the same lines, the FreeBSD Foundation is accepting donations. According to the most recent newsletter, the Foundation is doing well enough that a part-time administrator has been brought in to handle affairs. The most recent Foundation newsletter does not describe their financial status in specific terms, other than to sound positive. The newsletter for 2004 shows a small loss.
NetBSD also has a non-profit Foundation, with donations possible. The most recent financial report for the NetBSD foundation shows a positive balance, and recent newsletters show 2005 went well.
What about DragonFly? DragonFly is not yet a non-profit, so there’s no direct place for donations to go, though there are requests for equipment that can be filled. Pretty much all costs for dragonflybsd.org come out of Matthew Dillon’s pocket. Given the relatively huge size of these other project’s budgets, Dragonfly appears to be doing well.
Sven Willenberger saw some odd “cache_lock” messages; these are relatively benign.
Francis Gudin, I think it is, posted a link on his GoBSD blog to Dave Glowacki’s GCC warnings.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a new version of ifconfig, taken from FreeBSD 6 and put together for DragonFly by Andrew Atrens and Adrian Michael Nida. Give it a test, if you can.
Apparently, ruby has its own internal package management system, called gems. If you want to try this Ruby on Rails technique that’s all the rage lately, read this post from Csaba Henk.
LinuxTag 2006 is happening in Germany May 2-6, and the BSD booth needs volunteers.
Some packages in pkgsrc, if they were built in the past few days, will need to be rebuilt. This post to the tech-pkg@ mailing list has details.
If you’re trying to mount a windows/samba share, load the right libraries first.
For a bit of clarification, Matthew Dillon noted that his goal of having a single system image takes into account having “slow” network links to connect system, which means fancy (and expensive) high-speed interconnection will not be necessary.
I discovered that, at least on my uniprocessor test system, -j doesn’t make a speed difference for ‘make buildworld‘. The -jn flag creates nextra processes, and is supposed to speed the process up to some extent. I’d like if someone could show me a system where it does make a difference…
Francis Gudin found a problem with ppp causing crashes; he also found a fix.
Matthew Dillon has posted his first version of the patch for 32 bit block number to 64 bit byte offset conversion; it’s a dangerous patch because of the chance for data corruption. He has a long list of filesystem (some of which I’ve never heard of) that need testing.
Matthew Dillon has a post describing a bug in the installer (encountered by ‘Eugene’) along with a workaround.
Dillon also describes his upcoming work, which will include BUF/BIO conversion, a read() and write() buffer cache interface, and then the “grand
cache coherency management system”, also known as the most complex code yet.
The latest BSDTalk podcast has man page tips and a talk with Henning Brauer of OpenBSD.
Liam J. Foy’s ultra-comprehensive list of BSD-related RSS info has now got its own domain: BSDPortal.org. Update your booktagdiggmarks appropriately.
NFSv4 is desirable and new; I managed to somehow stumble into these slides from a LISA 2005 presentation on NFSv4 that describes a bit more about NFSv4 features. (If you want the basics on NFS, check Wikipedia.)
TextDrive, a web hosting company, has a weblog, and on it an author, Jason, likes ZFS. So naturally, he is apparently quite enthusiastic about DragonFly adopting ZFS.
If you wanted to use a different version control system, but wanted to be compatible with DragonFly’s CVS system, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has written some scripts that make his Mercurial setup work with CVS.