A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
A little tip picked up from Liam Foy Adrian Nida on #dragonflybsd on EFNet: If you have a 16-bit UTF file, cat and less will read it with ^@ characters all through the file. The pkgsrc package converters/recode will allow cleanup like so:
cat file.utf16 | recode utf16..ascii > file.ascii
Update: Several people pointed out that iconv can do the same thing.
OpenSSH 4.3 has been released, and it’ll be in DragonFly soon, though some of the new features may or may not work well.
BSDNews.com has a whole slew of new articles, some of which have been linked here before. Rather than call each out individually, I’ll say go, look.
Oliver Fromme wrote a nice description of how he backs up material on disk, skipping some file types and only archiving changed files.
Joerg Sonnenberger has posted a patch for those who want to compile packages from pkgsrc that use libtool, as an interim measure. The new version that doesn’t have the aforementioned problems will be in the pksrc tree in the next day or two.
Matthew Dillon posted the first version of his BIO work, along with a lengthy technical explanation. He’s looking for testers that use different filesystems like vn, msdosfs, etc.
Adrian Michael Nida has created a patch from Andrew Atrens’ work that will allow a Atheros-based wireless card to work on the current release of DragonFly and use WPA. Andrew Atrens does have some corrections. If you have this hardware, please give it a whirl; as patches for this have been around for a while, and it would be nice to have it in the tree.
Matthew Dillon is starting major work on the buffer cache, implementing BIO chaining in the current step. This involves touching a lot of files, so he asks that all developers avoid commiting kernel changes for the next few days.
Not that new, but new to me: The NetBSD News Beat, which appears to pick up news through RSS, including from this very site! Links within my posts vanish, unfortunately, as my XML feed doesn’t keep them.
Xorg 6.9 is now in the DragonFly binary pkgsrc archive, as noted recently by Joerg Sonnenberger.
Check the Xorg link above if you don’t know the difference between Xorg 6.9 and 7.0. The new features list mention DragonFly BSD support, along with some odd things like support of mice with more than 12 buttons.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert gave a little summary of how he uses vim and cscope to view (without leaving the editor) a definition of the current identifier, and so on. Beats having to browse a separate archive, and it works without having to go out to the network.
‘walt’ brought up the problem that if we use ZFS for DragonFly, we are reliant on a proprietary tool. Could Sun “take it away”, a favorite threat attributed to closed-source? No.
UnixReview.com this week has an ‘examination’ of the CISA and CISM certifications, plus an article about the relative value of certifications.
David Rhodus needs to read Excel files. Joerg Sonnenberger is fixing up OpenOffice 2 and Gnumeric in pkgsrc to work, while Eli Green suggests the program antiexcel.
Csaba Henk posted a link to Sun’s OpenGrok source code search engine. He’s got a version running at http://dragonfly.creo.hu/source.
This makes me think of two things: 1: Sun’s sure putting out a lot of neat stuff and 2: I always hated Stranger In A Strange Land.
UnixReview.com this week has only two articles: a book review of “Running IPv6” and “Regular Expressions: Rexx Still Going Strong“.
The NetBSD quarterly report (that seems to cover a half instead of a quarter; July – December 2005) is out. It covers their new logo, their new releases, new developers and ports, etc. Also, DragonFly’s adoption of pkgsrc is mentioned, along with the fact that Joerg Sonnenberger is more or less responsible for over 3,000 of the successful pkgsrc builds on DragonFly.
The fourth quarter Status Report for FreeBSD is out. Among other items of interest, the report contains links to two recent presentations at EuroBSDCon: New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0 and Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack (both links are PDF files). Also, OpenBSD’s dhclient has replaced ISC’s dhclient, and efforts to port DragonFly’s variant symlinks.
For entertainment value, there’s also the FreeBSD/XBox port, which is close to having network support. There’s now a FreeBSD list of available work for volunteers; there’s a number of DragonFly items on there.
Update: PDF links fixed, thanks to Joe “Floid” Kanowitz.