While we’re on the topic of papers, BSDCan 2006 is happening at the University of Ottowa, May 12-13th, and any proposals for a paper are due January 19th.
Joseph Garcia noticed that the newaliases command is apparently not run as part of a new DragonFly 1.4 install.
The USENIX 06 Technical Conference, held May 30th to June 3rd, has a call for papers out – due by the 17th!
UnixReview.com has 4 articles, this week: book reviews of
Write Portable Code,
Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide,
Debugging Expect,
Marcel’s Linux Game of the Month : eboard, a networkable chess game.
Bob Bagwill posted a link to an “unflattering (but not inaccurate)” review of DragonFly BSD 1.4 over at DistroWatch.
I was bit by this myself: the weekly tarball of pkgsrc files, for those who plan to install pkgsrc, appears to be broken. Use CVS (instructions on the aforementioned wiki page) to update the files within it.
This lengthy blog post details the use of NTP and time in general on Un*xy systems. (Seen on the #NetBSD Blog via hubertf)
Also seen on #NetBSD Blog: play hack over ssh!
The vnodes discussion has morphed into a conversation about kernel memory, and how it is allocated.
O-Reilly’s OnLAMP.com has a new FreeBSD Basics article up titled “Building Binary PC-BSD Packages“, which talks about the slick-sounding PC-BSD package superset of the FreeBSD port system.
In a conversation about having lots of RAM, Matthew Dillon described the relationship of vnodes to memory, and how you rarely want to change it.
UnixAdmin.com has an article up about building a widget for systems admin (Normally Mac-specific, but maybe not much longer), solutions to phishing attacks, and a guide on the venerable but useful tools iostat, vmstat, and netstat.
Several people more educated than I have chimed in with comments that describe the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip. Read the comments to be enlightened.
DragonFly BSD 1.4 Release Candidate 2 is out. I think there are no outstanding issues to hold up release at this point…
Matthew Dillon is planning for a January release for 1.4; while a good number of bugs have been found and squashed, there’s still a problem with network interface removal that needs to be fixed before release. However, a second release candidate will be assembled tonight.
I have a lot of little items mostly about the 1.4 transistion, so I’m just going to dump them all out:
* There’s a 1.4 cvsup file that will track the 1.4 release. This will be in the 1.2 release too, as soon as I figure out how, or someone tells me how to commit to a tag.
* the ‘.sh’ suffix requirement for rc scripts is dropped from 1.4 onward; this may happen to 1.4 too. This is needed for some pkgsrc scripts that do not end in .sh.
* cvsup is going to be replaced , one way or another.
* DragonFly will never be binary-compatible with FreeBSD 5+.
* Please, won’t somebody fix rcorder?
A contributor over at the #NetBSD Community Blog called me out on my errors. I corrected my goof on CGD, but I need someone to explain what the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip is. I know one’s a “work in progress”, but that doesn’t answer what the relationship is between the two, or how pacakges may move between them. I’m calling you smarty-pants out on the rug now – I want you to answer what 30 seconds of web surfing has not!
“Ed” posted a quote about STM – Software Transactional Memory – where memory usage in a multiprocessor situation is treated in a similar fashion to the way transactions are used in a database. Matthew Dillon wrote a lengthy response describing how DragonFly matches or improves on that system.
You may need to update your $PATH for pkgsrc when moving to 1.4, as the upgrade doesn’t necessarily change it for you. Fresh installs will be fine, however.
UnixReview.com has the “2004-2005 Annual SAGE Salary Survey” available on their site; skim it and look for your salary range.