Category: Goings-on

Matthew Dillon has posted a description of what remains to be accomplished before the 1.4 release, and just when that will happen, and he also has a detailed plan of what he’s going to do in 1.5. (Which, when stable, will be DragonFly 1.6.)

That second post contains several special things to note:

• 1.5 will be significantly unstable (at least compared to the previous development versions), so stick with 1.4 for a while if you don’t want trouble.
  
• The introduction of a new acronym that I daresay we will hear more and more often: cache coherency management system (CCMS).
  
• ZFS! (See Flash demo)
  

This post from Joerg Sonnenberger notes a couple tricks about getting the most out of your ATA bus.

Matthew Dillon described his schedule for the upcoming 1.4 release, coming before the end of the year.

Sys Admin Magazine has a new CD out that contains all issues of their magazine (1992 through 2005) and all the issues of The Perl Journal (1996-2002). I think I have all the paper issues of the Perl Journal around here someplace…

If you like Perl and miss the Journal, there’s also The Perl Review, which can show up in both print and PDF form. I like the paper, but I can back up the PDF…

BSDCertification.org is looking for donations. Given how much work they’ve already put into the process, it certainly seems a good idea to support. (Thanks, hubertf)

linuxjewelry.com is closing down, and having a final sale of their goods. Included in that is various Beastie statues and BSD case badges. (Thanks, hubertf)

Want a project for your winter vacation? Matthew Dillon wrote in a post that I don’t have a link for:

I would still like to have a regression suite that can be run with a simple ‘make DESTDIR=(some_place_with_lots_of_space_available)‘. It would be a good project for someone.

BayLISA has Matthew Dillon giving a short presentation on DragonFly. This is on the Apple campus in Cupertino, California, so some of you west coasters can see this. Apparently he’ll have some good statistics to report.

Joerg Sonnenberger has modified nrelease, the release-building setup on DragonFly, to use pkgsrc. That’s the last major step before the next release.

Wiger van Houten passed along a link to the FreeBSD projects and ideas page. There’s some projects there that would be useful for DragonFly, and also there are a number of ideas there from DragonFly.

Are you going to 22C3? That’s the 22nd Chaos Communications Congress, a hacker convention in Europe, if you aren’t familiar with the acronym. Sascha, corecode, and Andreas are going.

The bugs page on the DragonFlyBSD website has been updated with a security officer(s) address, on the off chance a security issue is found and a confidential contact is needed.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has put together a Mercurial repo of the DragonFly source code, for those who like their SCMs decentralized.

I took my own advice and made a little experiment: a cheesy status page for Joerg Sonnenberger’s pkgsrc binary site. The page lists the update time, in descending order, for all the packages on the site. (and links to them too.) Could it be better? Yep.

Jeremy C. Reed is writing an article, and he’s taking a survey of DragonFly users.

I have a number of small posts to link, and I’m placing them in one article: First, Joerg Sonnenberger mentions that he is updating his pkgsrc binary collection on an ad-hoc basis, though not everything is there yet. (Tracking updates is an afternoon project that would be enourmously beneficial, if anyone wants to try it…)

Also, Bob Bagwill contributed his own description of How Cabling Should Be. Last, Hiten Pandya commented on the idea of automatic crash reports, much like the “Feedback Agents” that upload crash information on the Windows platform.

If you’re looking for a KVM switch to use with a DragonFly machine(s), it appears that Belkin (and USB) is the way to go.

Joerg Sonneberger wants everyone to try out pkgsrc if possible; apparently large projects like KDE and Gnome are building, mostly.

UnixReview.com this week has two book reviews: Network Administrators Survival Guide and High Order Perl (I saw the book author, Mark Jason Dominus, at a conference a while back, come to think of it), an article about IPC called “Networking’s Easier than Programmers Realize“, and an article about forensic CDs, which is a cooler way to say “rescue CD”.

Let’s say you want to debug a crash, but it was caused by a separate kernel module? Hiten Pandya has a way to use asf(8) to get at the module-specific data.