KernelTrap has an interview of Timothy Miller, who is behind the Open Graphics Project, with the admirable goal of creating a video card that works well in 2D and 3D on open source platforms. Well, Linux, mostly, but my hope springs eternal for 4+ multihead 3D displays. Engineering samples are/will be available for anyone who wants to work on a DragonFly-specific driver. (thanks, BSDNews.)
FreeBSD 4.11 has been released. This is probably the last release in the 4.x series, though it will be updated for some time yet with needed security fixes. The next DragonFly release is slated for before the USENIX Technical Conference in April, so there’s an upgrade path available…
UnixReview.com has three new articles up: one on using the man page editor ManEdit, one on the security tool Samhain, and a review of the No Starch Press book “Write Great Code — Understanding the Machine“. Incidentally, the No Starch Press book Absolute BSD (covering FreeBSD, by excellent writer Michael Lucas of Big Scary Daemons fame) is a rare thing: a book about an operating system that’s fun to read.
Guillermo Garcia Rojas has created Spanish translations of Installing DragonFly and Laptop Installation.
There’s now a Lithuanian translation of the DragonFly FAQ, on the wiki. There’s also a Polish translation out there, too, that I managed to previously miss.
ONLamp/BSD has a new BSD News report up, this time summarizing December 2004.
Google Alerts told me about a new article on OSNews titled “Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom” that mentions, among other things, DragonFly being a fork from FreeBSD. While on the forked product idea, BSDNews has a nice link up to an explanation of Xorg’s 3D support (somewhat Linuxy) in the form of DRI, which also has a wiki.
If you’re feeling particularly Gallic, there’s a Paris BSD meeting on 02/02/2005. (Thanks BSDNews.)
For some lazy weekend reading: the Cell architecture. The article’s partially hypothetical, but interesting. If consumer-level PCs using this architecture were built, DragonFly would be a good fit.
Matthew Dillon posted two lengthy messages; one about SMP handling on DragonFly, and the other on kernel threading models and how they work.
Anreas Hauser, with Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, has managed to create a Xorg 6.8.1 port and package that does not the weak thread library problem. ‘pkg_add -r’ the package file he mentions in his post, and you’ll be set.
ONLamp/BSD has two new articles up. One is an interview with Scott Long of FreeBSD about FreeBSD 5’s SMP implementation – DragonFly is mentioned in contrast. The other is a report of November’s BSD news. Both seem a little late – November is no longer last month as mentioned in the article, and the interview places FreeBSD 5.3 in the future. I’m nitpicking, as they are both good articles.
A few people posted that they could not build world. Matthew Dillon suggested cleaning out the object directory.
‘Piet’ posted a link to a “Walk Through the PicoBSD Kernel“. This would be FreeBSD-based, but still relevant to DragonFly.
The Sitetronics wiki page for DragonFly has undergone a DNS makeover – it is now “http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/“.
‘nega’ posted some additional info about RSA vs. DSA encryption.
The latest addition to Dru Lavigne’s “FreeBSD Basics” column on ONLamp.com is “More FreeBSD for Linux Users“. It’s oriented towards FreeBSD and Linux, but it generally applies to DragonFly and Linux, too. Also, there’s a nice link collection at the end of the article.
Hiroki Sato is the newest to join the DragonFly team with commit access.
UnixReview.com has posted 3 new articles of general interest: zsh “keeper” functions, a review of Internetworking with TCP/IP, and a review of High-Tech Crimes Revealed.
Adrian Bocaniciu posted an explanation from an unknown author of just what the differences are between DSA and RSA keys for authentication and encyption.