The BSD Installer mailing list has returned, but functional this time. Send email to “discussion-subscribe ‘at’ bsdinstaller ‘dot’ com”. (That address is munged, obviously.)
Update: I had the wrong address – it ends in .com. Should work…
FreeBSD has a (big!) status report up for the latter half of 2004.
The DragonFly FAQ on dragonflybsd.org is now copied irregularly from the one on the Wiki, along with the Spanish and Russian versions. This is based off an excellent idea from Max Okumoto.
ONLamp.com has an article up about EuroBSDCon2004. The EuroBSDCon site has PDFs of (nearly) all the presentations, some of which are well worth the time to read.
Take some time to read Jordan Hubbard’s keynote (pdf) – Jordan was one of the original folks behind FreeBSD and is currently a mucky-muck at Apple. Dru Lavigne’s “But I am not a developer…how can I contribute to open source?” (pdf) is also worth a look, along with a large number of other more specific presentations.
If you see nothing else, look at this picture of Jordan Hubbard’s talk, and read the slide behind him. That’s right, folks: we are the mainstream, not the margin.
Andrew Atrens now has a web page with his ports of wireless drivers to DragonFly – Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG and Atheros, at this point. He’s looking for testers.
The Sitetronics wiki now holds the Spanish and Russian translations of the DragonFly FAQ.
Matthew Dillon happened to outline the process for adding third-party software (like dhcpd, ncurses, or gcc) to the base DragonFly system.
Greg Lehey, BSD hacker from a land down below, has a BSD-based beer brewing system. (Seen on Slashdot, though strangely not in their BSD section.) Greg has a lot of other interesting material to look at while you’re there.
Sergey Gluschenko has created a Russian translation of the DragonFly FAQ.
OpenBSD is being ported to the Zaurus PDA platform (see general user FAQ) (thanks OpenBSD Journal) NetBSD has the 2004 4th quarter report out. Also, NetBSD now supports the TS-7200 via the evbarm port, which is a single-board computer similar to the well-known Soekris products. (Seen on Slashdot/BSD.) Small computer products like that make me wish I could find a small, cheap LCD screen to hook up, and create a laptop-ish computer.
gobsd.com has a new bootstrap kit for pkgsrc.
Low on time, so it’s all mushed together:
Joerg Sonneberger has an explanation of RSA vs. DSA encryption. Unixreview.com has two useful articles – how to test a new version of MySQL without disturbing your current install and a book review of “Advanced Unix Programming”. And, oh yeah – ntpdate is gone – use rdate.
Chuck Tuffli has ported the fxp (Intel Etherexpress network card) driver that uses bus_dma, and so should be very speedy. Andrew Atrens ported the iwi driver, for the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG MiniPCI. Both are looking for testers.
Robert Watson posted some plans about SMP on FreeBSD. It’s interesting to contrast it with what’s planned for DragonFly, and how well the changes affect single and multiprocessor performance. (thanks BSDNews).
George Georgalis posted a link to a “Considered Harmful” article – this time, it’s recursive make.
MAtthew Dillon created a spot in the docs to note which laptops work with DragonFly – due to the custom hardware in most laptops, it can be hit or miss for many laptops and non-Windows operating systems. While talking about his IBM r32 (which works), Paul Grunwald suggested the site off-leasecomputers.com as a laptop source.
On kernel@, Antonio Vargas brought up the splice() I/O model planned for the Linux kernel.
Slashdot/BSD has a story on Sun revoking the Java license for FreeBSD, which is not a surprise to anyone who saw mention of this in December’s FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. (Admittedly, it was overshadowed by the non-corporation donation needs.) The real answer is that the license expired because of a SNAFU rather than a desire by Sun to end Java use on FreeBSD, and it’s getting worked out. This affects DragonFly to some extent, since Java can be built from the port system DragonFly inherited from FreeBSD.