Category: Goings-on

James L. Davis has created a new version of the x.org package that correctly deals with the mouse and with TrueType fonts.

If you haven’t heard of what xorg is, visit freedesktop.org and see – it’s a de facto/drop-in replacement for XFree86. It’s not a significantly different package at this point, but it may be, by the next release.

Slow news in the past 24 hours or so, so I’ll post about Dru Lavigne’s always entertaining column, of which the most recent version has a good collection of links.

If your laptop running DragonFly doesn’t want to boot while on battery power, try this in /boot/loader.conf:

set debug.acpi.disabled="acad thermal"

Taken from a suggestion by YONETANI Tomokazu.

Martin P. Hellwig found that Java Web Start did not work on DragonFly; the fix is to find $USER/.java/.deployment/deployment.properties and
change ‘FreeBSD’ to ‘DragonFly’.

During a conversation about ssh, ‘esmith’ pointed at a HOWTO on tcpwrappers. (It’s a Mac site – how strange!)

There were a few problems with the recent 802.11 commits; they appear fixed, but doing a make quickworld will probably not complete. Try a make buildworld on your next update, and it should sail through clearly.

Erik Paulsen Skaalerud now has daily snapshots of source and dfports available on his site. If you are setting up a new DragonFly install, this shortcuts having to update via CVSup.

I’ve changed the front page of the DragonFly mailing lists archive. There’s now a site-specific Google search, and the by-date listings are now linked on the front page.

Jeroen Ruigrok has committed Pentium 4 Thermal Control Circuit support. Really, he has. Enable it by placing:

options CPU_ENABLE_TCC

in your kernel config file, then rebuilding.

In a conversation today on IRC, I ended up pointing at this PDF on Greg Lehey’s site, which does a nice job of explaining in a not-overly technical manner why BSD Is Good. (There’s also this reason, when comparing to Linux.)

Dragonflybsd.org is going to be a bit slow for the next week – the network link is being worked on.

Einar Karttunen wrote a nice bit on “Maintaining local changes to the CVS tree”.

Matthew Dillon posted a patch for the scheduler that seems to improve DragonFly’s (already excellent) responsiveness. Normally, I don’t post about code until it’s in, but this can be helpful code for those willing to test it.

Previously, if you wanted to use x.org instead of XFree86, a package was your best bet. However, the FreeBSD port appears to be up to date, and may build correctly.

Scott Ullrich noted (via IRC) that there’s a DragonFly forum over at bsdnexus.com.

The software used for this page has been upgraded; there shouldn’t be any visible changes for now.

What’s next for the installer team? They’re working on an upgrade path (a wiki, not much there yet) for the installer, from FreeBSD 4.x to DragonFly.

‘MACHINE’ pointed at a Wine mailing list discussion about problems getting WINE to compile on FreeBSD; he wondered if the necessary changes could be made in DragonFly to accomodate WINE.

When compiling Mozilla, FireFox, or Thunderbird, you should stick with gcc 2.95.

Emiel Kollof is working on a new version of the NVIDIA driver to match their upcoming new release. He’s also working on the settings application. Also, Emiel posted a patch to submit@. If you are using the NVIDIA binary griver, please try it out.