Category: Goings-on

A newer version of the beta installer is up at http://www.livebsd.com/dfly.

WineX, a commercial version of Wine oriented towards gameplay, has been released (version 4.0) and renamed (“Cedega”). I vaguely recall it was possible to get it working on FreeBSD – it would be interesting to see how it performs on DragonFly, comparatively.

Chris Pressey announced the DragonFly Installer has gone to ‘beta’ status; his announcement is pasted here:
Continue reading “Installer in beta”

Jeroen Ruigrok pointed at Sprite and Eric Masson pointed at Amoeba as examples of single-system-image methodologies.

Hey, look – a new installer screenshot of the curses frontend.

God a small hard drive and want to simulate a CD build? Try Chris Pressey’s ‘Mock CD‘ trick. (Link stolen from a mention on IRC.)

The libh project for FreeBSD was supposed to replace the creaky sysinstall program, though it hasn’t been worked on extensively enough to offer a real replacement. Robert Watson writes some interesting points on the right way to go about working on an installer.

Why do I point this out? The DragonFly Installer has followed this general plan already; it’s nice to have external verification that something was done right.

Chris Buechler found out that varsyms don’t work (yet) on a per-jail basis. Darn.

I’ve been remiss, and haven’t mentioned YONETANI Tomokazu’s ACPI patches. They aren’t in the tree yet, but if you have a laptop and want to try them out, they are at http://les.ath.cx/DragonFly/.

Having trouble with loading a splash screen? “beastie_disable=YES” in your /boot/loader.conf. Note: this may or may not work; it’s untested.

Running DragonFly under VMWare? Try GeekGod’s XF86Config, if you don’t have one set up.

This should be bugfix week; DragonFly BSD 1.0 should be ready for USENIX, starting on the 27th in Boston. This week may be rather quiet…

After several iterations, we now now a “offical” archive of discussions on the dragonflybsd lists. This pulls right from the news server. It’s currently updated every 2 hours. Credit’s due to Matt and Hiten for hitting me with ideas for it, and for adding the support applications.

There’s still some work to be done: Search functions, raw messages, and archive downloads. That’ll be the next version.

Other archives out there:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/
http://www.gmane.org/ (dragonflybsd.kernel only)

The DragonFly Live CD with installer now includes a web-based installer in addition to the existing ncurses installer.

Hiten Pandya posted that work for DragonFly 1.0 should be done by June 13th, which gives a week of testing before USENIX.

(flop sweat time!)

I had been thinking, “How big a market is there for BSD-based systems?” Netcraft’s very nice websurver-survey shows just how much, at least for FreeBSD and webhosting. It also shows something else – the Internet/computer market is definitely back into a growth cycle.

Apropos to Hiten Pandya’s C99–oriented commit today, GoBSD.com now has a C99 wiki. (You have to be a gobsd.com member to participate.)

Matt Dillon noted that removing ‘device ehci’ from your kernel configuration will cause the USB 2.0 ports to switch down to USB 1.1. This may be needed to make certain USB chipsets work.

Munish Chopra pointed at this mailing list post as the possible reason you see -DTARGET_NAME=\”i386-undermydesk-freebsd\” when building GCC3.

A link getting passed around is this list of OSX optimizations. Joerg Sonnenberger commented on it in the GoBSD forums, listing what’s possible and what’s done already in DragonFly.