Stéphanie Ouillon has posted extensive details on the Virtio Google Summer of Code project; a few questions are included for anyone who wants to jump in and offer feedback.
One of the Google Summer of Code projects that will be valuable for DragonFly even though it isn’t a DragonFly project: “Add other package formats to pkgsrc”, where pkgsrc can interpret rpm, dpkg, and FreeBSD Ports files. Anyway, the project has a Sourceforge site.
If you follow this thread, it has some discussion on how to handle a multi-disk setup and Hammer. If a disk is going bad, you can try mirroring, though you have to be careful how your pseudo-file systems are set up.
Apparently the mail(1) and battlestar(6) source code caused a problem when checked out onto a NTFS volume. Sascha Wildner fixed it, and Alexander Polakov found an explanation as to why. How long has this problem been around? Well, look at the email addresses at the end of the man page for battlestar(6), for instance, or guess how long mail(1) has been around…
EuroBSDCon 2011, which is being held at Maarssen, The Netherlands, is October 6th through 9th of this year. If you want to get a paper in, the deadline is in a week – May 30th. Get a move on if you want to present!
As noted by reader eirik in a previous story comment, OpenJDK 7 is supposed to run on DragonFly (i386). Anyone want to try this?
This week, the links are generally fun.
- Hey, can this work on BSD? Cause this. (yeah, I know, hype.)
- PC emulator in Javascript. Here’s how. From the same fellow who produced qemu. Here’s another level on top of that.
- Michael Lucas has a summary of his experience at BSDCan 2011. His third point – anyone can experiment and publish results – is something I’d like to see. I love graphs, and I love being able to see quantifiable results.
- The many slides for ’10 years of pf’, also from BSDCan 2011, are online. (via) The background images are entertaining, though it’s using that font. Slide 78 mentions that other BSDs have much older versions of pf. I think DragonFly’s running the newest old version of any of them, actually, though the slide doesn’t mention it.
- There’s Gnome people saying “Ignore everything that isn’t Linux“. No, wait, it’s not that bad!
- The history of the computer mouse. Something I’d always heard about, but not with this detail.
- Git aliases. I don’t think it’ll save you hours of your life as the author claims, but it may be handy.
- How to build your own gaming PC. The author went for funny and true, rather than the multipage exposition of out-of-date numbers and graphs that usually make up these articles.
- Where the octothorpe came from. It has to do with Unix and telephones, which are close to the same thing if you go back far enough.
- Speaking of Unix-ish stuff, here’s an interview with Ken Thompson, who recently won the Japan Prize for the creation of Unix, along with Dennis Richie. (via) Yes, it’s their fault!
- “First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook.“
Here’s some recent notes on running Java on DragonFly; I may have posted something similar before, but it doesn’t hurt to keep the information out there.
Several updates, all at once: Jan Lentfer has updated ldns/drill (changelog) to 1.6.9, John Marino has updated binutils to 2.20.1 (changelog), and Matthias Rampke has built Chromium 11 for DragonFly, and has a package available. I assume the Chromium version posted about here before was version 10?
Sendmail in DragonFly is now at version 8.14.15, thanks to Jan Lentfer. (Have you seen this new MeTA1 thing?) See the changelog changes for the nitty-gritty.
Francois Tigeot has got LibreOffice working for DragonFly. See his post for build/download details. LibreOffice, if you haven’t heard of it, is the recent offshoot of OpenOffice, with much less Sun/Oracle involvement.
I have them, for DragonFly 2.11/i386 and DragonFly 2.11/x86_64 (see pkgsrc-bulk), on pkgsrc-2011Q1. I think I even uploaded them correctly this time.
Ferruccio Zamuner will be doing a talk about DragonFly at the Italian Perl Workshop in Turin, in September. It’s a free event. He’s working on slides, and is looking for feedback on them (I assume once he has them.)
Adam Hoka, a student in Google Summer of Code for DragonFly, has created a wiki page for his device mapper mirroring project. Not a lot there, but I’m happy to see the reference.
If you’ve used ‘free’ on Linux to find available memory, Steve O’Hara-Smith has described the way to do the same thing on DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon did some tests building both with an Intel i7 2600K and AMD PhenomIIx6 1090T CPU, and posted the results. He follows up with a note that the lower electricity cost of the Intel i7 makes it price-comparable with the AMD chip within a year and a half.
For anyone who missed/couldn’t join Summer of Code, there’s still lists of potentially interesting projects, as Alex Hornung points out.
I mentioned it before, but Matthew Dillon’s updated his Hammer document, and posted about it. Read on, especially if you like extremely complex plans.
Edit: first link fixed, plus there’s a followup.
Thanks to Matthias Rampke, Chromium builds on DragonFly. He’s posted with notes and even a screenshot, and has a working i386 binary.
