Goings-on – Page 54 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/11/06

Lazy Reading: Clouds, cookies, bugs, more

A catch-up week.

Ivan Voras askes for the ‘anti-cloud‘, a true decentralization of resources instead of the cloud-as-a-central-service-from-one-company, which is what it’s becoming now.
How not to design a protocol, about HTTP cookies. (via) I’ve heard from far more people worried about cookies and the need to clear or block them, than, say, people who realize the risks that programs like Firesheep expose. Such is life.
Will be needed: a SSH VPN. (via) Did I link this already?
‘radek’ sends along news of Giant DragonFlies. Not the most scientific of articles, but a fun thought.
sshd, given actual form.
Dru Lavigne’s got a nice summary of MeetBSD, complete with pictures, audio, and video. More conferences should be covered this completely, and quickly.

2010/11/062010/11/06

BSDTalk: Matthew Dillon, DragonFly

Another day, another BSDTalk item: this time it’s 15 minutes with Matthew Dillon at MeetBSD, talking about the 2.8 release. It was recorded either today or yesterday – quite fresh.

Matthew happens to mention that experimental deduplication support will arrive next week in Hammer.

2010/11/052010/11/05

Google Code-in: us too!

We’re part of Google Code-In! One of 20 organizations, this time.

If you want to contribute something right now, we can always use more Code-In ideas on our project page. (Follow the categories on the Code-In page.) Applications start on Nov. 22nd.

Update: my mailing list post with details.

2010/11/05

Hey, that’s neat-looking

Posted by ‘blinkkin’ on IRC: this SVG test using DragonFly facts. Click on it; it zooms.

2010/11/05

BSDTalk: PC-BSD, Kris Moore

BSDTalk has a brand new interview from the just-finished MeetBSD, talking about PC-BSD 9 with Kris Moore. (18 minutes)

2010/11/03

A pile of upcoming events

This is just based on what’s shown up in my Inbox lately:

AsiaBSDCon has a Call for Papers for the 2011 event, next March.
ECI in Argentina has a Call for Course Proposals.
MeetBSD 2010 is in a few days. (The conference with a paraplegic woman as the logo?)
BSDDay 2010 is happening in Hungary later this month.
NYCBSDCon has added BoF sessions to the schedule. (Early registration ends soon!)

Of course, for about a zillion more events, watch the BSDEvents Twitter feed.

2010/11/02

Swapcache helps out more

Swapcache is normally used with a SSD, but Matthew Dillon was able to set it up using a separate, ‘normal’ hard disk on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. This reduced pressure on the machine’s existing disk, especially with the recent release causing much traffic.

2010/11/022010/11/02

Building Cairo/gstreamer/etc.

If you have trouble building Cairo or gstreamer or some other X-related packages, check this page from Dave Shao. It came in useful for me. (linked by Steve O’Hara Smith)

2010/11/012010/11/03

HOWTO ftp

Pratyush Kshirsagar has added a howto page on setting up a ftp server, among other services .

The longer I work on this Digest, the harder the names are to spell.

Edit: Link fixed.

2010/10/31

Google Code-In tasks and small setups

I updated the projects page for DragonFly with some labeling of potential work for Google Code-In. Pratyush Kshirsagar suggested porting busybox, which Chris Turner countered with flashdist/flashrd. ‘joris dedieu’ followed with beastiebox.

2010/10/30

DragonFly BSD 2.8.2 is officially released

See the announcement and the release notes.

2010/10/29

Return of the JEDI^wGUI!

The index page of the DragonFly site has been updated by Matt Dillon with some notes regarding the status of the 2.8 release. Among these, it is mentioned that the GUI image will be making a return for 2.8! There will be no DVD image this time, only an image suitable for writing to a disk, such as a usb stick.

2010/10/28

Google Code-In project notes

I’ve coded some tasks on the DragonFly projects page for Google Code-In. (Application is in already.) If there’s any additional DragonFly projects appropriate for 13 to 18-year old students, that’s the place to add it. The application period ends the 29th at 23:00 UTC, so don’t take your time.

2010/10/28

Fix for x86_64 and non-English LANG users

If you’re using DragonFly x86_64, and set LANG to something other than English, you will get crashes from programs using pkgsrc’s gettext-lib. Francois Tigeot has a fix which is going into pkgsrc, though I don’t know if this will show up in pkgsrc-2010Q3.

2010/10/28

Release… soon!

The 2.8 release hasn’t quite happened yet. But soon!

2010/10/27

More quickstart work

Siju George has been fleshing out his ‘afterboot’ style page, though now it’s “Environment Quick Start“. Good to look at if you are, say, installing a 2.8 DragonFly image.

2010/10/26

2.8 release tomorrow!

DragonFly 2.8 (technically 2.8.1; see here for the .1 changes) is due to be released tomorrow. There should be at almost the same time pkgsrc 2010Q3 packages available. There will also be a LiveDVD for this release, too, though the window manager has changed.

2010/10/26

How to run jackd

Chris Turner posted details of how he gets jack (“a low-latency audio server”) to run on DragonFly. Your mileage may vary.

2010/10/25

Lazy Reading: Cute films, app stores, boom boxes

Whoops! This should have gone up last night. I’m almost waxing nostalgic for this one.

Two words you never thought you’d see together: “heartwarming” and “single system image computing”. I think this is how we should document everything for DragonFly. (via)
Apple’s bringing the App Store to the Mac platform, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Ani Dash has a writeup of the various “app store” platforms out there. pkgsrc (and FreeBSD/OpenBSD ports) would certainly count. Surprisingly, the application count for pkgsrc exceeds most of the other stores he lists.
Aw, no more cassette Walkmans. (via) Nowadays, it’s difficult to not take music with you wherever you go. In the 1980s, there was no other way to bring your music with you, except maybe a lot of batteries and this. I loved my crappy JVC dual tape deck.

I am totally stealing the horizonal evocative image idea from things magazine.

2010/10/222010/10/23

KMS and GEM work, for cash

There’s still no support for KMS/GEM on any most BSDs, though there are people interested in it for FreeBSD. One of DragonFly’s Summer of Code projects was just that, though it’s not in a state where it can be really used.