Something that always got with with Linux binary support was that I couldn’t get the Linux /proc filesystem to automatically mount on boot. I’d end up doing it by hand later, right after I tried to start a Linux binary and had all sorts of issues. Pierre Abbat had this same problem, and Sascha Wildner has the answer: “linux_load=yes” in /boot/loader.conf.
For those using the release version of DragonFly, the new C-based loader in 2.8 will look like this. Well, not exactly. This is from a proposal from Alex Hornung that removes some extra lines, but I expect this is what you’ll see.
The 200th (yay!) episode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with Kjell Wooding, talking about mg, a sort of teeny emacs included with OpenBSD.
Matt Dillon and Venkatesh Srinivas conspired to fix another nmalloc issue, which should resolve any remaining problems people were having with Firefox, and possibly other applications as well. Due to an oversight of sorts, all locking operations on nmalloc’s depot were ineffective, as if there were no locking at all. Curiously, it worked remarkably well considering such a large race condition was present.
I’m going. Venkatesh Srinivas is going. Who else is interested? (See the site.)
When compiling software on DragonFly but outside of pkgsrc, and you have trouble with configure, remember you can always manually pull down new versions. You’re welcome, future me.
Chris Turner wrote some notes about building pkgsrc packages in a chroot, including the handy tip of using
DISPLAY=:0
to run and display a GUI-using app under the chroot.
The almost-to-200 expisode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with John Hixson about PC-Sysinstall and what it could replace.
This Lazy Reading post actually has some good lengthy reading in it.
- Modern Perl: The Book: (actually a pre-print draft) Even if you don’t know Perl, I’ve always liked the way the author, chromatic, writes. Many articles about a language or other technical subject tend to either wander about loosely or become a ‘shopping list’ of actions, but chromatic’s work retains focus.
- Robert Watson presents Capsicum; a recent USENIX talk on Youtube. (via a number of places)
- 12 Forgotten Games – the slideshow is of most interest. (via) Online games that predate the vast swarm of today’s titles. MUDs, MUSHs, roguelikes, etc. The nice thing about the slideshow is the link on each slide to a still-running, still-accessible online version of that game.
- Kieron Gillen‘s moving away from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a gaming review site that has some honest to goodness decent writing. (My Lazy Reading posts are similar to their Sunday Papers for a reason.) One of his articles was all about ZangbandTK. I was all set to link to that in pkgsrc, but it’s not there – just games/angband-tty and games/angband-x11. Darnit. Anyway, read his article and then go play something roguelike.
Based on a recent project list entry for “changing the vm_map lookup” (currently last item on the page), Venkatesh Srinivas wrote up a bit more information on it, linking to different strategies for arranging the data. Good reading for those who like data structures.
Matthias Schmidt has set up a x86_64 DragonFly machine at uther.dragonflybsd.org. Anyone wanting to try 64-bit testing can use a vkernel on that machine. Mail him for an account.
Hasso Tepper posted a link to something I had only heard about when it didn’t exist in physical form: the Open Graphics Device v1. It’s possible to get one if you’re going to write support for it.
The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Sales as the theme. The very first article talks about something dangerous: turning open-source users into customers.
Chris Turner wrote up his experience of getting Flash 9 to work on DragonFly. The usual disclaimers apply.
Update: there’s an improved library available that fixes some audio and video sync problems.
Peter Avalos wrote a note that better summarized my earlier post, and mentioned a problem/workaround with ssh and non-md5 MACs.
John Marino found that when he couldn’t boot a x86_64 development image in Virtualbox, setting the sysctl hw.madt_probe_test=1 seemed to make a difference long enough to boot, though it still crashed later. It’s worth trying if there’s no other way to boot, at least.
I’ve drastically revamped the pkgsrc howto on the dragonflybsd.org website. It’s also linked in that site’s menu, too. Comments please!
Two committers who went dormant some time ago: Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett. Two committers who recently became active again? Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett. Welcome, back, guys. Developers tend to be active in open source only for as long as they’ve got an itch to scratch, so it’s always great to see a return.
I’ve noticed that if you have older pkgsrc packages installed, and install binary packages for pkgsrc-2010Q2, those packages will refuse to install if pkg_install is an older version than what they were built with.
I ended up force-deleting pkg_install and bmake, and reinstalling by running pkgtools/bootstrap/bootstrap. There may be better solutions; I’m mentioning it now since it’s a known problem.
Update: “bmake replace USE_DESTDIR=yes” was suggested by Joerg Sonnenberger. “pkg_add -u /path/to/newer/pkg_install” should also work (untested).
This will probably apply to the upcoming pkgsrc-2010Q3, too. Building from source is a workaround for now.