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.
Jan Lentfer updated his version of squid, and had issues; this is a note for anyone else running squid to maybe wait before upgrading. Note that this applies to the development version of squid, not necessarily the pkgsrc version.
Update: No, wait, it’s OK.
A hard disk in crater.dragonflybsd.org, where the repo for DragonFly source is located, died last night. The disk has been replaced, and the files should all be back in place later today. Double-check if you committed something in the last 24 hours and make sure it’s there, just to be safe.
If you were looking for something to do, Samuel J. Greear has invested some time in cleaning up the various project idea pages out there, and has links to prove it.
I mentioned previously that Postgres 9 is already in pkgsrc, but the flip side of that is both Postgres 8.2, and MySQL 4 are being removed. If you still have these installed, be ready to migrate at your next upgrade.
Oh, and you can switch to clang for building pkgsrc, too.
It looks like 2.8 will be showing up in a few weeks – mid-October. If things go well, we’ll have prebuilt pkgsrc-2010Q3 binaries to go with it.
Venkatesh Srinivas (whee!) has written up a lengthy post about his idlezero work. It provides a nice peek into recent work, and how parts of DragonFly work. I’d normally save it for a Lazy Reading entry, but I don’t want to wait that long. It should hopefully show up on the dragonflybsd.org site too.
Starting September 23rd, pkgsrc will freeze (i.e. bugfixes only) in preparation for the 2010Q3 release, which is planned for one week later, instead of the usual 2 weeks. This release will include some very new software like Postgres 9, too.
Samuel J. Greear asks that question, and there’s ongoing discussion of that idea – follow the threads.
Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip. It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list. It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.
‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager. The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.
I haven’t covered this enough: thanks to Alex Hornung, it’s possible to create a HAMMER volume and have it be encrypted. Matthias Schmidt has done just this, and has provided an rconfig(8) script to automate the process. (Or to crib from if you prefer to do it by hand.)
Swapoff has been added to DragonFly. This was a potential Summer of Code project, and also happened to have a bounty offered for it. $300 goes to Ilya Dryomov. If money for code like this interests you, check the Code Bounties page for more projects…
Dear universe: improved interrupt routing, or deduplication in HAMMER would make me happy. I’m not picky.