Alex Hornung has suggested replacing the existing bugtracker (Roundup) with a new one (Redmine). His post about the changes is lengthy and links to a demo, so read on for details; I haven’t had a chance to look at it in full, yet.
In an effort to catch up…
- Matthew Dillon made a change to how material in memory is paged out; it may improve things depending on how much paging your system already does.
- The AsiaBSDCon OpenBSD papers are online, with mention of video of the presentations.
- Use keys for your SSH login, cause this will only get worse.
- Ten Shell One-liners. The first one, using your favorite editor on the command line, is one of those things I knew about, but didn’t know to do. (caveat: some Linuxisms)
- Want to test a big xorg update for pkgsrc? Of course you do.
The next release, 2.6, will be branched in the next few days. The official release: next week, with some last-minute benefits.
The naming convention for the daily snapshots of DragonFly has changed, to make the file names more readable. This may lead to some confusion as the mirrors settle, but it’ll pan out. If you run a mirror, double-check your downloads.
Stephane Russel was having trouble printing with OpenOffice and lpr on DragonFly. He fixed it, and I’m linking to his explanation because someday, someone will have the same problem and be looking for the solution…
Alex Hornung is working on a new version of the Handbook; my hat is off to him. I brought along the FreeBSD handbook SGML to DragonFly, and converted it through to the current wiki, so I know just how much there is. Check RecentChanges for the new work, and join in if you like.
There’s a lot to read, so if you understand it, that’s great. I’m passing it on without other comment.
PHP version 5.3 has some differences from previous versions, so there’s now a lang/php53 port. Use this if you want to upgrade right away, or stick with lang/php if you want to play it safe.
The BSD Conferences channel on YouTube now has updated captioning, which will be useful if you don’t follow spoken English too well.
I’ve been building this one up:
- Marc Espie’s post about autoconf holds true; Linux is in danger of becoming a monoculture in itself, similar to Windows.
- The BSDCan 2010 schedule has been posted. (via) Will this be the year I finally make it to BSDCan? Maybe.
- This post about communities (in general, online, not just software) is interesting. So far DragonFly has managed to avoid the drama-with-a-capital-D that afflicts other communities over time. Here’s a reason to not want growth…
- Always have working backups. ALWAYS. (via)
- I once went through almost exactly this, except it was a phone system that spanned several U.S. states and China/Mexico. Asterisk is awful, except that every commercial phone system is worse.
- A very on-target assessment of the iPad from a longtime Apple developer makes me think of something: will the iPad be good for open source? Not as a platform, but as a way to push developers to open source systems, where program development doesn’t require approval from a single company with unclear guidelines. Even the single interface port on an iPad is proprietary, and requires licensing.
- It’s really nice to read about a successful open-source software business that did not hinge on investors or being bought out, but rather on, you know, actually doing business, as seen in this writeup of OpenNMS. (via)
I’ve applied for DragonFly for the 2010 Summer of Code program. I posted the details of the application, for the curious. The application period closes in the next 24 hours; hopefully we’ll be in again…
Jan Lentfer has accomplished something rather dramatic: the removal of BIND from the base system. It’s not actually out yet, but I daresay it will be after the 2.6 release, freeing people up to install any DNS server from pkgsrc – including BIND.
‘Walter’ asked about dealing with endless ssh port dictionary attacks. Several suggested changing ports and removing passwords, with opie(4) for when keyfiles aren’t available. Also, there’s various auto-blocking scripts, though they aren’t as useful nowadays.
Alex Hornung has taken on a very overdue and very necessary project: an update of linux binary support. His code is available for anyone who wants to try it. Testing so far is working, but it could really use something complex, like Java with OpenOffice or tomcat, or perhaps Firefox/Flash. Will it make it into the 2.6 release, which is potentially a week away? Maybe – testing like the above would help.
p.s. we would all individually owe Alex a beer for this.
I gots a Summer of Code org application to write up, so you get a linkdump:
An mp3 of “PFSense II, Rocking The Datacenter” at NYCBUG, via Dru Lavigne. Also, her “BSD for Linux Users” at the SCALE website.
A 5-part series about Scripting Vim, written by a terribly smart guy? Interesting! (Yeah, I did link to a part of it before…)
Have you ever wondered if building more than one pkgsrc package at a time can be a problem? Others have too, and apparently there’s a fix. If you don’t want to have to get to a command line to find the answer, it’s:
PKGSRC_LOCKTYPE?= none
The type of locking that will be done if competing processes
attempt to do work on one package directory simultaneously.
Possible values:
* none: No locking takes place at all.
* once: When the lock has already been aquired by another
process, the current process is terminated.
* sleep: When the lock has already been acquired by another
process, the current process will sleep for PKGSRC_SLEEPSECS
seconds and then try again.You should also set OBJHOSTNAME when you are using the same
copy of pkgsrc on different hosts, maybe via NFS. This is because the locking process writes its process ID into the lockfile, and process IDs on different hosts are unrelated.See also: LOCALBASE_LOCKTYPE, WRKDIR_LOCKTYPE.
The ‘freeze’ for pkgsrc-2010Q1 is scheduled to start March 16th, which will be right around the same time of the DragonFly 2.6 release. The freeze lasts 2 weeks, usually, so new packages for 2.6 will be built probably about mid-April, based on this info…
clang, which many people look to as a gcc replacement, is now able to build itself. (Thanks John Marino for the heads-up, some time ago) It can also build world and kernel on DragonFly, going on the work of Sascha Wildner!
Using the pkgsrc package, put
clang_CC=/usr/pkg/bin/clang
in /etc/compilers.conf and then set $CCVER to “clang” when building:
env WORLD_CCVER=clang make -DNO_GCC44 buildworld
I haven’t tried this, so any errors in description are mine, not Sascha’s – can someone verify? I don’t have a test system to run it on right now.
Edit: see Sascha’s comment for the definitive method.
I think I’ve almost caught up on my backlog of Things To Post:
The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is up, with the theme of “Mobile”. The BeagleBoard and OpenBTS articles are going to appeal to some specific people.
More links from Dru Lavigne.
“It’s sinking in that Sun is gone“, the vi Complete Key Binding List, and Post-quantum cryptography, all ganked from Trivium.
OpenSSL version 0.9.8m has been imported by Peter Avalos; this version contains a bugfix for a security issue.