A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Not one, but two roguelike items! Close your eyes and click randomly if you have no interest in my little obsession.
A useful BSD item from the Howling Void: BSD jails found to be more efficient than VMWare in given situations. I am both pleased and not really surprised.
The DragonFly mirror at dragonflybsd.kiev.ua went down due to hard drive failure some time ago, but it has returned. It’s an honest-to-goodness DragonFly system now too, I think. It’s (re)listed on the mirrors page.
The newest issue of the Open Source Business Resource covers Women in Open Source, with a larger-than-normal variety and length of articles.
While asking some questions, Alex Hornung let drop some of the details of his Summer of Code devfs project. Sounds like he’s making good progress.
This arrived in my mailbox in dead tree form today, but it’s also online: My favorite magazine has some good thoughts on open source vs. cloud computing, plus one on open source variety, or lack of it. It’s interesting that mainstream articles talking about open source software have moved beyond the forms ‘gee whiz there’s Linux’ and ‘here’s what a software license is’.
When DragonFly was moving away from CVS, the votes were split pretty evenly between Git and Mercurial. DragonFly went to Git, but it’s apparently now possible to use Mercurial with a Git repository.
Well, I’m not sure if it’s out, or the new thing is the release announcement and 2009Q1 has been out for a while. Usually, the quarterly releases of pkgsrc are available 2 weeks after freeze, which was back in March. Either way, it’s available.
Jordan Gordeev posted installation instructions for his ‘BTX Halted’ fix. It may not be the final answer, though.
Here’s an in-depth but quite readable explanation of not just the surface features of Git, but the underlying ideas of how it works, via a narrative. (via)
Dru Lavigne has posted links to SummerCamp presentations explaining “What is BSD?”. Whip this out for your mildly confused Linux-using friends.
I’ve linked to explanations like this before, but it’s worth repeating: when Tim Darby had a crash, Matthew Dillon explained how to obtain a dump. This can be fantastically useful when debugging a crash.
pkg_dry, the binary package management tool I keep nattering on about, has had its name changed to ‘pkgin‘. I have no idea how to pronounce it.
If you’ve already tried pkg_dry, this will require rebuilding the databases because of the name change.
The newest BSDTalk has a conversation from BSDCan 2009 with 5 different FreeBSD core team members, for 38 minutes.
I always forget how to do this, so I’m linking to an article about it: Tunneling and Proxies over SSH. There’s a cutesy title and intro, which can be safely ignored. (via)
Also, some tips for taking full advantage of Git. (via)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert tagged 2.3.1, which is still in the development branch, so don’t update unless you were already at 2.3. There’s a nice list of commits that went into this tag.
“FreeBSD – the unknown Giant” has beaten me to the post I was intending to make, noting that there’s 4 different BSD releases this week, all of varying sizes, and showing a lot of vigor in the BSD community.
Dru Lavigne has linked to the latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource, with a focus on open source in government. The next issue will be “women in open source” (appropriate given recent hullabaloo) – they’re looking for submissions.
Also, Dru made a good point in a separate post, that is connected with the recent kqemu work for DragonFly: if every BSD had a working kqemu kernel module, it would make life easier for people taking the BSDA exam.
I had mentioned the new malloc in DragonFly before, but Matthew Dillon has a nice explanation of its performance improvements and the relationship to the existing slab allocator.
Colin Adams has a DragonFly system up and running, and he’s posting about dragonflies – the insect variety.