A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Happy Cube day!
– 10 Steps to UNIX Nirvana, not all of which may be useful, but it talks about cscope, which I have heard a number of people rave about. (via)
– Dru Lavigne posted more open source alternatives, this time including options for the always-a-problem Visio. (via)
– Producing Open Source Software, which I find interesting, and it’s available in dead tree form and as a free download. This fits with some conversations I’ve had recently.
Daniel Phillips, who is working on the Tux3 filesystem, posted some more design notes. For those who joined recently, Tux3 is a filesystem similar in some ways to Hammer but being designed for Linux as its primary platform. This is a massively complex idea and project, so it’s good to peruse both the Tux3 site and prior posts about it.
The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the topic being “Geospatial” – something that isn’t covered often in open source terms.
Matthew Dillon notes that a 2.2.1 release will be coming about halfway through March; being a minor release, it’ll be bugfixes for things like the installer and the Hammer undo utility.
Alex Hornung posted a description of the work he’s done so far on a new I/O scheduler, with some details on his ideas on multiple scheduler levels. Feedback is welcomed.
CNet’s Buzz Out Loud podcast #918 mentions the new DragonFly release, though I haven’t yet listened to it to find out how far they get. Also, in the comments. (Thanks, Will Backman)
RUE Beltelecom has a DragonFly mirror; it includes images, snapshots, and binary packages. It’s already listed on the download page on the DragonFly website, too.
I’ve set up another mirror at df.v12.su, on some equipment/space/bandwidth kindly donated by GP Internet.
Freddie Cash has an interesting writeup of how he put together a very capable and cheap backup system using ZFS; this is part of a larger discussion on Hammer, ZFS, performance and solutions.
I’ve updated the website section of the Projects page on the DragonFly website; if you were looking for some things to clear up, some of them are relatively trivial.
Another one of those tools that can be handy to know: netcat. Here’s a nice guide about it.
DragonFly 2.2 is released! Visit the release page for details. As always, please use a mirror when downloading.
This IBM developerWorks article about screen goes into a lot of detail about how screen works, and has some nice examples of usage. (via)
One of the problems with screen is that it has a lot of settings and changes to use, which makes initial adoption difficult. However, it’s very useful…
This post on Blog Pseudoaccidentale described, by way of a parable, how many people think, incorrectly, they can’t contribute to open source. (The article says “FreeBSD”, but the rule applies to any open source project) It’s a matter of doing something, no matter how small, consistently.
I’d even use that analogy differently and say, “How do you eat an elephant?” Hint: see title.
(Thanks, Matthias Schmidt, for the link)
There’s an extensive article on “Unix’s Magical Moment” up on the O’Reilly site, with more details about that upcoming 1234567890 epoch time. That moment is probably happening very close to the same time you are reading this.
There’s a new issue of BSD Magazine out, and it’s (almost) all NetBSD. Apparently there’s been several issues, and I’ve been slack in covering them. (via)
Not only is there going to be BSDA exams available at AsiaBSDCon, but there is now a permanent testing facility for the BSDA in Brazil.
BSDTalk 170 has Marshall Kirk McKusick (His first name’s Marshall? Thought it was Kirk.) talking almost an hour of BSD history at the recent DCBSDCon. I’m assuming it’s going to be the first of several recordings coming from that event.
Matthew Dillon posted another summary of the road to the 2.2 release, scheduled forFebruary 15th. Among other things, this release will be available in a LiveDVD form which looks to be about a gigabyte in size with all the added packages.
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to give people money to work. (pdf) Specifically, they have USD $30K to give to people wanting to work on FreeBSD subsystems. Fight global recession!
EuroBSDCon 2009 is being held September 18-19th in Cambridge, UK. That’s a long way off, but they just opened their call for papers.
Art & Code is March 7th, at Carnegie Mellon. “Programming for Artists” – it’s cheap, and the output should be interesting. (via)