“Building OpenSolaris Communities“, found on an OpenSolaris blog, is a generally excellent guide on how to build an open-source community. It’s based around OpenSolaris, which isn’t a surprise, but almost everything discussed applies equally well to DragonFly or other projects without a corporate source. (via… I lost track, sorry!)
Aggelos Economopoulos, who is working on making the network stack multiprocessor safe, has a page up on the DragonFly wiki describing his work. Normally I’d link to his recent conversations about this on the kernel@ mailing list, but he’s already done a nice job describing/linking it on the wiki.
Benchmarks would be good. I bring this up because Hubert Feyrer has a post about various NetBSD happenings, which includes some interesting benchmark work. It doesn’t include DragonFly, but it’s a good model from which to work. Notice the hint there? Was it too subtle?
Most of the benchmarking work these days seems to focus on multi-cpu scalability… I would like to just see comparative numbers, especially since there’s still plenty of single-cpu systems around.
Undeadly.org has an interesting article about sticking to base applications. It’s all about making the programs that come in the base system install work instead of needing to install third-party packages to get a comfortable work environment.
It’s OpenBSD specific, but it is generally applicable to any system with a base set of included tools, which generally means all BSDs. The comments have some interesting parts, too, like using a source control system to synchronize dotfiles across multiple systems. (just having one consistent .vimrc would make me happy)
KernelTrap has a very nice summation of Constantine Murenin’s BSDCan 2008 talk about the OpenBSD sensors framework. This framework is in DragonFly now. It was also in and then out of FreeBSD; the KernelTrap article (in addition to describing how the actual code works) covers some of the conversation between Poul Henning-Kamp and Constantine Murenin at the BSDCan event about why that happened with FreeBSD.
Updated again: description changed, at Constantine’s request.
“FreeBSD – The Unknown Giant” has a nice compilation of BSD videos (and some pictures) from recent conferences.
These parodies of the “Vista Capable” stickers contain, among other systems, DragonFly BSD.
For some end-of-the-work-week reading: Aggelos Economopoulos posted some of his thoughts on in_pcbs for his planned work on removing the Big Giant Lock from networking.
GameSetPlay has another @Play column, with comparisons of roguelike games to Dungeons and Dragons. If you find this interesting, you may be an old-school geek. Like me.
This week’s BSDTalk has an nearly half-hour interview, from BSDCan 2008, with 7 different members of the FreeBSD Core Team.
Max Lindner posted a summary of his SoC plans for enhancing dma this summer, and he’s looking for feedback.
Louisa Luciani is looking for more discussion on her LiveDVD project; specifically, what kind of environment to create. She’s already collated previous suggestions on the wiki.
Robert Luciani (yes, they’re related) recently finished a school project evaluating threading on DragonFly; his poster and paper (PDF) are available. Appropriately,he’s working on multiprocessing support.
(typos fixed – thanks, smtms on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
James Frazer sent along a new site design for dragonflybsd.org; I’ve got an example of it hosted locally. Mailing list discussion starts here, and of course comments are welcome.
NASPRO, a sound processing framework, recently had a 0.1.0 release – it works ‘out of the box’ on DragonFly.
BSDTalk 151 has Sean Cody of Frantic Films, a visual effects studio spread over the North American continent, who details his use of BSD at home and at the office. They apparently sling about a huge amount of data.
Vkernels on leaf.dragonflybsd.org are now able to locally network; if you are a Google Summer of Code student that needs that functionality, tell Matthew Dillon and he will put you in the right group.
In addition, he’s created a new tool called vknetd, which enables network creation in userland. This is intended for userland applications like vkernels, though there seems to be some capability for a SSH-based VPN? Someone correct me – or better yet, try it out.
I have a number of small things, mostly old-school games, to post, so I’ll break out the bullets:
- Temple of the Roguelike has some links to roguelike applets; they need Java.
- Rob Beschizza asks on Boing Boing Gadgets, “Who’d like a portable text game console?” Me? Of course, running a BSD on a handheld (NetBSD is the most obvious choice) will get you that free.
- Parchment, a z-machine implemented in Javascript. You can play many free text games or dig up Infocom games. (via)
- Everyone has Big Kernel Lock troubles – everyone!
- The howling void has a post on “Smartphones for text SSH use” – an interesting idea, and there are some good suggestions interspersed with the bickering in the comments.
- Hubert Feyrer found an interesting thing: DracoPKG – a combination of pkgsrc and Slackware’s pkgtools.
There’s a bounty for fixing up the Linuxulator; bringing it up to match FreeBSD-current’s state will net you €250. If you want to contribute to the bounty, write your sum into the page. If you want to do the update, volunteer. (There’s already one interested person.)
As Dru Lavigne reports, the May issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on “Enterprise Readness”. I found the article on the need for project management in open source very interesting.
DragonFly hasn’t worked under VirtualBox for a long time. Several people found a cause, though not the reason for it – yet.
This question at the howling void about donating to open source projects (in this case, DesktopBSD) got me thinking. I’ve been meaning to investigate setting up a DragonFly nonprofit similar to FreeBSD and NetBSD‘s foundation efforts, in order to receive donations and have a legal entity. Anyone have experience with setting up a 501(c)3 company?