Category: Goings-on

For those who want a quick reference: regular expression cheat sheets.  Of course, it’s not such a quick reference if there’s 11 sheets.  (Found via rootprompt.org)

On a side note: I consider Mastering Regular Expressions one of those books that delivers what the title promised.

OnLAMP.com has an 2-page interview of Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Brian Behlendorf, and Michael Tiemann, all about 10 years of the Open Source Initiative. (Not the OSI model as my headline may suggest.)

Hey, the NetBSD mail archives have been redone, and are much more readable.  The pkgsrc lists like pkgsrc-users are there, and possibly useful to DragonFly users.  Interestingly, they are using the same support programs to create the archive as we are.(via Hubert Feyrer)

Dru Lavigne’s “Creating a Publication Using Open Source Tools” talk at SCALE 2008 is available as a PDF.

Matthew Dillon posted another HAMMER summary. This one details the great success he has had simplifying his strategy.  Here’s some details on what didn’t work, for the curious.

Here’s a rather long list of various closed-source programs and the open-source alternatives that match them.  (Via Hubert Feyrer)

The real advancement for open-source is going to be when they are no longer the second choice.  It’ll make my day when I see throwaway articles like “Tired of the GIMP and have money to burn?  Why not Photoshop?”

By common consensus on the kernel@ mailing lists, the next release will be 1.12. (Everyone wants to have HAMMER fully tested before 2.0) The 1.12 code branch is happening today.

Bruce Perens has put together a summary for the first decade of open source.  It’s a call to arms, not a news report. though that should not be a surprise.

This being a BSD-centric publication, I have to quibble: He defines open source as having started by his writing about it, 10 years ago, which seems somewhat arbitrary.  Also, he claims the GPLv3 is the ‘strongest’ open source license possible on the basis that people have been looking at it.  I’d argue that the BSD license has already made it through court.   The biggest problem these days appears to be patent law, which is certainly vulnerable to challenge.  (Via OnLAMP)

There’s a new mirror of ISO images and binary packages at Philipps-University Marburg, in Germany, available via FTP.

Aggelos Economopoulos posted his own vkernel management script, appropriately called ‘vkernmgr’.

Matthias Schmidt sent along a link to an Undeadly article that details how Will Backman made a major improvement for OpenBSD’s SNMP support without writing any code. “I want to contribute but I’m not a coder” is a common refrain for open-source projects, including DragonFly, and we would benefit from similar testing.

As for examples of non-code contributions: Will Backman is also known for BSDTalk.  In addition, there’s what you are reading right now…

Matthew Dillon posted another of his HAMMER updates; he reports on a number of issues he’s having trouble with.  The happy result is that fixing these problems actually led to a solution that was much easier to implement.

BSDTalk 140 is an interview with Kristaps Dzonsons, author of Mult, a “instance multiplicity system”.  It sounds similar to vkernels or Xen, though I’m sure there’s someone gritting their teeth at my generalizations.

I noticed this article describing a  product called ‘Flyback’ on Ubuntu, advertised as being  similar to Apple’s Time Machine.   It creates a backup system via rsync and hardlinks.  Oddly enough, this has already been done on DragonFly, and could work on any BSD.  Perhaps we need to name more basic assemblies of system features with cool names.  (via)

As mentioned here before and now on FreeBSD – the Unknown Giant, there will soon be “BSD Magazine“. It’s due out in 2Q 2008.

Digging around on the site shows some promotional material that says “Linux” where it should say “BSD”. This is probably because it’s repurposed from one of Software Media LLC’s other publications.  It should be interesting.  If you have a itch to write, they are taking submissions, though it sounds like they’ve already got the first issue ready.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert mentioned plans to eventually build an encrypted network file system; Matthew Dillon added a description of how that could work with HAMMER.

Vincent Stemen did a good amount of testing of cvsup vs. rsync in terms of update speed. Rsync came out way ahead, though as a few people noted, rsyncd’s load relative to cvsupd on a server serving many clients is unknown. In any case, cvsup does not build on DragonFly via pkgsrc, so it looks like rsync is generally a better choice, plus most mirrors are using it now. HAMMER may provide a better alternative, in any case.

While on the topic: Ulf Lilleengen’s blog post about improving csup.

Vincent Stemen put together a tool for automatically updating his DragonFly systems.  It’s called ‘mirror’, and he has an explanatory web page up for it now.  Give it a whirl.

An aside in this post from Matthew Dillon notes that the next release (which I assume will be 2.0) will be before the end of February.

This week’s BSDTalk is an interview with Dru Lavigne, covering her new “Best of FreeBSD Basics” book and the new BSDA exam, both previously mentioned on this Digest.

To continue that topic, Dru also attended DemoCamp7 in Ottawa recently and has a writeup on the new products she saw.