The “Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique” is mirroring DragonFly – it’s on the mirrors page or you can just go right to it if a French mirror is useful to you.
Apparently this is a good week for Lazy Reading links, cause I have lots! If you have any specific suggestions of where to find more links, I’d welcome them. I’m sure there’s more people to follow that come up with tidbits like these…
- Coding Tricks of Game Developers. A mix of genuine techniques and deadline near-misses. (via)
- Insane Calculations In Bash. Ostensibly, it describes all the work required to convert number series to “sparks” (inline UTF-8-based graphs) using bash. What it really shows is how far down the paths of madness shell programming can take you.
- From the same person, It Came From The Hold Space, a description of how crappy things could be pre-1990 or so when, say, sed was the most capable tool you had. Read the presentation description first. Bonus: the presentation explains a non-acronym source for the name “grep”.
- Hey, I’ve seen that logo before. (via Koston on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Mounting files from the web. (via luxh, same place)
- Here’s a Google Summer of Code success story that made me feel good just for having participated.
- “If a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have an option which enables it to be easily played by a moderately inebriated person who isn’t good at math, it is a failure.“
- Hey, Window Maker finally got updated. (via) It was always my favorite window manager.
- Michael Lucas published his sales numbers so far for SSH Mastery. (reviewed by me here, totally worth buying) The interesting takeaway for me was that despite the reach of Amazon, Smashwords was more profitable – and I like the variety of Smashwords’ DRM-free formats more.
- I’m linking to this mention of open source operating system cost estimates mostly cause I like the phrase “Debian for the most part is a package repository.“
- Hey, that’s cute. (Make sure your terminal is wider than 80 columns to see it.)
Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak. An animator in the UK; I like the rhythmic repetition in his (occasionally disturbing) animations.
As I mentioned last week, DragonFly developer Venkatesh Srinivas is collecting pledges for his crazy-long bike ride, raising funds for cancer patient support. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mother died from cancer in a long, agonizing process some years ago. The support system funded by these pledges would have helped us tremendously. Please donate a few dollars to ease someone else’s burden.
This is the version that the OpenBSD Project is selling, so the profit goes to the people who made OpenSSH. It’s an excellent idea.
I’m planning to tag the 3.0.1 release of DragonFly this weekend. There’s still a few bugs, so if you are able to help, please do. Otherwise, they will be errata.
Michael Lucas installed WHMCS, a commerical hosting management tool, on FreeBSD. He tells a story of doing so, and in the process happened to list all the PHP modules needed for it to run. I’m linking it because that list is going to come in useful for someone, someday.
Will Backman interviewed me for BSDTalk, talking about DragonFly 3.0 and all the stuff around it. I can’t listen to it it’s my own voice do I really sound like that aaaargh.
For the curious and technically oriented, Hammer 2 development can be watched directly by looking for any commits marked ‘hammer2’. There’s been a lot, and if you want to see the code as it flows in, here’s your chance.
If you’ve noticed the main dragonflybsd.org website being down, that’s because both network connections (on different networks!) serving it are down. This makes the website unavailable, and the source code, but you can still pull down images, packages, and the like from avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Hopefully this warning will be out of date soon.
Note: It’s back.
Hey, it’s snowing here! Finally.
- I remember when fractal zooming would bring a desktop computer to its knees. Now, you can do it in a web browser. (via) This exists as a standalone application (x11/XaoS) too.
- I see content from here get splogged, from time to time, and I think that’s what’s happening here. Someone throws “BSD” into a content generator, with ads slapped on top of it? Honestly, I’m not sure what it is. (via)
- Hammer 2 work is starting, as noted earlier this week. Let’s see some details on a similar filesystem project, btrfs. (via)
- You should quit Facebook because privacy etc. you’ve heard it from me before. The arguments are getting more thorough, though.
- Here’s an article from independent game developer Jeff Vogel about serving a niche with your independent work. I like his writing, plus if you squint your eyes and sorta look at that article’s point sideways, you could construe it as relevant for BSD.
- For fun, spot the two things I mention/link to here frequently, in this somewhat hypey article about Tumblr. (via)
- An Economist article about shifting from computer to computer. I read that and realized the one computer constant for me isn’t my desktop – it’s “~”.
- If you ever played games on the Amiga, you may want to watch this movie. It’s clips from a lot of Amiga games. By a lot, I mean an hour and a half of footage total. There were some really advanced games for the time there. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Shut Up About Cats. The rest of that site’s good too.
Also! On a related link, Venkatesh Srinivas, one of the DragonFly developers, is participating in a bike ride to raise cash for the Ulman Cancer Fund. If you’d like to pledge some money, he’ll feel better as he cycles a ridiculous 4,000 miles across the US.
There’s 7 bug reports to close before releasing DragonFly 3.0. Most of them have dumps to go with them, so each one should be solvable. Please take a look if you have the time and inclination,
John Marino has added support for preinit, init, and fini arrays. DragonFly is the first BSD to do so, apparently. What are they for? I’m not sure. The commit message points to more documentation, but not simple enough for me.
There’s a Hammer 2 branch in the DragonFly git repo now, for the next generation of DragonFly’s native file system. Don’t get too excited; as Matthew Dillon explains, it won’t be operational for months, and features won’t get added until much later this year. It’s neat to see the work happening, though, and there’s a new design document to show what’s coming.
Sascha Wildner has brought in improvements to the mps(4)driver from FreeBSD. It’s for LSI Logic Fusion-MPT 2 SAS controllers, and apparently didn’t work very well… until now. Sascha’s commit message details what’s new, including RAID support that is not yet mentioned in the man page.
If you were thinking about implementing DNSSEC, Michael Lucas did it himself and wrote down his notes. You can read them and either follow along to implement it yourself, or just spectate. The one disadvantage is that it uses BIND 9.9, and I only see 9.8 and 10 in pkgsrc.
Nick Prokharau’s project for Google Summer of Code last year was “Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD”. Sascha Wildner has now committed that to DragonFly. It’s experimental, so the normal caveats apply.
Here’s several things to look at:
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube. I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk. Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.
Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.
John Marino has made it possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using GCC 4.6 in the form of gnat-aux. (We’re currently on GCC version 4.4) Note that version 4.6 isn’t included with DragonFly, so you would need to download and compile GCC 4.6 a very recent version of lang/gnat-aux, and set CCVER=gcc46 before building world and kernel to try this out.
Update: John Marino points out in comments that you need to set WORLD_CCVER, not CCVER as his original message said.
BSD Magazine for February 2012 is out, and the feature item is BSD Certification.