If you happen to use a LG P-500 smartphone to get online via USB, as ‘Romick’ does, he’s got a patch that makes that device work under DragonFly. (Sorry, the original users@ email seems to have gone missing.)
About a month from now (August 10-14), the CCC Camp is being held outside Berlin. Bring a tent and (I assume) something capable of getting a wireless connection. It only happens every 4 years, so jump on it now. There will be at least one DragonFly-using person there – Matthias Schmidt is going.
John Marino has made binutils 2.21.1 the default binutils in DragonFly, and gprof is now built but not in the default path.
Man, it’s like the whole Internet decided to take a nap lately. Warm weather in the northern hemisphere does that.
- The Hidden Damage From Waste Data (And How To Deal With It) (via) My answer is more RAMdisks. That’s always my answer for everything, though.
- A replacement for ALTQ.
- Some developer who doesn’t use BSD says it’s not worthwhile. (via) Rather than argue, I’ll just note that the article was linked as “Developer says BSD not worth it” rather than “Interview with man who did PulseAudio” or “What’s happening with systemd”. That may show what people actually care about. Also, see this comment.
Alex Hornung has made a pile of changes for disk encryption, including adding libdm, a “simple BSD-licensed libdevmapper“,and adding tcplay, a 100% compatible implementation of TrueCrypt. This should make you very happy if you like running from an encrypted disk.
Update: Alex has written an in-depth explanation of this work. It’s a huge change!
Update update: Hey, it’s showing on Hacker News too!
All 6 Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly have reached the midterm, and passed!
Francois Tigeot has repeated his benchmarking, this time changing out the CPU instead of the operating system. There’s still more graphs, yay!
Irina Pre?a has posted a nice summary of the Google Summer of Code project “Checkpointing vkernels.”
If you are a Summer of Code student or mentor, make sure you’ve filled out your midterm survey. Without it, your project fails – and they are due for everyone in roughly the next 24 hours!
One of the perpetual questions about Summer of Code is “Why can’t there be documentation projects?”, since most open source projects need docs as badly as code. There’s various reasons that I’m too lazy to research and type out, I’m sure, but Google is sponsoring a “Doc Camp“, in October. You don’t have to be in Summer of Code; you just have to be willing to spend the 17th through the 25th writing documentation. Google pays for room and board, and you can apply for transportation cost coverage. A classy idea, all around. Someone participate and report back!
Francois Tigeot tested a system under both FreeBSD and DragonFly using various RAID setups with arcmsr(4) and blogbench. Hooray for graphs! Like any good benchmark, it quickly went to discussion of how the test was conducted and how the various runs differ. (Follow the thread.)
The Google Summer of Code midterms are coming up, which generally means students get graded on a pass/fail basis for their work so far, and both mentors and students fill out surveys. What’s this mean? It means we’re halfway through six projects!
If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.11, it’s worth updating. Matthew Dillon fixed a networking bug that I’ve seen cause problems. It was introduced within 2.11’s lifetime, so as far as I know, this won’t affect anyone on 2.10.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q2, has been branched. There’s no formal announcement yet to describe the highlights, but I’ll link it when it shows up. I’ve already started building binary packages for DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.
I happened to stumble on this: the DuckDuckGo search engine will take you directly to a DragonFly man page, if you type ‘!dfman’ at the start of your query. For instance, “!dfman hammer“.
Sascha Wildner has enabled the CPU_ENABLE_EST option for x86_64 kernels. If you’re on x86_64, you can now use Enhanced Speedstep Technology. (i386 users already could.)
The July issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and the theme is Women Entrepreneurs. Next month’s issue is unthemed, so here’s a good time to write about open source and get published.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a firmware update for bce(4) (Broadcom NetXtreme II) cards. He’s been doing a lot more incidental network hardware updates I haven’t linked; thanks, Sephe!
I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.
You probably heard of this already, but hey, look! DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.
Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front. This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.
While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself. It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up. Yeah, that worked out just dandy. There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).
The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places) Here’s my story. It was, and still is, “Fupjack”. Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack. Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway. He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.
Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!” I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one. People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…