A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
This is just based on what’s shown up in my Inbox lately:
Of course, for about a zillion more events, watch the BSDEvents Twitter feed.
Swapcache is normally used with a SSD, but Matthew Dillon was able to set it up using a separate, ‘normal’ hard disk on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. This reduced pressure on the machine’s existing disk, especially with the recent release causing much traffic.
If you have trouble building Cairo or gstreamer or some other X-related packages, check this page from Dave Shao. It came in useful for me. (linked by Steve O’Hara Smith)
The November issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Economic Development.” I like the microcredit article, but perhaps that’s just my special interest.
The December issue’s theme is “Humanitarian Open Source” and the guest editor will be Leslie Hawthorn. She’s currently Open Source Outreach Manager at Oregon State University Open Source Lab, but some may remember her as the face of Google Summer of Code for the past several years.
Pratyush Kshirsagar has added a howto page on setting up a ftp server, among other services .
The longer I work on this Digest, the harder the names are to spell.
Edit: Link fixed.
I updated the projects page for DragonFly with some labeling of potential work for Google Code-In. Pratyush Kshirsagar suggested porting busybox, which Chris Turner countered with flashdist/flashrd. ‘joris dedieu’ followed with beastiebox.
The early bird registration (a cheap $95) for NYCBSDCon has been extended an extra week to match how long they ran it previous years. November 7th, it goes to $125 and walk-in will be $145.
Chris Turner is working on ral(4) support, specifically the eee901’s 2860 network chip.
See the announcement and the release notes.
The index page of the DragonFly site has been updated by Matt Dillon with some notes regarding the status of the 2.8 release. Among these, it is mentioned that the GUI image will be making a return for 2.8! There will be no DVD image this time, only an image suitable for writing to a disk, such as a usb stick.
I’ve coded some tasks on the DragonFly projects page for Google Code-In. (Application is in already.) If there’s any additional DragonFly projects appropriate for 13 to 18-year old students, that’s the place to add it. The application period ends the 29th at 23:00 UTC, so don’t take your time.
If you’re using DragonFly x86_64, and set LANG to something other than English, you will get crashes from programs using pkgsrc’s gettext-lib. Francois Tigeot has a fix which is going into pkgsrc, though I don’t know if this will show up in pkgsrc-2010Q3.
The 2.8 release hasn’t quite happened yet. But soon!
Siju George has been fleshing out his ‘afterboot’ style page, though now it’s “Environment Quick Start“. Good to look at if you are, say, installing a 2.8 DragonFly image.
DragonFly 2.8 (technically 2.8.1; see here for the .1 changes) is due to be released tomorrow. There should be at almost the same time pkgsrc 2010Q3 packages available. There will also be a LiveDVD for this release, too, though the window manager has changed.
DragonFly has shipped with a uniprocessor kernel by default forever. Shipping with a SMP kernel may not work as well for all possible combinations. With some recent changes by Matthew Dillon, both types of kernel are present and can be picked from at boot time – with the LiveCD!
Chris Turner posted details of how he gets jack (“a low-latency audio server”) to run on DragonFly. Your mileage may vary.
The BSD Show! has a 20-minute interview with John Hixson, known for working on pc-sysinstall. (See also)
Whoops! This should have gone up last night. I’m almost waxing nostalgic for this one.
I am totally stealing the horizonal evocative image idea from things magazine.
There’s still no support for KMS/GEM on any most BSDs, though there are people interested in it for FreeBSD. One of DragonFly’s Summer of Code projects was just that, though it’s not in a state where it can be really used.