The almost-to-200 expisode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with John Hixson about PC-Sysinstall and what it could replace.
This Lazy Reading post actually has some good lengthy reading in it.
- Modern Perl: The Book: (actually a pre-print draft) Even if you don’t know Perl, I’ve always liked the way the author, chromatic, writes. Many articles about a language or other technical subject tend to either wander about loosely or become a ‘shopping list’ of actions, but chromatic’s work retains focus.
- Robert Watson presents Capsicum; a recent USENIX talk on Youtube. (via a number of places)
- 12 Forgotten Games – the slideshow is of most interest. (via) Online games that predate the vast swarm of today’s titles. MUDs, MUSHs, roguelikes, etc. The nice thing about the slideshow is the link on each slide to a still-running, still-accessible online version of that game.
- Kieron Gillen‘s moving away from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a gaming review site that has some honest to goodness decent writing. (My Lazy Reading posts are similar to their Sunday Papers for a reason.) One of his articles was all about ZangbandTK. I was all set to link to that in pkgsrc, but it’s not there – just games/angband-tty and games/angband-x11. Darnit. Anyway, read his article and then go play something roguelike.
Based on a recent project list entry for “changing the vm_map lookup” (currently last item on the page), Venkatesh Srinivas wrote up a bit more information on it, linking to different strategies for arranging the data. Good reading for those who like data structures.
Matthias Schmidt has set up a x86_64 DragonFly machine at uther.dragonflybsd.org. Anyone wanting to try 64-bit testing can use a vkernel on that machine. Mail him for an account.
Hasso Tepper posted a link to something I had only heard about when it didn’t exist in physical form: the Open Graphics Device v1. It’s possible to get one if you’re going to write support for it.
The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Sales as the theme. The very first article talks about something dangerous: turning open-source users into customers.
Our mirror of the never-quite-official git repository for pkgsrc is being rebuilt, so it will be temporarily inaccessible. Matthew Dillon is working on building a new one directly from pkgsrc CVS, which will have a different link.
Update: It’s finished. Matthew Dillon’s posted a summary of the changes and what you need to update in order to use it.
The BSD Show! has a 15 minute talk with Matt Olander about MeetBSD, and a 14-minute B-Side with Randal Schwartz, who writes books and does podcasts. (there, even more to listen to now.)
BSDTalk 198 has 12 minutes of conversation with Matt Olander and James T. Nixon, about MeetBSD. (which is November 5th and 6th.)
It looks like my prior article was incorrect: it was a different issue than MADT causing problems with booting x86_64. Scrambled memory report appears to be at the heart of the issue; in any case, it’s fixed now.
Chris Turner wrote up his experience of getting Flash 9 to work on DragonFly. The usual disclaimers apply.
Update: there’s an improved library available that fixes some audio and video sync problems.
Peter Avalos wrote a note that better summarized my earlier post, and mentioned a problem/workaround with ssh and non-md5 MACs.
John Marino found that when he couldn’t boot a x86_64 development image in Virtualbox, setting the sysctl hw.madt_probe_test=1 seemed to make a difference long enough to boot, though it still crashed later. It’s worth trying if there’s no other way to boot, at least.
I’ve drastically revamped the pkgsrc howto on the dragonflybsd.org website. It’s also linked in that site’s menu, too. Comments please!
Two committers who went dormant some time ago: Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett. Two committers who recently became active again? Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett. Welcome, back, guys. Developers tend to be active in open source only for as long as they’ve got an itch to scratch, so it’s always great to see a return.
A bump in shared library version for libssl/libcrypto means that any programs dependent on it will require a rebuild – including any pkgsrc programs.
This only affects you if you are running 2.7, for now. It means that on upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8, any libssl-using programs will need to be updated. This may not be a big thing, since pkgsrc-2010Q3 will also be out and people will want to upgrade anyway.
A small crop for Lazy Reading this week – oh well.
- Bad things about SVN. I’ve always thought git is more interesting, but subversion is easier. Oh well. The article is also fun for the unfiltered Windows-hate.
- At least this hasn’t happened yet with pkgsrc.
- What happens if you put your hand in the way of the Large Hadron Collider beam? (via)
I’ve noticed that if you have older pkgsrc packages installed, and install binary packages for pkgsrc-2010Q2, those packages will refuse to install if pkg_install is an older version than what they were built with.
I ended up force-deleting pkg_install and bmake, and reinstalling by running pkgtools/bootstrap/bootstrap. There may be better solutions; I’m mentioning it now since it’s a known problem.
Update: “bmake replace USE_DESTDIR=yes” was suggested by Joerg Sonnenberger. “pkg_add -u /path/to/newer/pkg_install” should also work (untested).
This will probably apply to the upcoming pkgsrc-2010Q3, too. Building from source is a workaround for now.
Jan Lentfer updated his version of squid, and had issues; this is a note for anyone else running squid to maybe wait before upgrading. Note that this applies to the development version of squid, not necessarily the pkgsrc version.
Update: No, wait, it’s OK.