I’ve heard of Dvorak keyboard layouts, but I didn’t know there’s another, called Colemak. Sascha Wildner has committed a patch from Geert Hendrickx which makes Colemak layouts available on DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon has changed the way USB flash drives are attached, to make sure they don’t interfere with AHCI-attached disks. This is temporary, and will be replaced by a dynamic /dev.
Dru Lavigne is going to be doing blogging/tweeting for the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation. This is a good thing – BSD in general is helped by more of a conversation about what’s going on. I daresay this Digest has established that there’s definitely enough events, just with DragonFly, for daily news.
Also, Dru’s published summaries of the articles in the upcoming July ‘Collaboration’ issue of the Open Source Business Resource.
Gleaned from the SoC mailing lists: the tenative dates for the 2009 Mentor Summit for the Google Summer of Code program is October 24th and 25th. Where? Probably Mountain View, CA.
This time, it’s what happens when you take Rogue, export it to Japan, and then see what you get back as a Sega Genesis console game.
I had no idea there were so many permutations of roguelike games. A few years ago, I’d have listed rogue, nethack, moria, [zmw]angband, and ADOM, and felt like I covered it all.
BSDTalk 175 (the semidemibicentennial?) has a 23 minute interview with Michael Dexter of BSD Fund. Did you know you can get a BSD Fund Visa card (if you are a U.S. resident) that contributes money on each purchase and has a beastie on the card? I did not.
Siju George described his efforts to set up a continuous, automatic backup system using Hammer, with some interesting results. Matthew Dillon chimed in with some suggestions.
Matthew Dillon is looking for one more driver to build to complement the AHCI and Sili drivers. There’s several suggestions already.
The whole OpenBSD-focused issue of BSD Magazine is available online as a PDF, plus some other articles from the NetBSD issue. (via)
The list of monthly topics for the Open Source Business Resource have been published. The list runs through the end of the year. If one of the topics is something you’re interested in, here’s your chance to get published!
Matthew Dillon’s made some small changes to Hammer; it should result in a small speedup when copying data.
It’s the weekend, so it’s a good time for a digression. This blog post from Matt Trout describes a lot of the code work he’s done for Perl, and what he thinks the best contribution is. The important part is the end of the post. He notes that for all the code he’s added, the best return has come from encouraging others to contribute. The net result has been a magnification of effort, as more people donate time.
The reason I’m posting this is to note that DragonFly, as a community, has been excellent so far at providing a low-drama environment for people to have ideas and contribute work. Keep this in mind; the best benefit to DragonFly isn’t lines of code, but people welcomed.
For the benefit of others: a Git diagram that shows the different levels of storage. Useful, because git goes far beyond the ‘it’s either here or it’s there’ style of cvs/svn. (via)
‘Haidut’ brings word of a 50-system DragonFly installation acting as web crawlers, with performance exceeding that of the Debian Linux systems they replaced. There’s more details about what’s being run, if you’re curious.
A number of people have noticed that Hammer’s pruning (which by default runs once at midnight) makes systems temporarily unresponsive. Matthew Dillon’s committed a fix for this, with warnings of more improvements to come.
Another installment in my continuing obsession with roguelikes: Nethack, implemented as an AJAX application. (via)
I recently did a bulk build of pkgsrc on two similar machines; the only significant difference being extra CPU work being done on one system, and Hammer snapshots on the other. However, they’re diverging in speed over time, which is interesting but not yet conclusive. Read my post about it for more details.
A good benchmarking project would be testing Hammer with snapshots on and with snapshots off.
Taking from his AHCI work, Matthew Dillon’s working on a Silicon Image 3132 driver. An initial version is available now, though the usual caveats about a brand-new device driver apply.
Update: he’s really moving fast on this.
Hasso Tepper posted his notes on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list about the different video modes for the Intel video driver. Version 2.7 works, but only if you use certain options.
The pkgsrc freeze is on. We should have release 2009Q2 in 2 weeks…