The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the topic being “Geospatial” – something that isn’t covered often in open source terms.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has some tips on how to mirror the git repo for DragonFly more exactly; there’s an additional command that can clean up spurious branches.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a preference for the emx(4) driver over em(4). This means that loading the emx module or adding the emx device to your kernel config will may turn your em devices into emx. This isn’t dangerous; just a note to keep it from being a surprise.
Edit: Thanks, Sascha Wildner, for pointing out details on which chipsets are affected.
Matthew Dillon notes that a 2.2.1 release will be coming about halfway through March; being a minor release, it’ll be bugfixes for things like the installer and the Hammer undo utility.
Alex Hornung posted a description of the work he’s done so far on a new I/O scheduler, with some details on his ideas on multiple scheduler levels. Feedback is welcomed.
CNet’s Buzz Out Loud podcast #918 mentions the new DragonFly release, though I haven’t yet listened to it to find out how far they get. Also, in the comments. (Thanks, Will Backman)
RUE Beltelecom has a DragonFly mirror; it includes images, snapshots, and binary packages. It’s already listed on the download page on the DragonFly website, too.
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated em(4) to version 6.9.6, with some interesting improvements. It does possible require loading a module now. He also has more patches to test.
Matthias Schmidt readded the CVS DragonFly template. However, git being git, you have to manually bring it down to your local clone of the repo. Do this with:
git config --add commit.template /usr/src/tools/gittemplate
Hammer filesystem, meet Hammer OS. Please don’t take this seriously.
If you can see YouTube, you can see a 20-minute presentation from a Philip Johnson about his experiences from Google Summer of Code 2008, where he was a mentor for another project. If you aren’t familiar with the Summer of Code project, or think that you might participate as a student, this is a good introduction to the concept.
Rob Pike, one of the people responsible for UNIX, among other things, has a photo blog. (via)
Incidentally, his wife’s books are good, and wierd, and I read them long before I had any real idea who Rob Pike was, in a wierd bit of synchronicity. Early computer science history would be a good topic for Jim Ottaviani to publish, come to think of it… (also recommended)
For anyone interested in profiling: I posted details on a bulk build of pkgsrc that seem to imply it’s limited by something other than CPU. The ensuing discussion had some ideas on how to speed up the whole process.
I’ve set up another mirror at df.v12.su, on some equipment/space/bandwidth kindly donated by GP Internet.
Freddie Cash has an interesting writeup of how he put together a very capable and cheap backup system using ZFS; this is part of a larger discussion on Hammer, ZFS, performance and solutions.
Do you use em(4)? Sepherosa Ziehau has an improved version for testing. What’s changed? Dunno.
I’ve updated the website section of the Projects page on the DragonFly website; if you were looking for some things to clear up, some of them are relatively trivial.
“Desktop NetBSD” – with the DragonFly LiveDVD and installer, we’re almost able to do the same thing now – a skim of that project page seems to imply we just need to add some more packages. (via)
As I try to catch up with a large backlog of messages (I was traveling), I’ll note that Sepherosa Ziehau has done a lot of work on network card support and Sascha Wildner on WARNS cleanup; both of them have made so many commits in the last few days I’m just going to throw up my hands and point at the date index for this month’s commits.
Another one of those tools that can be handy to know: netcat. Here’s a nice guide about it.