A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Something I’ve been holding onto for a while and only got around to looking at tonight: A Git introduction at a Google TechTalk, via YouTube.
Anecdote: I saw Randal Schwartz, the speaker, at a Perl conference back in… 2000? He was a decent speaker, and I went up after his talk to tell him how I was (successfully) using two programming practices he specifically deprecated during his talk. Not that it was any better an idea because of that…
Want to look at old computer museums? There’s a number of them to choose from. (via) While you’re at it: Apple ][ in a browser, now via Java (via).
In the ridiculously rare event that my old-school credentials are ever challenged, I will just point to my store-bought 5.25″ floppy of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple ][, complete with typewritten label.
It makes me happy to see code spread across multiple BSDs.
OnlineDirect has a new DragonFly mirror up in Bulgaria; it’s hosting the official ISOs at this point.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to fix problems with memory alignment when doing tasks like burning optical media. Try it if you’ve had this problem, or wait, as it will probably be committed soon.
For those of you thinking of installing DragonFly on a EeePC 901, Christopher Rawnsley tried, with some booting problems. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has an easy fix, however.
pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has a set of packages for pkgsrc 2008Q4 on DragonFly 2.0.1. The bulk build was started after the freeze for 2008Q4 but before the actual branch was released, so it’s not exactly the 2008Q4 release, but it’s pretty close. It’ll be updated as soon as the next build completes. Please, use a mirror as soon as they update.
For those going to DCBSDCon but not yet having rooms to sleep in, a cheaper Days Inn has been found a few metro stops away from the convention.
(Hotel costs kept me from making it to NYCBSDCon, for instance.)
Dmitry Komissaroffis doing a very useful thing and producing code to support more ACPI stuff – specifically, HPET timers, the mysterious Smart Battery, and Asus systems.
Hasso Tepper is looking for other people with experience and/or interest in porting FreeBSD’s mmc(4) support for SD cards greater than 2G in size. Contact him is that describes you.
The 2008Q4 release of pkgsrc is out, with a number of improvements: pulseaudio, OpenOffice 3, and perl 5.10, among other things. The announcement mentions using audit-packages and pkgsurvey, too.
There’s a build of pkgsrc from just before the 2008Q4 ‘freeze’ finishing now on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; a build will happen soon. Hasso Tepper noted a higher failure rate in package building for that release…
Peter Avalos has committed a new version of OpenSSL – 0.9.8j. (New version caused by a recent security issue.) Also, the vendor branches are no longer versioned, since git has made that unneccesary.
I have a number of items that are all going to get posted together:
Some extra reading: Hasso Tepper posted a link to an article talking about non-uniform memory access (NUMA). Any article that can have diagrams labeled ‘hypercubes’ must be worthwhile.
Google’s planning a Summer of Code again for 2009, according to the still-running mailing lists from last year’s SoC event. More will be announced at FOSDEM.
DragonFly may or may not be participating; it’s dependent on the application process same as every year. If you’re a student, start thinking about what to do, now.
Michael Neumann came up with an interesting script that creates a bootable DragonFly USB drive. This makes it possible to boot up and install on a netbook that lacks a normal CDROM, for instance.
The DCBSDCon Blog announces the last 3 speakers at DCBSDCon:George Neville-Neil, one of the authors of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Ken Caruso of SchmooCon Labs, and our very own Robert Luciani, talking about DragonFly and threading.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. (via) Dru Lavigne posted a list of the contents, earlier.