Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a experimental version of the NVIDIA FreeBSD driver changed for DragonFly; the code is available without any support so it’s not as simple as a download, unfortunately.
BSDTalk 165 has a 35-minute conversation with Julian Elischer while at MeetBSD. I wonder how many interviews Will backman got out of this event…
Hasso Tepper has made /dev/audio a symlink to /dev/dsp. DragonFly’s sound device hasn’t been /dev/audio in a while, but until recently in pkgsrc, applications that used audio would default to /dev/audio for playback. With this symlink, they all should work – or at least not be directing sound to a nonexistent device.
This isn’t dramatic news, but I can never remember which device is the right one, and this fixes that little issue for me.
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the Broadcom bge(4) network interface driver so that it apparently now goes as fast as possible; e.g. receiving at the full line rate of 1Gbps.
David Tweed posted a short but interesting anecdote of his real-world experiences dealing with a large number of files, to follow up with a recent discussion on handling large directories with Hammer.
Hasso Tepper has made some fixes to SATA ATAPI code that fix some of the issues with SATA CD/DVD readers, though some issues remain. Please test if you’ve got the hardware to match.
Will Backman has another podcast up; this one being 38 minutes of FreeBSD Core Team interviews from the just-concluded MeetBSD event.
Will Backman visited iXsystems recently, and he has a 8 minute podcast with the details up as BSDTalk 163.
python15 and zope25 are being removed from pkgsrc, unless someone speaks up. If you’re that someone, post to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org list about it.
Hasso Tepper is taking advantage of his new pkgsrc commit bit and working on a KDE change, by removing the need to have arts included when building the rest of KDE. He’s testing on DragonFly, so a side benefit will be better DragonFly integration.
Matthew Dillon is adding versioning support to Hammer; it’ll support in-place version upgrading. The gory details of his current plan are available, with an interesting tidbit: Hammer directory lookups remain the same speed even with 2 billion files in a directory, while UFS will be O(N^3) speed after several hundred thousand.
I have a number of things to link which probably can all go together:
- Useful (Stupid) BlackBerry Tricks, to go with the previous ones for Unix, Vi, Emacs, and Regexes.
- Dru Lavigne brings work of the November OSBR issue: “Health and Life Sciences“, along with something else I didn’t know the BSD Fund was supporting: Events.
- BoingBoing is having an Obfusticated Code contest; I seem to have heard of this sort of thing before.
- Two links from sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd: tarsnap and Sun’s hybrid storage plans. (PDF)
User “dark0s Optik” has put together a graphical tool for managing pkgsrc, called “pkgsrcgfe”. I’d say to give it a whirl, but I don’t recall seeing a download link yet.
The newest BSDTalk is about trying various BSDs (including DragonFly) on a EeePC 900A. Little netbooks are this close to being an acceptable price/performance combination for me…
Will Backman, the host, is going to be at MeetBSD, which is happening in 5 days…
Since DragonFly is switching to git instead of CVS, something handy is ‘eg’, or Easy Git. It’s a wrapper around git that makes the transition from CVS easier, or so it says. (via _hasso_ on EFNet #dragonflybsd) The linked page lists some alternate programs that are also designed to make git acclimation easier.
Hasso Tepper has been helpfully submitting DragonFly-specific pkgsrc fixes for some time; his reward/punishment is commit access to pkgsrc. Congratulations, Hasso
The change from CVS to git will be happening this week, with git being moved in and mercurial added in a mirrored form, so both will be available. Expect some wierdness on the commits@ mailing list.
Michael Neumann has come up with a way to automatically create pseudo file systems (PFS) when mirroring a Hammer volume. Previously, the destination/slave file system would have to be created first; this makes it Just Work.
This means Hammer data streams will be incompatible with versions before and after this change, but it’s not going to damage anything. Introducing a versioning system into Hammer data streams is an available project…
Some random links I’ve had built up:
- Dru Lavigne has links explaining cross-platform zip differences
- Microsoft is getting in on the idea of an App Store, same as Apple and Google. I want to point out that you can draw a straight line between the BSD world’s ports/package systems and this idea…
- pcc is seeking funding. (via)