Matthew Dillon’s latest Hammer update, among other things, brings news of a Hammer mailing list specifically for people working on porting Hammer to other systems.
Matthew Dillon is planning for the most recent minor bugfixes for Hammer to go in Wednesday; they will also be merged to the 2.0 branch.
With all these updates going in, a 2.0.1 release, sometime soon, appears likely.
The 2008Q2 pkgsrc bulk build pn pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has been redone; it should flow out to the mirrors normally.
These linkdumps are really kind of fun to do:
- Star Trek, the console game, from BASIC to C#. I knew the game was old, but not that it originated from 1971. A version is on your system right now, probably. (via)
- This week’s @Play column talks about modeling player motion in roguelike games.
- Hopefully, this report (among others) makes me sound a little less crazy when I say “You should be able to choose what software you can use, on hardware you own.” is one of the reasons for open source.
I have a tentative potential layout for dragonflybsd.org. As stated in my mail about it, I want opinions: comments plz!
Mayur Bhosle has updated his wiki page with the latest details on his Proportional Scheduler for Summer of Code.
GPT partitioning is now supported, though Matthew Dillon’s post about it warns that it is very experimental. He also lists some interesting potential projects to go with it.
Matthew Dillon’s committed some initial support for streaming mirroring. With this, two disks can be synchronized over a network link of any speed or reliability – it can be restarted and immediately begin where it left off, and the amount of bandwidth used can be controlled. This sounds neat.
Upgrading WordPress to 2.6 yesterday broke the direct links to articles on the Digest. It’ll be updated in the 2.6.1 release of WordPress, but until then I’ve changed the links to correct for the issue.
I really like pkgsrc. It’s a big system that works well for managing a huge variety of software packages, across multiple platforms, and it’s been beneficial to DragonFly for making a lot of programs instantly accessible.
The issue nobody’s fixed – yet – is that there are plenty of ways to upgrade, some of which don’t work (make update), or involved homegrown solutions that miss the goal most people have: the ability to say simply “Upgrade this” and have it work. This is why programs with the same functionality but simpler usage become popular.
(Prompted by a number of recent “How do I upgrade pkgsrc?” questions on DragonFly and pkgsrc mailing lists.)
Gergo Szakal noticed that there is now ath9k, an official open source driver for Atheros 802.11n wireless chipsets. (‘Sunnz’ pointed out it’s still not as open as people would like.)Â There is an existing community-built ath(4) driver.
Edit: Gergo Szakal pointed out ath(4) is 802.11b/g and ath9k is 802.11n, so it’s not a direct overlap. Thanks, Gergo.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s committed his ETHER_INPUT2 networking upgrades, which moves networking a bit closer to getting out from under the Giant Lock.
Damian Vicino is presenting a 40-minute talk on Hammer at the “Jornada Regional de Software Libre” in Argentina, August 20-22.
Dashu Huang has posted a patchset and a link to his design document (PDF) for his work on RFC3542 support, which is one of the DragonFly Summer of Code projects.
Versions of DragonFly later than 2.0 now have bsdcpio, a BSD-licensed version of cpio, as the default version of cpio, instead of the GNU-licensed one. Thanks to Peter Avalos for adding it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for JMicron Gigabit/Fast Ethernet chipsets, apparently with the support of Ethanat JMicron and Pyun YongHyeon of FreeBSD.
Here’s another one of those Flash shakycam presentations: Danny O’Brien talking about Web 2.0 and personal info. I link to this because it’s interesting: lots of newer web sites like Flickr, LiveJournal, etc have absorbed people’s creativity. While that’s good, it’s dangerous in a way that’s been seen before. Having your own system with your own operating system (hint: DragonFly) lets you own your own data and interests. If you can get past some of the joking at the beginning, the video makes that point at some length. I post this not to make with the tinfoil hat attitude, but to point out that in some ways, handing your writing or art off to a remote hosting service makes as much sense as renting a paintbrush.
The Open Souce Business Resource for this month is about Accessibility. (via) This means
Pedro F. Giffuni pointed out something interesting: a project to bring LVM to NetBSD. We could use this too.