There’s a new BSD forum site, called DaemonForums. Looking at the comments, it appears to be a replacement for the now-unmaintained BSDForums.(Via)
Leonardo Taccari created a NetBSD reference card (link to 2-page PDF). The command section also applies, by and large, to DragonFly, as does the entire pkgsrc reference. (via Hubert Feyrer)
Samuel J. Greear asked about HAMMER and if it could be optimized for handling the somewhat-more-common-these-days Solid State Disk. Matthew Dillon responded, and some discussion ensued. (I’m linking to the posts because they’ve got the details.
Samuel J. Greear did an informal comparison of zip, gzip, bzip2, and 7zip, comparing compression ratio and compression time. 7zip looks pretty good, though testing it on some more varied file types and sizes would be in order.
Matthew Dillon posted another HAMMER status report, with handling a full file system the only remaining major item. It’s being tested now on his backup system. He’s also committing the final disk structure changes, so you will need to reformat any existing HAMMER volumes.
pkgsrcCon 5, in Berlin, Germany, June 13 – 15, is less than one month away from closing registration. Register now if you want to attend (since the hosting university does not allow walk-ins). If you want to present, your deadline is slightly earlier, on May 25th.
OpenBSD is, as usual, selling CDs of their 4.3 release. It appears that related-but-not-directly-linked goods like The Book of PF are being sold right along side.
The sight of a thick technical book with an included (and probably out of date) CD has been common for years; however, this reversal strikes me as a good idea. Selling a good book along with the operating system that will use it is worthwhile.
Martin Schütte is updating syslog (there’s an IETF standard for it, which I did not know) for one of NetBSD’s Google Summer of Code projects; he very kindly posted links to it on the DragonFly users@ list in the hopes that it could benefit DragonFly’s syslogd too.
Marc Balmer of OpenBSD posted about a cross-BSD bug in seekdir()/readdir(); a fix is forthcoming.
Sepherosa Ziehau has introduced ETHER_INPUT_CHAIN, which apparently gives a “~150Kpps” speed boost.
This week’s 16-minute BSDTalk episode has Jeremy White of CodeWeavers, the company that releases the Wine-based CrossOver products. They’re now experimenting with BSD versions of their software – specifically, for FreeBSD/PC-BSD.
Wine is coming up on a 1.0 release, which may or may not be coincidental. I recall there was some issues with getting Wine to work on DragonFly; can someone confirm or deny that?
Robert Luciani asked a question I’ve wondered about before: how do you limit bandwidth using pf? Matthew Dillon had some ideas.
The Preview tag has been moved up; if you run Preview or 1.12.2, and still have errors building m4 from pkgsrc 2008Q1, add this patch.
Robert Luciani, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, did some initial testing of the libc_r and libthread_xu libraries, with some graphable results. Unfortunately, there’s some degree of error, but that’s OK – I just like having tests performed and images created.
‘Sdavtaker’ posted news of a slight DragonFly presence at FLISOL08. Not huge, but interesting since it’s very oriented towards easy Linux installs. I didn’t know the event existed, possibly because it does not appear to have a central website.
Update: Damien posted a descriptive link – in Spanish.
The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource online magazine is out. This issue focuses on Communications. (via)
Murray Stokely has an interesting post up on his blog noting a bunch of interesting BSD-themed tutorials on (mostly) Youtube. His sentiments – and I agree – are that there should be more BSD instruction in video form, not just the various texts we have today. (via)
BSD systems have always been well-documented compared to the open source … well, ‘standard’ isn’t the right word. Branching past text-based media is a good idea, though I suspect part of the barrier is common Flash support.
I’ve been traveling the past few days, so I’m going to do a linkdump to catch up:
OpenBSD has an interesting mergemaster replacement, sysmerge. I’ve never seen a final answer on if DragonFly needs some sort of merging tool or not.
Nominations for the 2008 Open Source Awards are now possible. (Via)
ScummC is a tool for creating ScummVM adventures, another one of those things that people of a certain age look on fondly. (via)
The first issue of BSD Magazine is out, and Dru Lavigne has a list of the contents.
OSNews.com has an article highlighting some interesting projects among the various Google Summer of code proposals. First on the list? DragonFly’s LiveCD project. (via Matthias Schmidt on IRC)