This was mentioned before, but now it’s official: ipw(4) is gone, superseded by iwl(4).
Despite the logarithmic expansion of computers and drop in costs of the years, everyone looks back on their first computer systems with a sense of nostalgia. This is why certain readers will find the Raymond Commodore Amiga store in Minneapolis interesting. You should be able to gues their exclusive inventory from the store name. It’s so old-school, the website is a ~username directory. (via Boing Boing Gadgets)
Microsoft has been making some “We support open source” noise lately, but I wonder how far it will go. It’s neat to see open source tools acknowledged, but this other OnLAMP post about how open source removes vendor dependence seems to conflict with Mcrosoft’s usual business model. I would be surprised if Microsoft went so far as to have open source products supplant (instead of complement) their products, like other vendors have done.
Dru Lavigne wrote a blog entry on some of the dangers of using a GPL license vs. BSD, and links to this interesting story of how the University of Toronto found sticking to BSD licensing made software management easier. That article is from the October 2007 issue (“Licensing”) of the Open Source Business Resource; I’ve linked to the OSBR before, but not that issue.
Even more conferences: Free and Open Source Conference 3 is happening August 23-24, in Germany.  The call for papers is already out. (via Undeadly) Also, there will be a BSD booth at IT360, April 8-9 in Toronto. (via Dru Lavigne) Check Dru’s post for details on free admission. There will be a BSDA exam there, too.
The latest BSDTalk has an interview with Dan Langille, a driving force behind BSDCan and also the creator of the FreeBSD Diary, which is one of the things that inspired me to create this digest.
There’s a BSD convention in Barcelona, April 19th and 20th. If you want more information, it will help if you can read Spanish. As I’ve said before, the number of BSD conventions is growing. (via Planet FreeBSD)
Matthew Dillon has committed some improvements to DragonFly’s virtual kernel mechanism, possibly prompted by a discussion of it on freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org.
Peter Avalos has updated bzip2 to fix issue CVE-2008-1372.
Matthew Dillon recommended a specific way to Merge From Current.
My bulk build of pkgsrc binaries for 1.12 is taking quite a while to finish, but you can grab completed binaries from pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org or (even better) one of the mirrors.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM. However, this ‘Ramback‘ is an interesting idea for Linux I’d like to see more of. (Via the howling void) I’m a sucker for the idea of battery-backed RAM for storage.
Johnny C. Lam posted his grand plan for Ruby packages in pkgsrc, including use of Ruby’s internal ‘gems‘ packaging method.
Microsoft is running a program called “DreamSpark”, where students get Microsoft tools free to use in creating software for particular academic activities, as long as it’s non-commercial and student status can be verified.
That’s great – I’m not knocking the provision of software that’s normally too expensive to buy so that people can learn. However, I do want to contrast it against BSD (and Linux, too) – where all the development tools come with your free system, and have been doing so with BSD for 3 decades.
For additional snarkiness, compare the Microsoft terms of use and the BSD license.
Hasso Tepper has updated DragonFly’s Bluetooth stack with code from OpenBSD (and originally from NetBSD, if I understand correctly.)
Update: corrected because I managed to invert just about everything in that post.
Registration for BSDCan, happening in mid-May, is open, with prices in U.S. and Canadian dollars equal. Also, PGCon (for PostgreSQL) is happening in the same place, the next week. (Thanks, Undeadly)
I’ve placed a page on the wiki with some guidelines for students who want to work with DragonFly for Google’s SoC 2008. It’s on the wiki, so if you want to add something, please do.
I’ll link to my mailing list post about it, as I’ve already summarized there. Student signup is the 24-31st of March, so start getting it together if you want to be involved as a student or mentor!
p.s. Yay!