DragonFly BSD Digest

Francis Gudin is working on IKE/IPSEC support for DragonFly; he has patches for racoon in pkgsrc, plus there’s other patches available out there.

If you need an XSLT2 processor, or like programs written in Eiffel, Colin Adams has a program for you.

If your configure is out of date, Sascha Wildner pointed out the right place to get the most recent config.sub and config.guess.

This is one of those perennial article types: “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits” on IBM’s developerWorks site. It’s not shell-specific, and actually quite useful, though dry. (via rootprompt)

OnLAMP has a article talking about setting up Apache with SSL; it’s been covered elsewhere, but this article manages to not assume you’re using one platform or another, thankfully.

DragonFly user ‘why the lucky stiff’ has put together a book called ‘Nobody Knows Shoes‘.  Shoes is a library for creating graphical interfaces on Ruby applications.  The book is a lesson on how to use Shoes, mixed in with hand-drawn and collaged art, and available as a free download or a physical, purchasable object.

I am all for more interesting computer books.  This one reads as a mix between an O’Reilly Nutshell guide and The Book of the Subgenius, or perhaps a Max Ernst novel.

Alert readers may remember why’s previous book, “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby“.

The NYCBSDCon site now has a call for presentations, plus details for sponsorship.   (via Undeadly)

Hubert Feyrer’s latest post detailing recent changes in NetBSD mentions strcspn(3), strpbrk(3) and strpspn(3) improvements coming from DragonFly.  It’s gratifying to see good ideas spread.

It’s finally happened: an amateur entomologist interested in dragonflies (the bugs) is using DragonFly (the operating system).  This entertains me in a geeky way.

Dmitri Nikulin wrote a long post on users@ about how he was worried that DragonFly would lose importance given that FreeBSD 7 has improved performance relative to FreeBSD 5/6.  Responses include a number of anecdotes on how agreeable the DragonFly community can be, plus my note that DragonFly validation does not require FreeBSD to suck.  Matthew Dillon noted his concerns as project leader, and the difficulty of explaining how significant the changes from FreeBSD-4 are in DragonFly.

EuroBSDCon 2008 will be Oct. 18-19th at the University of Strasbourg, France.

NYCBSDCon 2008 will be October 11-12th at Columbia University.

BSDCan 2008 will be May 16-17th, in Ottawa, Canada.

AsiaBSDCon 2008 will be the 27-30th of March, at the Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan

EuroBSDCon’s dates were recently announced, which is what caused this post. Has anyone noticed that not so many years ago, BSD conventions were just informal gatherings held at Linux-centric events? An interesting change.

BSDTalk 142 has an interview with Ken Smith, lead release engineer for FreeBSD. I haven’t listeded to the interview yet, but I daresay it covers the recent 7.0 release.

It’s always entertaining to see where release announcements appear.  I like this one from _why, as it’s way better than the usual announcement reprint.  Plus, it’s the first art/code blog I’ve ever seen.

Dru Lavigne posted that the latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is available; this issue being about “open data”.

The 1.12 release is out now, and should be available on any of the mirrors. I’m blockquoting the announcement:

This release is primarily a maintainance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel.

The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year.

Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release.

If you’re a student, start thinking about potential Summer of Code projects, as Google’s starting their 2008 edition.

BSDTalk 141 has Kris Moore from PC-BSD talking about their recent release 4 of PC-BSD’s packaging system, PBI.