A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
This week’s BSDTalk is an interview with Dru Lavigne, covering her new “Best of FreeBSD Basics” book and the new BSDA exam, both previously mentioned on this Digest.
To continue that topic, Dru also attended DemoCamp7 in Ottawa recently and has a writeup on the new products she saw.
boulder.tele.dk is a new DragonFly mirror, serving images and pkgsrc binaries via HTTP and FTP.
An experiment in Barcelona, last year, took a number of people with no coding experience but plenty of graphic design experience whatever and got them to modify a version of the old game Breakout. The results were quite interesting. You’ll need Flash to see the video of the abstract results. (Via waxy)
Why do I mention this? Open source systems tend to assume users are either very experienced or totally inexperienced. Looking for people who don’t fit either of those categories is a much more useful goal, as it produces new methods and ways of looking at things.
An article on OpenAddict talks about managing multiple FreeBSD systems, though it could apply to most any BSD system, including DragonFly. It boils down to “Share code via NFS.”, really. (Via FreeBSDOS)
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. There’s notes in there on some $300k (!) of grant money for Ontario, canada universities for open source projects looking to commercialize. (Via Dru Lavigne)
As I was notified by Michael Lyngbøl, there’s a new Danish mirror for DragonFly:
Snapshots and ISO images:
pkgsrc binary mirrors:
BSDTalk this week is about setting up a centralized syslog server. If you manage more than a few non-Windows systems, this is going to be useful.
This has nothing to do with BSD, really, but it’s a live-action film by one of my favorite cartoonists, and it’s excellent.
View at Yooootube – embedding it gets mangled by this blog software.
Matthew Dillon wrote another one of his updates on the work being done on HAMMER; he’s moving on to balancing code next.
Seen on Undeadly: Peter Hansteen, author of The Book of PF, will be giving a full day tutorial on PF, on February 20th in Riga, Latvia.
Gerard van Essen found an appropriately titled page: EeeBSD, talking about running FreeBSD on an Eee PC. The issues appear the same for NetBSD and DragonFly – networking is the only real issue. Anyone familiar with my interest in small computers will realize I am this close to buying one of these little things.
Peter Avalos has been busy, updating mly(4), updating file to 4.23, and adding the CAM_NEW_TRAN_CODE kernel option. Thanks, Peter!
Gerard van Essen, from the PC-BSD project, has started a blog called “FreeBSD – the unknown Giant“.   It’s news reporting, similar to this site, and it’s updated regularly! It makes me very happy to see resources like that in the BSD world. (Via Dru Lavigne)
A off-topic item: Jonas Sundström suggested a PIC32 microcontroller for anyone looking to get into hardware hacking. Robert ‘r3tex’ Luciani followed up with a suggestion for ‘baby steps‘. Or, as Matthew Dillon wrote: start very small.
This is a very minor change, but almost everyone will use it, sooner or later: Matthias Schmidt has updated ls(1) for sorting (-t) by size (-S).
Michael Neumann wrote up a HAMMER description, with some ZFS comparisons. Matthew Dillon had some corrections, which I think have made it back to the original article. There is an obvious bias in the article, but it does at least provide a feature list.
Hasso Tepper pointed at the usb4bsd project as a potential improvement for USB, though Jeremy Messenger saw something that may keep it out of FreeBSD, at least.
GameSetWatch has a very in-depth article talking about Angband and Nethack, two classic roguelike games. It’s well worth a read if you are familiar with the genre.
Along the same lines, Julian Dibbell’s book “My Tiny Life” is now available. It describes his time playing in LambdaMOO , and is based in part on his Village Voice article, “A Rape In Cyberspace“.
For those readers too young to know these games, roguelike games are single-player dungeon exploration games like Diablo, and MOO/MUDs a type of MMORPG. The mechanisms are remarkably similar, but the graphics were all terminal based. Keep in mind you can still try these games right now.
While we are on the topic: It Is Pitch Dark.
If you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly code, Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent 802.11 changes will require you to do a ‘make quickworld’ or normal ‘make world’ on your next build, due to structure changes.