Dario Banno and Matthias Schmidt have both been doing a lot of cleanup work on the version of the Handbook contained in the wiki. I want to point out the work they are doing because it’s helpful, and also because it’s possible for anyone else to contribute to this. If you’ve been feeling an itch to do something, here’s your chance to contribute to DragonFly with only a few seconds of labor.
Matthew Dillon wrote an update on the state of HAMMER, and what remains to complete. (summary: not too much) He also wrote out some explanation of the balancing code, and the ‘spikes’ used for cluster expansion.
Matthew Dillon wants the 2.0 release of DragonFly to include HAMMER, so 2.0 won’t be ready until HAMMER’s ready too. This may mean a delay of the usual 6-month release to February.
In the meantime, the Preview tag has been moved up, for those folks following nearly bleeding-edge code.
HAsso Tepper has committed changes that allow recognition of the EVDO/UMTS card found in in a Thinkpad X61.
Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to remove support for the awi(4), ray(4) and gx(4) devices in the next DragonFly release. These are (I think) all wireless devices; please speak up on kernel@ or users@ if you actually need/use them.
Matthias Schmidt has added support for the em(4) device found on Intel ICH9 chipsets.
Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer (we’ve had a lot lately!): Nuno Antunes.
Matthias Schmidt has committed a useful feature from FreeBSD that uses dumpfs to get the correct newfs command to duplicate an existing filesystem. Also, he added PAM support to cron, which I’m surprised we didn’t have already.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s dri/drm update has a followup; you will need to update your sources to try it. Other people (who have been reporting success) have some other tips.
Hasso Tepper has described some simple steps for using Bluetooth under DragonFly.
Peter Avalos, in reply to a question from ‘walt’, has pointed out that DragonFly is available via git on repo.or.cz, though it’s infrequently updated.
Max Herrgard has been cleaning up bug reports on bugs.dragonflybsd.org. (Thanks, Max!) Please contribute, as many of these reports just need someone to mark them closed.
If there’s a report from you on there, make sure it’s up to date, too. It would be helpful to clean up as much as possible before the next release.
Matthias Schmidt has committed Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s pkg_radd, a wrapper script that allows installation of pkgsrc binaries, even if there isn’t a local pkgsrc tree. Check the commit message for an explanation, or the script itself for the details. Note that this is a DragonFly-specific pkgsrc utility, meaning it doesn’t appear on any other pkgsrc platform.
The 2007Q4 quarterly release of pkgsrc is out, with almost 7,500 packages available. Prebuilt binaries for DragonFly will be available ‘soon’.
New ones are popping up everywhere! Our newest committer: Aggelos Economopoulos.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has done what we’ve been needing for a long time: an update for DRI/DRM. That’s 3D support in X Windows, for those who aren’t familiar with the acronyms. His note contains extensive instructions for testing this update; give it a whirl and report back so it can get in the tree.
Astute reader “Yair K.” sent along links to two things:
There is work being done on a “user-mode NetBSD“, which sounds quite similar to DragonFly’s vkernel(7) system.
4Front Technologies has placed their Open Sound System (discussed previously) under a BSD license, removing what I think was the only obstacle to using it in DragonFly and other BSDs. A press release is out, too.
I didn’t know this existed: there’s an official OpenBSD non-profit that’s been created to handle donations. (via) There’s one for FreeBSD and NetBSD, so perhaps DragonFly should follow suit?
The first BSDTalk of the new year is here, with Marten Vijn about Open Community Camp, a camping/geekout event in the Netherlands being held August 2008.
For your entertainment: (some of these require Flash; all are off-topic)
- Why geeks are a handy weapon
- 10 minutes of awesome
- Working on short attention spans (last two via)
- Oldie but goodie: the Electronic Music Guide
- A nice open-source payback story