Matthew Dillon has written up some details of how he wants the syslink protocol to deal with a variety of situations, like asymmetrical bandwidth, or having to discover the network path when the state of the network is changing or broken. I see some similarities with other successful protocols you may have heard of.
Steve O’Hara-Smith has managed to get nspluginwrapper working. This program acts as a wrapper for FireFox plugins compiled for other platforms, most notably Flash. The changes have been submitted (and already included!) upstream into pkgsrc, but you can get details from him now, if desired.
Rumko posted a kdebase patch to the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list. This patch corrects kdebase to work with the recent 1:1 threading changes in DragonFly.
From an anonymous post: dragonfly clusters.
From a discussion on users@: if you’re thinking about a UPS, look at what apcupsd can support. (hint: apparently, almost anything)
dragonflybsd.org has been down for a good chunk of today; it was due to a blown transformer.
Google Alerts told me of two links: “Baby Steps with DragonFly BSD 1.8.1“, and “Review: DragonFly BSD 1.8.1“. Both excellent reviews, in that they describe an accurate picture of the good and bad points of the recent release.
Joerg Sonnenberger has pkgsrc packages built using 1.8 and the new modular xorg packages, available at: ftp://packages.stura.uni-rostock.de/pkgsrc-modular (Thanks, Hasso Tepper)
The title says it all – visit the download page for 1.8 to get it. Most every mirror appears to have it right now – not just the ones on the 1.8 page.
Note that some sites have an early version of the 1.8.1 release that lacks the installer; that image is ‘dfly-1.8.1.iso.gz’. Instead, be sure to download ‘dfly-1.8.1_REL.iso.gz’, which should be the newer file of the two.
I’ve given the main page of leaf.dragonflybsd.org a slight update, to show more of the resources available to developers.
Peter Avalos has upgraded DragonFly to use libarchive 2.0.25, for increased speed relative to both libarchive 1.x and GNU tar, and other bugfixes.
A task where much of the heavy lifting has been done: making a kernel boot no matter how many processors are in the system. (notes)Â Right now, SMP kernels can’t boot on a system with 1 CPU, so the LiveCD runs only a non-SMP kernel.
Sepherosa Ziehau warned bleeding-edge users that recent network interface changes will require a rebuild of both kernel and world when next updating. This does not apply to 1.8 users.
A few packages are going to be dropped from pkgsrc – mostly older versions of software. Speak up on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list if you don’t want this to happen.
I’ve removed some of the inconvenient antispam features (comments from new people are always moderated, http:// links get a post filtered, etc) and switched to different antispam software. Email me if you add a comment and can’t get through…
The next pkgsrc freeze, in preparation for the quarterly release, starts 2007/03/24.
On UnixReview.com this week: “Test Your Knowledge of Ethernet Topics“, two book reviews: “Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference” and “Building the Perfect PC“, along with a product review of “The Ultimate CompTIA Network+ Resource Kit” and the host integrity tool “Osiris“.
DragonFly 1.8.1 will be released this weekend, so if you have something that you need added, speak up! This release will include the rtld fixes that enable parts of KDE to work again, among other things.
As part of a discussion about issues with the current methods of adding third-party software to base, Matthew Dillon noted that much of it could be replaced safely using pkgsrc packages.