Jeremy C. Reed wrote in to announce a new book. He’s created this wiki for the purpose of writing the “Quick Guide to BSD Administration”, which uses the BSDA Certification Requirements Document as a guideline. There’s regularly generated PDFs to show progress.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has committed his giant sound update, supporting (among other things) High Definition Audio and bringing in changes from FreeBSD. Aside from a change in the generic kernel module name, it should work the same.
From OpenCon 2006, a presentation on OpenBSD Culture. I link to this in part because soft of the community ideas apply to DragonFly, and also because what makes up an open-source development group is rarely discussed beyond the code level. (Thanks Undeadly)
A few of the mirrors out there have DragonFly source available through rsync; Peter Avalos describes the correct command to retrieve it from theshell.com. (Note: read that post for details before trying it yourself.)
One of the eternal chicken-and-egg problems is kernel modification. Sometimes, a freshly installed system requires a different kernel, but you can’t download the source to build that new kernel until those changes are made. However, kernel source will be included with the 1.8 release, so this should theoretically not be a problem.
Matthew Dillon posted a list of the various ways testing could be done over the next 4 weeks for the 1.8 release. Help out, if you’ve got the inclination.
Matthew Dillon has announced that the next release will be branched in two weeks (Jan. 14th), with the 1.8 release scheduled for Jan. 28th. Get stuff in/tested now if you want to be in 1.8! He’s also updated his online diary with the extensive list of what’s gone in since 1.6.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, having recently finished his thesis, has started up work on 1:1 userland threading again, with a status report in his latest commit.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an ath(4) (that’s wireless atheros chipsets) patch available for testing. It’s scheduled to go in January 7th if nobody has issues.
Victor Balada Diaz has committed his jail work, which adds support to jails for having more than one IP address, and also the ability to use IPv6.
A resurrected experiment: this local page shows the creation date of each binary pkgsrc package in Joerg’s archive, sorted in reverse chronological order. It’s updated daily. It’s an easy, cheesy way to tell when new packages have been uploaded. (The link for this page is also in the Links list on this page.)
Matthew Dillon is performing some significant cleanup of the kernel startup/VM code, so watch out if you are using the bleeding edge code. He synced Preview before starting, so Preview users can move to the code version just before this (potentially) destabilizing code.
Petr Janda linked to a review of the open-source ‘Nouveau’ NVIDIA drivers, which plan to have 3D support.
Also, Gergo Szakal found that a recent poll on the Hungarian Unix Portal listed DragonFly as the 4th most popular BSD-based operating system – more popular than NetBSD.
If you could use over $100 USD, Petr Janda needs someone to port the getcontext and swapcontext calls to DragonFly’s libc, and he’s willing to pay the aforementioned money for it. Hop on now and make some quick money.
Undeadly.org has a review of “The OpenBSD Packet Filter Book“, which is Jeremy C. Reed’s version of the PF FAQ and other material, in printed form. It’s available through Lulu.com print-on-demand. DragonFly is mentioned in there, as we (along with I think pretty much every other BSD) also use PF.
Peter Avalos has updated libpcap to 0.9.5 and tcpdump to 3.9.5. I never realized tcpdump was a separate utility.
User ‘Haidut’ wrote up some notes on how he got DragonFly to boot from a USB stick. (Summary: it just worked.)
In an effort to prevent spam messages from showing up in bugs.dragonflybsd.org via the mail gateway, some work is being done on the bugs site. This may cause some bounce messages to show on the bugs@ mailing list.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s been busy, committing a bunch of networking updates and improvements to driver support.
Joerg Sonnenberger announced a virtual pkgsrc hackathon, aimed at closing as many PRs as possible. It’s at the same time as 23c3 – the end of this month. (Don’t forget the DragonFly meetup, there!)