UnixReview.com has 2 new articles up: “Parsing Web Form Input in CGI Shell Scripts“, which deals with the crazy notion of shell scripts handling interactive web pages, and “New Year, More Security Challenges“, which covers some U.S. federal law changes for 2007 that require computer data as part of the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
OnLAMP.com has a nice interview of the people behind PC-BSD, and details on their latest release.
I’ve changed the theme, and added some elements to make this match the other DragonFly sites a bit more. If I’ve removed a link you need, please let me know.
Jeremy C. Reed is writing an article about DragonFly’s virtual kernel, and he had some comprehensive questions. Matthew Dillon had some answers which make a good read.
1.8 has been branched in CVS, and release is scheduled for Monday.
An ongoing conversation about virtual kernels led to a description of just how virtual kernel and real kernel memory usage interacts; they are surprisingly well synchronized.
Matthew Dillon has synchronized Preview with the latest bleeding-edge code, to match up with the large number of commits lately.
xfce 4.4 is out; it’s in pkgsrc-wip now if you want to try it early; otherwise, it should be officially in pkgsrc soon.
Matthew Dillon was planning to branch 1.8 today, but Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert came up with a fix that lets a kernel successfully boot using gcc 4.1, so the branching will be tomorrow.
Peter Avalos has updated bzip2, which fixes some minor security issues.
A minor update to 1.6 is out, to incorporate some recent backpatches.
Matthew Dillon reports changes to the kernel configuration file are needed now. Also, if you are running bleeding-edge code, a full buildworld/buildkernel is required on the next upgrade.
Branching for 1.8 will happen very soon; as soon as ACPI is ready. The release date has not slipped.
OnLAMP.com has a new article up about using PF and spamd to kill spam.
Matthew Dillon is doing CVS surgery tonight to revert the architecture name changes; if you are using bleeding-edge code, don’t update it until tomorrow.
The FreeBSD Laptop Compatibility List has been resurrected. Much of what’s on that list will also apply to DragonFly, so keep it in mind for your next laptop purchase. (Thanks, BSDNews)
YONETANI Tomokazu has imported and installed the latest version of ACPI code from Intel.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted to pkgsrc-users@ how he’s coming along in transitioning Xorg from the monolithic version currently in pkgsrc to the new 7.x modular version. (Short version: not yet, but soon)
A number of news sites have linked to the recent European Commission study of the economics of free/open source software (PDF). Less known but also good: There’s an article up on the Harvard Business School ‘Working Knowledge‘ site titled “The Business of Free Software.”
jscan isn’t ready for prime time, but Steve O’Hara-Smith decided to try it for backups. It sorta almost kinda works, though Matthew Dillon added some tips to show more info on how it’s working.
And for your daily vkernel news… Virtual kernels now are secure by default, meaning no loading kernel modules and no writing to kernel memory. This is disabled by a command line flag at virtual kernel start time. Also, Matthew Dillon realized that the virtual kernel automatically presents a safe way to cluster.