Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert suggests two projects available for a taker: updating Radeon DRM support, or updating the linux syscall support, both of which have existing code from which to start.
In the news recently:
Advisory Check 1.0 was released, which checks for vulnerabilities in installed software, and works with an impressive number of package managment systems on BSD and Linux. It includes pkgsrc, so it should work on DragonFly. (Thanks, BSDNews)
PC-BSD, a ‘with-its-desktop-and-package-manager’ version of FreeBSD, was bought by iXsystems. Reading this interview, it seems ‘bought’ == hiring of the main developer of PC-BSD by iXsystems. The lucky guy gets to be paid for what he used to do for fun.
pfSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall derived from m0n0wall, has reached version 1.0. One of the project leads on pfSense is Scott Ullrich, who also commits to DragonFly. pfSense uses the BSD Installer (again, Scott Ullrich is involved in that) as does DragonFly.
For those of you who run Preview, the tag is about to be slipped up to synchronize with the beeding edge code, as it’s been running pretty stable recently.
If you aren’t sure what Preview is, see “Is there a branch oriented towards stability?” on the FAQ.
Anthony L. Bryan has created a ‘metalink‘ for the DragonFly 1.6 ISO.  See his message for more details on the format.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has brought over FreeBSD’s high definition audio support, making it possible to get sound from ICH8 chipsets, for instance. It’s not yet committed; contact corecode if you want to try it out.
(No mailing list post yet; he announced this on the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
Jeremy C. Reed interviewed a number of folks using pkgsrc on non-NetBSD platforms, and put the results together on a webpage at bsdnewsletter.com. (DragonFly is represented by your humble Digest writer.)
Vector image files of the DragonFly logo are now available, which can produce much better versions of the image, especially at higher resolutions.
fsck(8) in DragonFly now can handle filesystems containing millions of directories. Matthew Dillon added this support because he happens to have 23 million directories laying around on a single volume.
YONETANI Tomokazu has added support for disk suspension for saving power.
A discussion on users@ has wandered into just how much of any data transmission is overhead; e.g. not data.
Hubert Feyrer has an interesting post showing some of the many places BSD (often NetBSD, in his search) code can be found, which is probably in no small part due to the BSD license.
DragonFly 1.6.2 is released, along with 1.4.5, to include the recent changes that had been merged back to the branches. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert moved the release up, and a changelog is available for 1.4 and 1.6. (changelogs are in forward chronological order, so skim down.)
Updating pkgsrc is usually done through cvs, though it is apparently also now possible using Mercurial. (Thanks HubertF)
csup is usable for a cvsup client, and since it’s written in C, doesn’t require modula-3, which doesn’t build on DragonFly. csup was broken on DragonFly, though YONETANI Tomokazu has a fix. Of course, the server side still needs to be compiled, with the same dependency problems. Alternatives like cvsync have problems, and rsync is supposed to be too taxing, but now is a good time to test that assumption, perhaps with a benchmark?
Sascha Wildner has updated timezone data! Yeah, slow news day.
Dru Lavigne has a new article on OnLAMP.com describing how to fine-tune your firewall, assuming your firewall is IPFW.
Markus Schatzl happened to (re)post a link to a DragonFly installation guide he wrote that includes mention of the Smart Bootmanager, which can allow booting from the DragonFly install CD even on systems that don’t allow for CD booting. I may have posted this before, but it’s worth repeating.
The BSDStats.org statistics script is now in DragonFly. It’s not enabled by default; the following two lines in /etc/periodic.conf are needed to activate it.
monthly_statistics_enable="YES"
monthly_statistics_report_devices="YES"
A wierd bug in bmake, pkgsrc (and NetBSD’s) version of make, would occasionally make it difficult to kill a make process with a Ctrl-C. Matthew Dillon found the bug, a fix for it, and a suggested fix for NetBSD, too.