As part of a larger discussion, Freddie Cash described some possible IDE disk and CD combinations that make sense for various tasks.
Joerg Sonnenberger is temporarily taking packages.stura.uni-rostock.de down for disk reorganization; there’s a bulk build of pkgsrc packages running for 1.6. Most packages built for 1.4.4 will work with 1.6, in any case.
As a side effect of the new release, the various ISO images located on dragonflybsd.org and mirrors have been cleaned up to reflect only actual releases; there were some out-of-date intermediate versions in there. Daily snapshots are still available.
DragonFly 1.6 is released, (see announcement) with highlights including:
- even better pkgsrc integration, with over 93% of pkgsrc‘s 6,000+ packages building on DragonFly
- significant 802.11 improvements including ath(4) support
- clustering progress
- and many other changes.
- See the diary or the release page for exhaustive update detail.
ISO images and/or source updates are available from a number of mirrors, though I suggest the torrent.
SATA drive donations are being solicited (in the form of cash) for the machine that hosts the FreeBSD Diary, FreshPorts, FreshSource, and BSDCan.
What’s the first thing to check when troubleshooting? Hardware, like power cords, and any other connections.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has more AMD64 patches for testing, and Joerg Sonnenberger has potential support for Tekram controllers (trm(4))
This week on UnixReview.com: 4 articles, the first two of which may be of limited use to this page's audience:
Security: The adventure continues - SELinux Book Review: Unix to Linux Porting Certification: Test Your Knowledge of A+ Essentials Topics Product Review: Spyforce-AI
If you’re thinking about buying a wireless card to use with DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau recommends cards supported by the ath(4), ral(4) and acx(4) drivers. No, I’m not sure which those are.
Martti Kuparinen is looking for some testers for Xfce 4.4 beta 2. See his email to pkgsrc-users@ for details.
NYCBSDCon, held in New York City (surprise!) is being held October 28-29th on the Columbia University campus. If you want to present, your abstract is due August 15th.
DragonFly 1.6 has been branched in CVS, with the release happening at the end of the week.
Java 1.4.2_11 and earlier works on DragonFly, and a number of further tips came up on the mailing lists. (See similar previous entry.)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s vinum changes were recently committed by Matthew Dillon. Simon follows up with a warning: ABI compatibility is broken by this, so vinum will have to be recompiled, if you are using it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ath(4) driver, for many models of wireless card, to DragonFly.
It is possible to build a custom install CD that adds additional packages and/or changed configuration files to the ‘normal’ DragonFly installation. How do you do it? The answer is in ‘man release‘
There’s new bsdtalk interviews every week, but this week, it’s Matthew Dillon, talking about the upcoming 1.6 release. A notable comment he made was that DragonFly is now more stable than even the much-vaunted FreeBSD 4.x releases that it came from. (Credit goes to Sascha Wildner for noticing the interview first.)
Eric Jacobs said “I’d like to work with LWKT“. Matthew Dillon said, “How about userland VFS?” , and Eric said “Sure!“. Then, Matthew Dillon went into unsummarizable details.
I’ve updated the Handbook, and rebuilt the web version and the PDF. Most of the changes are the addition of Adrian Nida and Erik Wikstrom’s updates for pkgsrc.