Due to the solving of a nasty locking problem, 1.6.1 is out.
lsof doesn’t build on DragonFly, but apparently the DragonFly version of fstat works well as an alternative, barring the occasional problem.
In a larger conversation about using CF cards in place of normal hard drives, Oliver Fromme mentioned that he’s been building a small computer into the case of a Sony CD player, and has pictures to prove it. (and yes, it could run DragonFly.)
The utility calendar can be used to provide reminders of upcoming events; you can even provide your own personalized list, as Sascha Wildner pointed out.
(If you’re interested in a columnar calendar, similar to a wall calendar, try cal.)
A tip found from a larger discussion of root shells: su -m allows the user’s shell to be brought forth as the root shell. If you have multiple people su’ing to root, this will allow each to use a favorite shell instead of the default /bin/tcsh.
Matthew Dillon posted two tidbits of information: ‘large mode‘ in BIOS can be needed to make disks visible, and why console messages are often limited in rate.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch that updates the em(4) driver (that’s a network chipset, if it’s unfamiliar) to the latest version from Intel’s website. Give it a try if you’ve got the hardware. It’ll be in the tree in two weeks.
bfconfig has been removed, as ifconfig now contains all of brconfig’s features.
Producing a trace from kdgb can be difficult, especially if the crash involved kernel modules whose symbols are not necessarily visible. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has directions on how to resolve this.
Matthew Dillon has removed the thread pointer argument from all device operations. What does this mean? Glad you asked.
Hubert Feyrer found a handy way to view/keep those embedded website movies (like on YouTube) that are difficult to play on BSD: keepvid.com.
Hubert Feyrer put together an interesting chart that shows the Makefile dependencies in pkgsrc. I’ve always wondered how people make directional charts from text data like that…
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has committed his support for building a AMD64-native world. (Not kernel, not yet) I have an example link; it touched a lot of files. Check commits@ for more.
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.