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Month: October 2004
10/29/2004
Dutch DragonFly article
Douwe Kiela wrote in to mention that the Dutch Linux Magazine (October edition) has an article about DragonFly, written by him, and on page 48.
OpenBSD gets a BGL
In this ONLamp.com story about the upcoming OpenBSD 3.6, it’s revealed that apparently the new multiprocessor support will be much like the Big Giant Lock (BGL) in FreeBSD-4.
10/28/2004
FireFox 1.0.1 available as package
Andreas Hauser has a FireFox 1.0.1 package for DragonFly. Add it using pkg_add -r url. (You may need this patch.)
CVS trick
While talking about other issues, Matthew Dillon noted that if you pull your source files from CVS to a local repository and then check them out, you should have a ~/.cvsrc containing:
update -Pd
checkout -P
This will prune directories otherwise deleted in CVS but still present for “bookkeeping”.
FreeBSD, backwards
The latest entry in David Rhodus’s journal notes the strange “unreleasing” of FreeBSD 5.3 back to first release candidate status.
Hacks, tricks, blogs
(from bsdnews) Dru Lavigne of BSD Hacks and FreeBSD Basics fame has made a pamphlet called “BSD Success Stories“. (Alternate link to the PDF) There’s a mention of DragonFly in there.
There will be another version of this pamphlet, so if you have a DragonFly success story, you should be able to guess what to do next. Here’s Dru’s original blog mention of “Success Stories”. Also worthwhile in her blog is a visit to NYCBUG‘s recent event with Kirk McKusick/Eric Allman.
10/26/2004
OLDCARD on the way out
Joerg Sonneberger is itching to get rid of OLDCARD. Anyone using it?
Better gzip
Joerg Sonneberger added the NetBSD version of gzip. It uses the new libz, so it works more efficiently, plus it’s not GNU, which matters to some folks.
10/25/2004
Crescent Anchor site upgrade
Crescent Anchor has had a site redesign. Crescent Anchor makes FireFlyBSD, which is (as far as I know) a commercial derivative of DragonFly. The product is showing up in Google ads, too.
Dillon on video
Yeah, OK, I’ve been traveling, and not keeping up, if you can’t tell by all the posts today. There’s a Quicktime video of fearless leader Matthew Dillon up on Daemonnews, found by Emiel Kollof. (A direct link to the .mov file if you don’t have movie playing working with your browser-of-choice)
Yet Another Committer
Liam J. Foy has commit access, the lucky fellow. There’s been a number of new committers added – Hidetoshi Shimokawa, YONETANI Tomokazu, and Scott Ullrich. DragonFly commit status is not as exclusive a club as with FreeBSD, so I’ve been lax in keeping track.
Stable tag moving up
Matthew Dillon posted that the Stable tag will be moved up as of late tonight. A new “known good” ISO image should be up later this week, too.
readline 5, GDB 6 in
GNU readline 5.0 has been committed by Joerg Sonnberger, from suggestions by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert. Joerg also added GDB 6.2.1 which (at this point) requires “make obj; make depend all install”
in gnu/usr.bin/gdb in order to use it.
Better version reporting
uname -a will now use the CVS tag from the cvsup of code involved in building that kernel. In more explicit terms, DragonFly_Stable will now be reported as such, instead of CURRENT.
10/21/2004
Stripping idea spread
Matthew Dillon’s idea about installing a kernel with debug symbols made it to the FreeBSD-current mailing list; much discussion ensued.
10/20/2004
Saving crash dumps
Ever wonder how to save those crash dumps, especially if your /var is teeny-tiny? Wonder no more.
Kernel stripping
Matthew Dillon noted that including a debug kernel by default may make bug reports much easier, at the expense of a relatively small quantity of disk space. After some discussion, it was generally decided to be good enough to implement. (Strangely, it saves disk space, overall.)
10/19/2004
BSD Installer spreading
Scott Ullrich mentioned that the BSD Installer with FreeBSD 5 is now available. Haters of sysinstall, rejoice!
Update: the FreeSBIE Project is now using it too.
10/14/2004
CDless install
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert came up with a nice description of how to install DragonFly using tftp and nfs. Matthew Dillon found a way to get that almost automatic, with some dhcpd.conf changes.
10/13/2004
Filters on
The aforementioned spamblocks are now on the DragonFly mailing lists, except for bugs@.
10/12/2004
Another working ssh
Atte Peltomaki reports that F-Secure SSH builds and runs on DragonFly just fine.
10/11/2004
Antispam mailing list changes
Matthew Dillon posted about some changes to the way the mailing lists work; this is to avoid the ever-increasing spam that has been coming in. The short summary is that is you post through news, or use your subscribing address when posting mail, it should work normally. Otherwise, read his plan further.
10/09/2004
Using rm -I
If you have an existing DragonFly system, and want to use rm -I, it’s explained here.
New reasonably stable ISO
Matthew Dillon changed the download page to note that dfly-stable-20041009.iso.gz is the best recent release to start with.
Next VFS stage and patch
Matthew Dillon wrote a little more about how the VFS work is set up, and he posted a patch with his first day of work on the issue. (11,000 lines of code!) Don’t try it unless you feel really lucky.
Keyboard/Mouse support
Matthew Dillon has added (partial) support for devices such as the Logitech Desktop Pro, as suggested by Roland Hammerle from what he found in a FreeBSD patch.
10/08/2004
DragonFly_Stable reverted
Matthew Dillon has seen some problems on his test machines for DragonFly_Stable, so he’s pushing the tag back to the Sept. 13th point, for reasons he detailed in a separate message. Make sure to be using this if you have a production machine.
10/07/2004
DragonFly case badges available
Joerg Anslik pointed out that dreamsticker.de now has specific DragonFly case badges available. No image needed, no minimum order, and shipping outside of Germany is possible.
10/06/2004
DragonFly_Stable moved up
The DragonFly_Stable tag has been slipped up to correct a memory leak and incorporate the ‘rm -I’ fix. This does place the stble code right smack in the middle of the VFS changes, but those appear to be at a stable point right now.
Safer rm, more quickly
Giorgos Keramidas, after reading an article about how rm -rf / (i.e. accidentally deleting your operating system) is avoided by Sun, suggested on the hackers@freebsd.org mailing list some changes to protect from that. An extensive discussion (bikeshed) ensued. See “Protection from the dreaded “rm -fr /” thread on the former link, if you are curious. It’s still not resolved.
On the other hand, this has been quickly fixed in DragonFly, without changing the basic function of rm. New installs will have this safer behavior by default, though the old unsafe setup can be restored if desired.
10/05/2004
Adding device, description
In a recent post to kernel about adding devices, Matthew Dillon describes how and why device adding on DragonFly deviated from FreeBSD-4, and how it could (eventually) lead to a different sort of devfs.
Installer Ubiquity
The Installer is spreading – look at livebsd.com. Specifically, the 5th item down mentions using the Installer with FreeBSD 5.3b7.
linux_base-8 enabled
Matthew Dillon found that his recent VFS changes made linux_base-8 work again. Be warned that these changes are in the not-necessarily-completely-stable current version of code, not stable.
10/04/2004
DragonFly case badge
Joerg Anslik sent along a note that dreamsticker.de took a supplied image and turned it into a 2.5 sq.cm case badge for him.
Joerg Anslik wrote: “Just order “3D-Wunschsticker” (5 is minimum) and send him a 300 dpi picture (or whatever) in a separate mail refering to the order number
you’ll receive.”
This should work for any Germany residents; the dreamsticker.de is in German so I can’t identify if they ship outside of the country.
A Nice Present
OffMyServer.com has apparently donated an Intel-based blade server for general use in developing DragonFly. It’s being set up today by Devon H. O’Dell, as far as I know… Thanks, OffMyServer!
Update: Pictures!
10/03/2004
Unsurprising bugs
Some problems have been reported now that the new code is in; this sort of trouble was anticpated, so stick to the DragonFly_Stable tag if you want to avoid this trouble.
More namecache work
Matthew Dillon described his ‘stage 7b’ in a commit message, which includes a description of an upcoming improvemwnt to NFS.
More C tutorials
George Georgalis found The C Book from 1991, which he said was helpful with learning.
How to Include a License
Matthew Dillon pointed out just why the complete BSD license is reprinted in a file, instead of a reference to another location as is usually done with GNU.
