The prebuilt packages at GoBSD.com have been updated; see David Rhodus’s post for details on upgrading. He also notes that you can now buy a 4-CDROM set of DragonFly BSD (branded FireFly BSD) now, with all these packages included.

Zera William Holladay posted a link to an entertaining DragonFly image he created.

The FreeBSD Foundation has received enough donations from private individuals to retain non-profit status for 2004.

‘walt’ passed along details of his GRUB configuration for booting Windows and DragonFly. Steven Looman added a writeup of how to do it with the Windows XP bootloader.

Matthew Dillon posted a number of explanations about how he expects DragonFly journalling to work. Maxim Sobalev raised some issues (answered twice), and work continued.

Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote me to mention that his recent libm changes “included optimised assembly routines for certain mathematical functions for x86 and amd64.”

Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai has updated dfports/x11/xterm to support color – he posted some tips on how to use it.

Update: Corrected.

Matthew Dillon mentioned that he anticipates the next releases in February and just before the next USENIX event in April. He also brought up the concept of an actual branch in the DragonFly source code, though without any firm date as to when.

Matthew Dillon posted what he plans to do to implement journaling, with some very impressive goals. He also detailed his methodology for new technology in a separate followup, and he performed more work on the topic. Here’s more on journaling if you’re unfamiliar with the general concept.

Unixreview.com has posted 3 new articles originally found in SysAdmin magazine, all of which can be used with DragonFly: Checking Your Bookmarks (a Perl script), Entrap: A File Integrity Checker (Korn shell schripts), and Online Backups Using dump and NFS.

A fellow named John Leimon posted a helpful tip on how to set up your soundcard under DragonFly, and some statistics on file transfer speeds improvements under DragonFly. (hint: it’s good)

Hiroki Sato of AllBSD.org has built 6,278 packages from the FreeBSD ports tree as of Dec. 12th. They’re available at ftp://ftp.allbsd.org/pub/DragonFly/ports/i386/packages/, meaning you can add packages with ‘pkg_add -r ftp://ftp.allbsd.org/pub/DragonFly/ports/i386/packages/Latest/packagename.tgz‘.

Matthew Dillon’s committed more journaling work; Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai has committed Kristian Vlaardingerbroek’s patch to support the 10/100 Ethernet chipset on ICH5-based Intel motherboards. If you are planning to edit man pages, look at mdoc(7), and vim may be a good editor to use, especially if you tackle it like this. Hiten Pandya will be in Bremen, Germany, through January 6th; look him up is you’re a DragonFly user and local.

The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to add $30,400 by the end of the year – i.e. within about a week. The Foundation has a good amount of cash, but a greater proportion of the Foundation’s money needs to come from private individuals, not corporations, in order to keep its non-profit status (and accompanying tax breaks) in the U.S.

Donating via PayPal or check to the Foundation doesn’t directly help DragonFly, but a high tide raises all boats, as the saying goes.

What kind of payoff is Matthew Dillon expecting from the threaded subsystems in DragonFly? *HUGE*

Oliver Fromme posted two helpful notes – one on mounting devices as non-root, and another on booting a group of computers without disks. The ‘diskless boot’ discussion continued on, with comments from Joerg Sonnenberger and Matthew Dillon.

UNIXReview.com has posted three new articles, all of which may be useful for DragonFly users: One on using OpenOffice, and another on integrating Cisco and Unix equipment, both of which are really book reviews. There’s a third article that covers the ports for Logmon, Portmanager, and Nullmailer.

A fellow named Robert T. Kopp posted a question on whether a new BSD user should pick FreeBSD 5.3 or DragonFly, and Matt Dillon did a short summary on the reasons for picking either.

The DragonFly BSD website has had its main page updated with a link to this log and to the Sitetronics Wiki, and Matthew Dillon’s updated his diary.

Matthew Dillon posted the plans he and Hiten Pandya have for working on I/O and dma-direct buffering (msf_bufs). His post dives right into specific details, so a link to it is in order.

YONETANI Tomokazu posted a detailed list of instructions on how to get the FreeBSD port of the linux-based Flash 7 plugin working.

Matthew Dillon said this weekend is when the Stable tag in CVS will be moved up to match the most recent version of DragonFly.

There’s been lots more discussion on getting a German keyboard and characters to work. Along with that, Jonas Sundstom asked if standardizing on UTF8 would help.

Sascha Wildner is gaining the ability to commit DragonFly changes, due to his frequent submissions. Congratulations, and get to work.

Craig Dooley posted a description of his dfport override for DRI, and asked for help finding a place to host it, as it needs testing.

FreeSBIE 1.1 is out, using the very same installer technology as DragonFly – the BSD installer! (thanks GeekGod for the note)

Todd Willey pointed out on GoBSD.com that the pkgsrc bootstrap kit now should work on DragonFly, now that his changes have been committed. It should be possible to download the most recent version of pkgsrc and start using it normally (barring individual package issues).

If it hasn’t already happened, Matthew Dillon will be moving the stable tag up to the newest version of DragonFly, as there are no major problems right now with the bleeding edge code. He’s waiting to see how well Jeffrey Hsu’s network stack parallelizing code (!) works.

Joerg Sonneberger brought the DragonFly version of OpenNTPD into sync with the OpenBSD version, and added an example configuration file. Also, David Rhodus has posted a writeup about the integration of OpenNTPD into DragonFly over at GoBSD.com.

A poll for your favorite BSD personality was posted on the users@ mailing list. Relive high school years – in Dutch!

Joerg Sonnenberger posted a solution that creates a working German keyboard layout on DragonFly.

‘walt’ has a patch for /boot/loader that lets DragonFly be installed to an extended partition, and he’s looking for testers.

Glenn Johnson described just how to change optimization flags when compiling X.org, though Joerg Sonnenberger recommends against it.

An old corecode suggestion about cleaning up the “$XXX is not set properly” warning has been reinforced by Robert Garrett, the fellow who brought RCNG into DragonFly.

If you see that error message on startup or shutdown, this will fix it:

sed -i -e 's/FreeBSD)/DragonFly|&/' /usr/local/etc/rc.d/rc.subr

It’s a slow news day, so take the time to read the full text of the USL settlement text, over at GrokLaw.

For those not versed in arcane history, BSD is a product of the code that Berkeley produced from early access to AT&T’s Unix source code. Lawsuits ensued, almost two decades ago, but were all settled – this is why SCO has not been able to sue any BSD-using company, even though BSD is a more “direct descendant” of the original UNIX than Linux.

NetBSD 2.0 is officially out; this is notable because several of the NetBSD replacements for GNU utilities are now found in DragonFly, too.

This date is not set in stone: February. This is probably when the VFS work will be done and stable.

Raphael Marmier has a patch that makes portupgrade work with DragonFly port overrides; he’s looking for testers.

Markus Schatzl referenced this page on how to get a German umlaut to print on-screen.

Markus also noted in a separate post that the TIMER_USE_1 kernel config option fixed problems he had with X freezing at startup.

Not directly DragonFly related, but I recently read this article in print form, which talks about server motherboard architecture with the new amd64 chips. A number of people running DragonFly have reported excellent results using them, even though DragonFly is not yet 64-bit.

KernelTrap mentions, and highlights, recent mailing list discussion on the DragonFly scheduler. (found through Google Alerts)

Max Okumoto, who’s been submitting a torrent of patches lately, has been given commit access, probably just so that he can take care of it all himself. Congratulations, Max.

Hey, look! GoBSD has a new news aggregator that carries headlines from this very site.

Richard Bejtlich’s always excellent TaoSecurity blog comments on the different goals described by the major BSD projects. A interesting read. He also wrote a list of reasons on why he works with FreeBSD – points 4,6, and 7 apply even more to DragonFly. (From BSDNews.) He later linked to more discussion, including a discussion on freebsd-chat that unfortunately consists of some folks pointing out a problem (FreeBSD project goal definition) and a number of others doing nothing but describing their indifference, intricately.

The Sitetronics wiki has a new C Development Under DragonFly BSD” section that already has some content.

The BSDInstaller mailing list is back – again. It seems it wasn’t quite fixed at the time I mentioned this before, but this time, it’s for real. It’s still discussion-subscribe “at” bsdinstaller ‘dot’ org to subscribe.

Update: I still haven’t seen a “confirmation of subscription” message, so I could be wrong again.

NetBSD 2.0 is almost out – watch the NetBSD web site for the release announcement.

Guillermo Garcia Rojas is looking to translate the DragonFly FAQ into Spanish; if you have a reasonable command of Spanish and English, take a look at his Wiki version and contribute.

The bsdinstaller mailing list was accidentally trashed a little while ago; if you want to (re)subscribe, mail discussion-subscribe “at” bsdinstaller ‘dot’ org.

Want to try pkgsrc, but you already have DragonFly installed? Todd Willey posted that he has put up a binary bootstrap package.

The Sitetronics wiki now has a copy of the DragonFly FAQ; add to it if you feel you have something good to explain.

Volume 2 of the FreeBSD Handbook is available in print form now, at the FreeBSD Mall. A good amount of it will apply to DragonFly, though this material is availble free.

BSDCan 2005 is coming May 13-14th, in Ottawa, Canada. The Call for Papers is out!

Matthew Dillon suggested a small, easy project for anyone who wanted it would be to support booting from logical partitions.

The Perl Review issue 1 is out, too. This, like the Perl Journal, you need to have a subscription.