If you have 10 minutes to waste, there’s a “Which BSD should I use” post over on Slashdot/BSD.

Andre Nathan posted a link to an interview of Matthew Dillon over at BSDNexus.com, with some good information on where DragonFly is headed in the short term.

The DragonFly mirror at bsdtech.com is down due to an employment change. (Good luck, Erik Skaalerud!) There’s a new source mirror in Riga, Latvia, located at http://alxl.info/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/?cvsroot=DragonFly. Also, the new mirror at vt220.com now has HTTP access.

Maxime Labelle has a new DragonFly mirror up in Quebec, Canada, at ftp://bsd.vt220.com/.

“Ed” found that Qt 3.3.4 now explicitly supports DragonFly.

KernelTrap has an interview of Timothy Miller, who is behind the Open Graphics Project, with the admirable goal of creating a video card that works well in 2D and 3D on open source platforms. Well, Linux, mostly, but my hope springs eternal for 4+ multihead 3D displays. Engineering samples are/will be available for anyone who wants to work on a DragonFly-specific driver. (thanks, BSDNews.)

FreeBSD 4.11 has been released. This is probably the last release in the 4.x series, though it will be updated for some time yet with needed security fixes. The next DragonFly release is slated for before the USENIX Technical Conference in April, so there’s an upgrade path available…

UnixReview.com has three new articles up: one on using the man page editor ManEdit, one on the security tool Samhain, and a review of the No Starch Press book “Write Great Code — Understanding the Machine“. Incidentally, the No Starch Press book Absolute BSD (covering FreeBSD, by excellent writer Michael Lucas of Big Scary Daemons fame) is a rare thing: a book about an operating system that’s fun to read.

Guillermo Garcia Rojas has created Spanish translations of Installing DragonFly and Laptop Installation.

There’s now a Lithuanian translation of the DragonFly FAQ, on the wiki. There’s also a Polish translation out there, too, that I managed to previously miss.

ONLamp/BSD has a new BSD News report up, this time summarizing December 2004.

Google Alerts told me about a new article on OSNews titled “Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom” that mentions, among other things, DragonFly being a fork from FreeBSD. While on the forked product idea, BSDNews has a nice link up to an explanation of Xorg’s 3D support (somewhat Linuxy) in the form of DRI, which also has a wiki.

If you’re feeling particularly Gallic, there’s a Paris BSD meeting on 02/02/2005. (Thanks BSDNews.)

For some lazy weekend reading: the Cell architecture. The article’s partially hypothetical, but interesting. If consumer-level PCs using this architecture were built, DragonFly would be a good fit.

Matthew Dillon posted two lengthy messages; one about SMP handling on DragonFly, and the other on kernel threading models and how they work.

Anreas Hauser, with Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, has managed to create a Xorg 6.8.1 port and package that does not the weak thread library problem. ‘pkg_add -r’ the package file he mentions in his post, and you’ll be set.

ONLamp/BSD has two new articles up. One is an interview with Scott Long of FreeBSD about FreeBSD 5′s SMP implementation – DragonFly is mentioned in contrast. The other is a report of November’s BSD news. Both seem a little late – November is no longer last month as mentioned in the article, and the interview places FreeBSD 5.3 in the future. I’m nitpicking, as they are both good articles.

A few people posted that they could not build world. Matthew Dillon suggested cleaning out the object directory.

‘Piet’ posted a link to a “Walk Through the PicoBSD Kernel“. This would be FreeBSD-based, but still relevant to DragonFly.

The Sitetronics wiki page for DragonFly has undergone a DNS makeover – it is now “http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/“.

‘nega’ posted some additional info about RSA vs. DSA encryption.

The latest addition to Dru Lavigne’s “FreeBSD Basics” column on ONLamp.com is “More FreeBSD for Linux Users“. It’s oriented towards FreeBSD and Linux, but it generally applies to DragonFly and Linux, too. Also, there’s a nice link collection at the end of the article.

Hiroki Sato is the newest to join the DragonFly team with commit access.

UnixReview.com has posted 3 new articles of general interest: zsh “keeper” functions, a review of Internetworking with TCP/IP, and a review of High-Tech Crimes Revealed.

Adrian Bocaniciu posted an explanation from an unknown author of just what the differences are between DSA and RSA keys for authentication and encyption.

The BSD Installer mailing list has returned, but functional this time. Send email to “discussion-subscribe ‘at’ bsdinstaller ‘dot’ com”. (That address is munged, obviously.)

Update: I had the wrong address – it ends in .com. Should work…

FreeBSD has a (big!) status report up for the latter half of 2004.

The DragonFly FAQ on dragonflybsd.org is now copied irregularly from the one on the Wiki, along with the Spanish and Russian versions. This is based off an excellent idea from Max Okumoto.

ONLamp.com has an article up about EuroBSDCon2004. The EuroBSDCon site has PDFs of (nearly) all the presentations, some of which are well worth the time to read.

Take some time to read Jordan Hubbard’s keynote (pdf) – Jordan was one of the original folks behind FreeBSD and is currently a mucky-muck at Apple. Dru Lavigne’s “But I am not a developer…how can I contribute to open source?” (pdf) is also worth a look, along with a large number of other more specific presentations.

If you see nothing else, look at this picture of Jordan Hubbard’s talk, and read the slide behind him. That’s right, folks: we are the mainstream, not the margin.

Andrew Atrens now has a web page with his ports of wireless drivers to DragonFly – Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG and Atheros, at this point. He’s looking for testers.

The Sitetronics wiki now holds the Spanish and Russian translations of the DragonFly FAQ.

Matthew Dillon happened to outline the process for adding third-party software (like dhcpd, ncurses, or gcc) to the base DragonFly system.

Greg Lehey, BSD hacker from a land down below, has a BSD-based beer brewing system. (Seen on Slashdot, though strangely not in their BSD section.) Greg has a lot of other interesting material to look at while you’re there.

Sergey Gluschenko has created a Russian translation of the DragonFly FAQ.

OpenBSD is being ported to the Zaurus PDA platform (see general user FAQ) (thanks OpenBSD Journal) NetBSD has the 2004 4th quarter report out. Also, NetBSD now supports the TS-7200 via the evbarm port, which is a single-board computer similar to the well-known Soekris products. (Seen on Slashdot/BSD.) Small computer products like that make me wish I could find a small, cheap LCD screen to hook up, and create a laptop-ish computer.

gobsd.com has a new bootstrap kit for pkgsrc.

Zera William Holladay asked about how traps and interrupts work, and received several answers.

Binary packages for DragonFly from pkgsrc are planned at gobsd.com

Low on time, so it’s all mushed together:

Joerg Sonneberger has an explanation of RSA vs. DSA encryption. Unixreview.com has two useful articles – how to test a new version of MySQL without disturbing your current install and a book review of “Advanced Unix Programming”. And, oh yeah – ntpdate is gone – use rdate.

Chuck Tuffli has ported the fxp (Intel Etherexpress network card) driver that uses bus_dma, and so should be very speedy. Andrew Atrens ported the iwi driver, for the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG MiniPCI. Both are looking for testers.

Robert Watson posted some plans about SMP on FreeBSD. It’s interesting to contrast it with what’s planned for DragonFly, and how well the changes affect single and multiprocessor performance. (thanks BSDNews).

George Georgalis posted a link to a “Considered Harmful” article – this time, it’s recursive make.

MAtthew Dillon created a spot in the docs to note which laptops work with DragonFly – due to the custom hardware in most laptops, it can be hit or miss for many laptops and non-Windows operating systems. While talking about his IBM r32 (which works), Paul Grunwald suggested the site off-leasecomputers.com as a laptop source.

On kernel@, Antonio Vargas brought up the splice() I/O model planned for the Linux kernel.

Slashdot/BSD has a story on Sun revoking the Java license for FreeBSD, which is not a surprise to anyone who saw mention of this in December’s FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. (Admittedly, it was overshadowed by the non-corporation donation needs.) The real answer is that the license expired because of a SNAFU rather than a desire by Sun to end Java use on FreeBSD, and it’s getting worked out. This affects DragonFly to some extent, since Java can be built from the port system DragonFly inherited from FreeBSD.

A fellow named Gregory McGarry has written a paper showing NetBSD outperforming FreeBSD 5 on a number of benchmarks. These would be more accurately called microbenchmarks, as the paper describes very specific system activities, repeated. It would be interesting to repeat with DragonFly – and it could be done, as the paper includes details on how to repeat. The benchmark is similar to an earlier BSD and Linux comparison done more than a year ago. (seen on BSDNews)

‘walt’ posted a question about how makefile variables interoperate, for which Max Okumoto wrote a detailed explanation.

Guillermo Garcia Rojas has completed a Spanish translation of the DragonFly FAQ.

Zera William Holladay is due credit for filling Emiel Kollof’s donation request for hard drives on the DragonFly Donations page. Consider donating, if you have something that matches.

Newsforge has an article about the recent 2.0 release of NetBSD. The article mentions DragonFly, though only in passing while talking about NetBSD’s “big lock” symmetric multiprocessing style. (found with Google Alerts.)

Joerg Sonnerberger’s updating a number of parts of the base system – read his post for details. It means Perl will be out of the base system, finally.

Oliver Fromme linked to a description of Sun’s ZFS with the interesting note that data safety is maintained through copy-on-write. (more links in post) Anil Madhavapeddy pointed at CIL for parsing C, and at some tales of wierd C.

Paul Grenwald posted his Laptop Installation Guide to the Sitetronics Wiki.

Zera Holliday posted another DragonFly logo image.

Hiroki Sato has some precompiled X.org 6.8.1 packages for testing.