Joerg Sonnenberger is changing errno to a thread-local variable this weekend, which means for those running the latest DragonFly code (i.e. from CVS, not 1.2.1), you will need to rebuild everything. That includes ports, and drastic changes like this will happen again.

Some articles to read: the story of USB, and why comments are more important than code. Also, there’s a new live backup option for NetBSD that is has some similarities with the planned journaling work in DragonFly. (From Hubert Feyer’s NetBSD blog)

UnixReview.com has an article up on using telnet to test network services; if you aren’t nodding your head in recognition of what this is, you should read the article. It’s a basic and useful tool.

Steve O’Hara-Smith found that running the Knoppix CD left his network card in a wierd state and unable to pass traffic. He had to physically remove power from his machine before DragonFly (or FreeBSD) could use the card again.

A minor point that came up during conversation on user@: DragonFly releases do not slowly move into new versions, as STABLE does on FreeBSD; 1.2 will always remain 1.2.x, while the next stable version (1.4) will be built from the new code that’s in 1.3 right now.

I’ve seen links in a few places for PC-BSD, which is a flavor (dare I say distribution?) of FreeBSD 5.3 with a nice installer.

There’s been precious little news - lots of activity, but nothing new - for the past 24 hours, so here’s a wierd link: Hubert Feyrer’s blog has a link to a Chinese operating system called Kylin, which apparently has some BSD-like elements, though it’s not clear just how much or from where.

Matthew Dillon’s put together a new NTP daemon. xntpd is apparently too large, and OpenNTPd has been problematic since its import.

And here’s the note.

Jeremy C. Reed, of BSDNewsletter fame, sent along news of the first survey from the BSD Certification Group. The survey is to “determine what kinds of tasks are performed by BSD system administrators in their day-to-day duties. Also of interest is the importance of each of these tasks as well as the level of skill required for each.” Read the announcement, and then take the survey.

Also, seen on BSDNewsletter.com, there is a ZDNet interview with Dru Lavigne, one of the folks working in the BSD Certification Group, and also a BSD author.

Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai has added CVS version 1.12.12 to DragonFly, which has a number of fixes and improvements from the previous version.

Joerg Sonnenberger has added Citrus support, taken from NetBSD. Citrus is a method for program internationalization, for those not familiar with it. This is important for user who have English as a second (or third, or fourth…) language.

The FreeBSD Status report for this year so far has been published. Several of the projects overlap with DragonFly, notably David Xu’s libthread.

Version 3.4 of GCC is now the default compiler in DragonFly (CURRENT, anyway). This should net more compatibility with other projects that use it, and some degree of greater speeds.

PCVT, which may already be broken, is being removed.

Matthew Dillon sent out a large warning. Here’s a summation:

* The Preview tag has been slipped.
* All bug fixes made since 1.2.0 was released will be added to that release branch.
* Unless you want to deal with major breakage, stick with the 1.2.0 Release or the -WORKING code; the CURRENT code will have severe modifications going on, including libc revisions.
* Upgrading from FreeBSD-4.x will break! Updating to DragonFly 1.2.0 and then to a more recent version of DragonFly will be the only way.

Now on UnixReview.com: IPv4 to IPv6 migration, and a Nameko webmail review.

BSDCan is having Work In Progress presentations - 5 minutes or less on a given topic; sort of a “lightning talk”. I can’t find an online copy of the email announcing this, so I’ll paste in the body of what Dan Langille wrote:
Continue Reading “BSDCan WIP sessions” »

There’s now German and Swedish versions of the FAQ, too.