Chris Pressey sent a recent announcement about the BSD Installer infrastructure, and changes thereto. I don’t see web-accessible archives of the message, so I’ll paste it here as an extended entry.
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There is a preview of the next version of GNOME (2.12), found via Slashdot.

Anyone compiling GNOME from CVS on DragonFly? It’d be interesting to know how compatible it is.

Matthew Dillon and Hiten Pandya outlined their plans for what goes into the next PREVIEW revision.

The first version of the BSDInstaller on FreeBSD is available.

Matthew Dillon mentioned a couple of obstacles in booting with a Shuttle board.

Sam Smith (I assume) wrote in a comment that his monthly BSD summaries for OnLAMP/BSD have become a blog, with June being the latest entry.

FreeBSD’s been ported to the XBox, interestingly enough. It’s more proof-of-concept right now – once networking works, it could be very useful.

Seen on Hubert Feyrer’s blog: The BSD daemon used for sex toy vending machines. Wierd.

UnixReview.com has three new articles: a review of the book on 60′s culture and PCs, “What the Dormouse Said“, an article on Nagios, and a look at OpenSolaris.

So, if you’re using Google’s new personalization features, you can add DragonFly BSD Digest headlines using: http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/index.rdf. Ooh, pretty.

Matthew Dillon only just noticed the Wikipedia entry for DragonFly. (It’s been linked here for quite a while.)

Also, IBM’s developerWorks has a “Why FreeBSD?” article that mentions DragonFly as the more technical alternative.

FreeBSD’s latest newletter is out, covering a number of their projects.

Speaking of this topic, there hasn’t been a BSD news roundup on OnLAMP for some time. Where did you go, Sam?

Matthew Dillon posted about the work he and others are doing to track down some elusive SMP bugs. Because of this work, the “preview” tag will be moved up soon.

The BSDNews website has undergone a cosmetic change. Content and layout appears to remain the same, however.

OnLAMP/BSD has a new (and long!) interview of Colin Percival, who discovered the cache security flaw in multicore chips.

Colin primarily works on FreeBSD, but he very kindly sends alerts to DragonFly developers for issues that affect both code bases.

Chriss Pressey announced the 2005.0721 version of the BSD Installer. This version can partition disks and leave existing installed operating systems intact. Also, the entire session is saved in a repeatable script that doesn’t even require the installer to run, similar to RedHat’s Kickstart or other technologies.

There’s more changes, and a new upgrade feature that needs testing. Check the announcement for details.

BSDCertification.org has a new newsletter out, and a monstrous 143-page summary of the Task Summary Survey they conducted some time ago. Interestingly, 3.8% of respondents use DragonFly at school/work, which is more than I expected in this part of the development cycle.

OnLAMP/BSD is back in action with an article on the latest trend: Live CDs, this time for OpenBSD.

Also, UnixReview.com has new material,including a number of book reviews such as “Silence on the Wire” and the goofy-sounding but probably useful “Spring into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists“.

It’s a slow news day, for once, so here’s a minor bit of information: a definition of “rollup” for patches.

By the way, it’s time to renew your The Perl Journal subscription. The magazine’s successfully survived a full year, even printing in dead-tree format.

FreeBSD has 18 different Google Summer of Code projects, one of which is integrating our very own BSD Installer, among other very interesting ideas. There’s a wiki with information on a few of the proposals. NetBSD is also particpating, though there’s no list of accepted proposals online, yet. (hubertf will probably have something soon.)

Update: There’s a SourceForge project for the NetBSD Summer of Code work. (thanks, anonymous poster!) Ooh! Someone’s working on zeroconf!

Sascha Retzki brought up the idea of using a neural network scheduler, which would be possible to add in with other schedulers, in the future.

I knew what it was, but I never checked to see what a phy looks like.

David Leimbach brought up a different journaling implementation that originated with Plan 9.

Updated: Matthew Dillon thought about this, and realized userland VFS is closer than he thought.

S/Key’s PAM module is out, so you may want to remove it from pam.conf.

(Corrected; thanks, Joerg)

Here’s a nice little summation of how to use the experimental ath driver (not in the base system).

The T1 for dragonflybsd.org is apparently having some trouble; it should be fixed soon.

Yeah, yeah, it’s for Linux, but it’s good to see a game review for a Unixy operating system. Many games will play on BSD as well as Linux, sometimes natively.

Speaking of reviews and such, the ONLamp BSD page hasn’t been updated for almost 2 months. Come back, ONLamp! The main site has an interview with Mark Breyer of Covalent about the BSD license, though.

Joerg Sonnenberger has proposed for the removal of S/Key from base. Would anyone object?

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s update rampage continues with an update to OpenSSH, bringing it to 4.1p1. Anyone want to update libedit, to match?

Hiten Pandya needs some disk space for DragonFly development. 300G would be enough, in the form of a RAID controller and multiple drives, or just a big IDE disk.

Man, drives are getting bigger and cheaper these days. Unfortuantely, somewhat disposable, too.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s crosscheck now has a search engine for commit messages.

Joerg Sonnenberger has updated his patchset for pkgsrc (link to diff file) which fixes FireFox compilation, among other things.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s “crosscheck” site is now available (again). It contains up-to-date source code for multiple BSD operating systems, to allow for easy comparison.

While it would be nigh-impossible to use DragonFly’s journaling implemenation within Linux or another BSD, it would be possible to have other operating systems able to receive the journaled data.

UnixReview.com has a number of new articles:

- A review of the new “MySQL in a Nutshell” book, complete with a link to a sample chapter.
- An examination of the Cisco CCIE certification.
- And, something I didn’t know could be done: tracking the mouse with a shell script.

Matthew Dillon sent out notice of his recent journaling work, which now actually works for mirroring a partition. He sent another update, with more details.

For those readers who didn’t read the original description of journaling, this is different than the usual “fast reboot” version of journaling that other operating systems have. This scheme is intended to allow for rollback to arbitrary spots in disk history, or mirroring of data to other drives or other network locations.

If you’re having trouble with a Serial ATA controller, try setting it in BIOS to “compatibility mode”. This problem has hit a few people.

UnixReview.com has a new book review up for “Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization“.

Most third-party software work for DragonFly seems to be happening with pkgsrc these days, but Andreas Hauser is still building packages for DragonFly using the FreeBSD ports system. Pick one of the libc.so.4 directories if you’re running 1.2, or libc.so.5 if you’re on the bleeding edge of DragonFly development.