08/31/2005
Jeremy C. Reed posted his results from building all possible pkgsrc packages on DragonFly. More than half were successful already, and more (since he was building as non-root) should be possible. You can read his full post for details, but here’s a nice little summary:
Build started: Mon Aug 29 19:45:33 2005 GMT
Build ended: Wed Aug 31 03:36:14 2005 GMT
Successfully packaged: 2902
Packages really broken: 1037
Pkgs broken due to them: 1270
Total broken: 2307
Not packaged: 314
Total: 2621
Matthew Dillon wrote a small entry on how he goes about merging important fixes back into the Release version of DragonFly.
08/29/2005
There’s a petition on bsdnexus.comto bring Codeweavers’ Crossover Office to BSD (meaning FreeBSD, probably).
Update: I’ve traded a few emails with Frank Jahnke, the man behind this work, and I take back every unoptimistic thing I’ve ever said about it.
Matthew Dillon, while looking at a locking problem on chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de, happened to explain a bit about SPECFS and the trouble it causes.
Jeffrey Hsu has committed his new spinlock implementation – the commit message has a short explanation of how it was implemented.
08/28/2005
I’ve upgraded the software behind this site; it should make no real difference to you, the reader. Please tell me if you encounter something that’s broken.
A big welcome to our two newest DragonFly committers: Sepherosa Ziehau and Noritoshi Demizu. Yep, those are names I’ll have to cut and paste.
Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai has upgraded texinfo to version 4.8.
Matthew Dillon posted that the last (major) ABI changes are done, and Preview has been updated. If you’re running Preview, now is a good time to update. However, you’ll have to rebuild everything, as he describes.
08/27/2005
Joerg Anslik has written a very complete bit of documentation on getting a Quake 3 Arena server running under DragonFly; it’s available on the Wiki.
Matthew Dillon posted a warning that the final ABI changes would go in this weekend, and that Preview would soon be bumped to match the bleeding-edge HEAD. That means everything on non-Release systems will have to be rebuilt – pkgsrc/port packages, too.
Scott Robbins mailed in a link to his page, which contains some DragonFly notes, and a much more up-to-date install guide than what’s in the current Handbook.
08/26/2005
Jeremy C. Reed has started a bulk build of pkgsrc packages for DragonFly; so far, he has 907 built of 5,523. He’ll have a full report when it completes.
Matthew Dillon explained why his journaling system will be more like a transactional database. (He should know; he wrote one)
08/25/2005
UnixReview.com has a review of “Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks“, an article about regular expressions titled “Don’t Fear Reliability“, and a review of the podcasting application jPodder, which may work on DragonFly
Matthew Dillon described some of the possibilities and hurdles for his journaling code.
Jeremy C. Reed announced a new roadmap (.pdf) for the planned BSD certification process at BSDCertification.org.
Chris Pressey found out the hard way that installing DragonFly and then FreeBSD can lead to DragonFly being wiped out by the FreeBSD installer.
08/24/2005
Matthew Dillon committed the remaining large portion of kernel work for journaling; he followed up with some comments on remaining userland work.
Do you have an ARECA based RAID/SATA card? Hiten Pandya needs guinea pigs
08/22/2005
There’s several new programs to try out. First, “walt” mentioned his ‘rlc’ program, which can be used to randomize background colors in new xterms. Joerg Anslik ported over the recently released Quake 3 Arena server, and Jeremy C. Reed posted (untested) patches for postgresql 8 in pkgsrc,
Todd Willey posted a fix for compiling gdm in pkgsrc. gdm is necessary for using Gnome.
If you’re having trouble with Netgraph, Hiten Pandya has a temporary fix until he gets to work on it again.
08/20/2005
Seen on BSDNews: Maik Ehinger has written (partial) support for the Accelerometer on IBM laptops. Well, really Lenovo laptops, nowadays.
There’s a Linux module that does similar work, with an interesting story on the work.
Sascha Wildner added a feature: if you set the sysctl machdep.enable_panic_key to 1, CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-ESC will panic the machine, no matter which keymap you have.
I hadn’t noticed these two pages on the wiki, but Jeremy Messenger posted a link to DragonFly Status and Network Stack Status.
08/19/2005
There’s a new Big Scary Daemons article up at ONLamp.com/BSD: Monitoring Network Traffic with Netflow, which is, oddly enough, a topic I had to deal with at work recently.
08/18/2005
Seen a number of places: the NYCBSDCON is coming in almost exactly a month. If you can’t guess from the acronym, it’s a BSD-themed convention in New York City – specifically, at Columbia University. There’s some interesting speakers, too!
08/17/2005
Why not portage? ‘ejc’ says why.
The “Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST)” in Ishikawa, Japan, is now mirroring DragonFly via HTTP and FTP.
Probably because of my subscription to SysAdmin Magazine, I got an email from CMP Media for the net event “Why Did My Build Break? Learn Effective Techniques to Debug Troublesome Makefiles, which is a 1-hour talk on August 24th with Usman Muzaffar and John Osterhout (the person who created Tcl). I have no idea how interesting this is, as it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
It appears to be linked into Software Development Magazine, another CMP product. Looking at that page, it appears that this magazine absorbed New Architect, which I really enjoyed years ago when it was “Web Techniques”. What does that mean now? Nothing!
08/16/2005
UnixReview.com has several new articles up: a farewell to Dept. 1127, where AT&T Unix was born, and reviews of the books “Eclipse 3.0 Kick Start” and “Information Security Policies Made Easy, Version 10“. That security book had better make things easy – it’s nearly $800!
As part of the continuing package manager discussion (i.e. ports and what to replace it with), Chris Pressey pointed out that DragonFly does not have a publically defined set of nontechnical goals, and linked to a few others for contrast.
In addition, Hiten Pandya described the “Smart Package Manager” as a potential solution to many (if not all) the issues people have with package management systems.
‘walt’ reports some luck running the Java JDK from pkgsrc; the absolute latest patchset from eyesbeyond.com supports DragonFly and makes it work.
I’ve cleaned up the page; I’ve reduced the redundant references to archives in the page navigation, and added a book section that points at books on Amazon.com. This new book section has some permanent links (including my favorite programming book ever), and also links to whatever books have been mentioned here lately.
08/15/2005
A question about FreeBSD port compatibility has turned into a long ports vs. pkgsrc discussion. (read through the follow-ups, or visit the monthly archive and read “Compatibility with FreeBSD Ports”) It’s one of those problems that gets answered by what people work on the most.
Someone posted a link to another dragonfly image; it’s, well… not about the bug, really.
08/14/2005
Joerg Sonnenberger’s got a number of diff files for use with pkgsrc, to make it a bit more compatible with DragonFly. These will (well, ought to) be incorporated into pkgsrc at some point, but until then…
08/13/2005
ONLamp/BSD has a new article up in FreeBSD Basics, outlining how to access a Subversion server. I recall someone was experimenting with a Subversion server for DragonFly code, though it’s going to remain in CVS (man, nongnu.org pages are ugly!) in the main repositiory.
08/12/2005
David Rhodus has updated the pkg_add command to point to http://www.fireflybsd.com/packages, where the binary builds live. This works if you’re running the latest code; however, you will need to use the full URL for a given package if you’re using 1.2.x Release, as it still looks to the old location.
Anyone know a good place (other than EBay) to find cheap used laptops? I want to find something small, light, and able to run DragonFly, natch.
08/11/2005
UnixReview.com this week covers an interesting Python script called “DenyHosts“, which locks out hosts that fail login too much. There’s another game review, this time of the racing game TORCS, which may or may not work on DragonFly. (It’s currently broken on FreeBSD-4, so we may be out of luck, temporarily…)
08/10/2005
The default location for DragonFly to use when retrieving binary ports is http://www.gobsd.com/packages. However, gobsd.com (the physical machine) is undergoing a data center move, and it’s not all back together yet. Until then, build ports from source, or use pkgsrc.
Joerg Sonnenberger has updated gcc to version 3.4.5.
Welcome Noritoshi Demizu, the newest developer for DragonFly.
Here’s some links nabbed from the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet: a tutorial on Project Evil (using MS Windows wireless card drivers on a different operating system), several tutorials on various types of shell scripting, and possibly the biggest list of programming documents ever I seen. Warning – it’s pretty Linux-centric.
08/09/2005
Leaf.dragonflybsd.org now has additional disk space for twe (3ware controller) testing, and has had an operating system upgrade to 1.3.4-DEVELOPMENT. Matthew Dillon has the details.
As David Rhodus found, beeping from your PC speaker works in recent code. It can be turned off with `kbdcontrol -b quiet.visual`, but reports conflict on if that works.
08/08/2005
It’s a slow news day, so here’s something I’ve seen linked in several places: DesktopBSD, which, if you can’t guess at the name, is an effort to make a desktop-friendly BSD. It’s based on FreeBSD and KDE, similar to PC-BSD.
08/06/2005
There’s a whole lot of changes in the development branch (HEAD) of DragonFly. These are good changes, especially if you are a multiprocessor user, but HEAD users will shortly need to recompile everything – kernel, world, and ports/pkgsrc! Matthew Dillon lays it out in a recent post.
08/05/2005
Bob Bagwill found that the FreeBSD version of Opera works on DragonFly, with some minor modifications.
Doug Keester noted that Bill and Lynne Jolitz have jolix.com and 386BSD.com, where you can read/buy various bits of historical BSD documentation.
08/04/2005
Wiger van Houten pointed at the FreeBSD kernel stress test and OpenPOSIX Test Suite as potential test methods for DragonFly; Matthew Dillon plans to try out the former.
08/03/2005
A conversation about BSD architecture books led to “Basic Kernel Source Code Secrets” by Lynne and Bill Jolitz, who also penned a series of articles on porting Unix (what we now call BSD, of course) to the 386. These articles came out around the same time Linus Torvalds started his little project…
Matthew Dillon posted a thorough description of that the different tags mean when using cvsup to update your DragonFly system.
08/02/2005
shiningsilence.com will be going down for a short period today, due to a repositioning of an exterior power line.
If you are running bleeding edge DragonFly code (HEAD), you will need to have COMPAT_DF12 in your kernel config file, unless you’re using the GENERIC kernel. This is because of the stat(2) work Joerg Sonnenberger plans to commit.
08/01/2005
‘walt’ found what may eventually be a nice way to manage pkgsrc packages: pkgmanager.
FreeBSD, as one of the Google Summer of Code projects, is going through a networking code cleanup. Would DragonFly benefit from this? Yes, except it’s already happened.
Matthew Dillon wrote a little explanation of how the kernel and userland schedulers interact.
