PC-BSD, which is FreeBSD 6 with KDE 3.5 and a GUI package management system, is now at version 1.0. I can only describe it as the way a BSD should be packaged.
Month: April 2006
04/29/2006
How well off are we?
Some relative stats on how platforms are doing with pkgsrc; results found in recent entries to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list.
NetBSD 3.0_STABLE/i386 96%
NetBSD 3.99.18/i386 94%
NetBSD 2.1/i386 92%
NetBSD 1.6.2/i386 92%
DragonFly/i386 90%
NetBSD 3.0/x86_64 87%
NetBSD 2.1/sparc 82%
Darwin 8.5.0/powerpc 60%
IRIX64 6.5/mipseb 31%
DragonFly appears to be the best place to run pkgsrc, if you aren’t running NetBSD.
Not repeating old mistakes
One of the design goals for DragonFly is creating a BSD with clean, clear code. Here’s one example.
04/28/2006
Another test, for BUF/BIO
Matthew Dillon would like feedback and perhaps even testing on his BUF/BIO separation patch.
04/27/2006
More DragonFly is always good
Oliver Fromme noticed that the cheap DVD sold at Lehmanns for LinuxTag 2006 now contains FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD – and DragonFly.
Libcr gone away
Matthew Dillon has removed libcr, since libc_r now links correctly against libc, and libcr is no longer needed.
BSDCan coming up
2 weeks until BSDCan! I won’t be able to make it, but there will be a few DragonFly people up there…
pkgsrc gets bigger
pkgsrc has reached 6,000 total packages. How many of those build on DragonFly? About 93%. For comparison, pkgsrc builds about 97% of all packages on NetBSD 3.0_STABLE, which is possibly the most common platform using pkgsrc. That’s fantastic statistics.
04/26/2006
Bug report prevention
Joerg Sonnenberger followed up on the pkgsrc bug reports, noting that checking recent bulk builds (via the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list) is another way to check up on pkgsrc problems.
04/25/2006
Pkgsrc and bug reporting
If you’ve ever been curious about how to report DragonFly issues to people outside of DragonFly; here’s the process. (DragonFly mailing lists are also a good alternative.)
04/24/2006
Faster upgrades
One of the issues with pkgsrc is that it is difficult to upgrade all packages with minimal downtime. However, as long as you are sticking to prebuilt binaries, it’s possible to get it to happen rather quickly.
Security donations still needed
Colin Percival is looking for donations to support his work over the summer handling security issues for FreeBSD, Portsnap, and FreeBSD Update. He’s very close to meeting the goal.
Interlock removed
Matthew Dillon has removed lockmgr()’s interlock, which apparently has diverged in form between the different BSDs over the years.
04/22/2006
1.4.4 is out!
With some final changes, version 1.4.4 is available now. This is the recommended download/update for everyone. (Including me, so I’ll have to update tonight.)
04/21/2006
Google Summer of Code idea lists
If you’ve got an hour or two, check out the many organizations participating in the Google Summer of Code. The idea lists have a lot of neat material.
04/19/2006
UnixReview.com gets busy
This week on UnixReview.com has a lot more content than usual:
Examining the Updated Security+ Certification - Part One, Shell Corner: Graphing Perl's Regular Expressions,
Security: Unpatched and Doing Fine?,
and the book reviews Migrating to IPv6 and Cryptography in the Database
04/18/2006
1.4.4 almost ready
Matthew Dillon’s merged a heap of bugfixes from the current code back into the 1.4 release branch; the update to 1.4.4 won’t happen until Friday, however.
04/16/2006
3rd partition lucky
Alex Burke has a writeup of his experiences installing DragonFly to a third partition.
04/15/2006
ipw2200 howto
Thomas Schlesinger has written a howto on the wiki for setting up a ipw2200 network adapter.
Documentation frenzy
Adrian Nida has a huge patch for the Handbook, removing outdated ports info and replacing it with pkgsrc mentions. He’s looking for feedback, and there’s already some.
Also, Jeremy C. Reed has improvements to the X11 documentation in the handbook for review.
If you speak a language other than English, Trevor Kendall wants you to check out and sync the wiki FAQs.
1.5.3 released, more coming
Matthew Dillon has moved the Preview release to 1.5.3, as it’s stable enough for more testing. In addition, Release is moving to 1.4.4 in about a week to incorporate recent fixes; details are in his post.
Summer of Code 2006 started
It’s open! We need to incorporate a DragonFly nonprofit to be involved, at some point. (Thanks, Christian Sturm)
Jobs aplenty
Apparently there’s a good number of BSD-based jobs out there. These examples are based on NetBSD, but there’s surely more. (From Hubert Feyrer and others)
04/13/2006
Two little reminders
Matthew Dillon has two comments on some small things that are absolutely essential: how to reach the CDROM and how to really back up existing partitions before installing DragonFly.
04/12/2006
An ongoing iwi saga
Thomas Schlesinger is trying to get his ipw2200 wireless connection to work. The pkgsrc package sysutils/iwi_firmware will do it, though it’s not packaged as a binary, so there’s some trickery to install.
04/11/2006
DragonFly: Best place for pkgsrc?
Joerg Sonnenberger’s bulk builds of pkgsrc are showing that almost everything in pkgsrc now builds on DragonFly.  That’s 92% complete.
04/10/2006
Less annoying is always better
I can’t find the original post, but apparently pkg_install no longer complains about minor changes in system name, which can affect anyone installing binary packages.
Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery
“fader” has a post on gobsd.com that mentions Qemu works very well with DragonFly as a client environment, especially if you have the accelerator. Something similar that has been attracting attention: Parallels.
04/09/2006
Immediate MBR Assistance
Petr Janda had the misfortune of overwriting his Master Boot Record; helpfully, a number of people had ways to fix it.
04/07/2006
Everybody hates spam
Andreas Hauser recommends using greylisting to combat spam, and talks a little bit about how to do it.
04/06/2006
Installer bug
As Matthew Dillon and others have described, if you install the latest bleeding-edge code (1.5) of DragonFly, there is a bug in the installer. To keep from being bit, first log in as ‘root’ and type:
ln -s a /etc/malloc.conf
Then log out and log in as ‘installer’ and proceed normally.
(8^3)*2versary?
April 6th is the 1024th day since the DragonFly project was formed. Happy 8*8*8*2aversary, us!
04/05/2006
Interview with Jan Schaumann
Daemonnews has an interview with Jan Schaumann up;
the interview is about NetBSD as a desktop system. Many of the answers also apply to DragonFly, as NetBSD and DragonFly both use pkgsrc.
New dragonflybsd.org layout
dragonflybsd.org has been updated with a different logical layout; it’s my fault.
04/04/2006
OpenBSD gets money
Apparently the Mozilla Foundation donated US$10K to OpenSSH. That’s good! They still need money, though.
ext2fs back in
Matthew Dillon writes that it is back in the system, with a different methodology. Try it if you are running bleeding edge.
04/03/2006
ext2fs out for a bit
Matthw Dillon has unhooked ext2fs from the build temporarily as he disassociates it from the existing UFS code.
Short FUSE time
Matthew Dillon is planning to start userland VFS work in about a month; this led Andreas Hauser to ask if FUSE could be brought in as for FreeBSD. Csaba Henk, who ported it to FreeBSD, said “yes, but better“!
04/02/2006
new ifconfig
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a new version of ifconfig, taken from FreeBSD 6. The interface is the same from the user perspective, but is apparently more flexible.
