06/30/2006
‘Timofonic’ spotted this post by an NVIDIA employee describing the changes needed for better performance/support of NVIDIA chipsets in FreeBSD. This could apply to DragonFly., though I daresay these issues would already be fixed (or at least worked on) if it wasn’t a closed-source driver.
Of course, while I’m at it, I may as well wish for a pony and a million bucks, as there’s probably business reasons for the closed-source driver that are more compelling than the opinion of Some Guy with Blogging Software Installed.
The last 24 hours have brought some interesting improvements: Scott Ullrich committed new code for bridging, YONETANI Tomokazu committed his est (Enhanced Speedstep) support, which was converted from NetBSD, and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has
success building world for the AMD64 architecture. (Kernel is not supported, so fully native AMD64 DragonFly isn’t possible – yet.) Unlike the other two items, Simon’s code has not yet been committed, as it’s the newest of these three items.
Steve Mynott posted an interesting link: ZFS-on-FUSE. It appears to be a not-yet-complete implementation of ZFS on top of the FUSE (userspace filesystems)
06/28/2006
Matthew Dillon committed a change allowing the DragonFly boot menu to recognize NTFS and call it that. Previously, NTFS partitions/disks would show as ‘??’. It originates from FreeBSD and was suggested for DragonFly by Bill Marquette
.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert would like to get rid of ipfw, slowly. This means it wouldn’t be gone until release 1.7.  While pf doesn’t have all needed functionality to work as a replacement, Gary Allan pointed out that ipfw2 is a suitable replacement as it has similar features but is less of a mess. (And look – he’s on it!)
06/27/2006
‘walt’ has 3 pkgsrc packages set up to work on DragonFly – gnome-multimedia, nautilus-cd-burner, and sane-backends – he’d like folks to test.
Attilio Rao would like to make some improvements to the DragonFly kernel. Follow the link and resulting discussion between him and Matthew Dillon for details, because it’s far enough into the internals of the system that it’s like another language.
06/26/2006
Matthew Dillon wrote about some of the remaining hurdles for ZFS.
YONETANI Tomokazu has added an EST (enhanced speedstep) driver, which allows certain CPUs to be reduced in speed to control battery usage and heat production. See his notes, and some tips on usage from Johannes Hofmann.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted a short list of how he was able to make openvpn work. Your mileage may vary.
06/25/2006
I’ve been traveling, and not posting – sorry! Back to a regular schedule tomorrow.
06/20/2006
Thomas Schlesinger found KDE would not run on his DragonFly 1.5.4 system; Matthew Dillon committed a fix for a problem.
If you enable device ehci(4) in your kernel, for USB 2.0 support, you’ll see some extra output on boot. It’s harmless.
Sascha Wildner and Joerg Sonnenberger will be representing DragonFly at FrOSCon, happening in Bonn, Germany, June 24th and 25th.
06/19/2006
Are you trying to put together the BSD Installer? Taken from an email from Scott Ullrich (sorry, no web archive):
Here is the steps I take to build the installer once it is checked out of cvs:
cd installer/scripts/build
./create_installer_tarballs.sh
./copy_ports_to_portsdir.sh
./build_installer_packages.sh
The title sums it up: EuroBSDCon 2006 is ready to accept proposals, due by July 15th.
Simon Schubert has added a bunch of Coverity-found fixes seen in NetBSD and present in shared code.
Demokritos University of Thrace (Greece) is the newest DragonFly mirror – links are on the download page.
Dmitri Nikulin has a quick tip on how to remove some package dependencies in pkgsrc, in the (rare) chance that you don’t want and don’t need certain other programs.
FreeBSD committer Ruslan Ermilov’s wife has cancer, and he needs money for treatment. Please help.
06/18/2006
Pkgsrc has regular quarterly releases, and the one for the second quarter of 2006 is starting up. These releases are designed to provide known stable points, or at least points more stable than pulling from CVS.
A few kernel options, such as INVARIANT_SUPPORT, have gone away. Watch for this when upgrading from 1.5.3 to 1.5.4. If you are a Release (1.4.4) user, this won’t affect you until the next release.
06/17/2006
Sepherosa Ziehau has improved support for the acx networking chipset, adding WPA2 support, though not yet for the acx100.
06/16/2006
Let’s say you want to identify the pkgsrc packages on your system that are ‘leaves’, meaning no other packages are dependent on them. Johnny Lam, on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list, has a short script to find just that.
As predicted, the Preview tag has been synced with HEAD, meaning all recent changes are now available. Now’s a good time to update if you’re not on Release (1.4.4). Because of ABI changes, there’s a specific procedure one should follow.
06/15/2006
A short question about a warning message, while answered, led to a short discussion about optimization.
06/14/2006
Matthew Dillon noted that due to general stability, the Preview tag will be slipped on the 16th, and the next Release will happen in July.
A proposal to remove sendmail and replace it with postfix has resulted in a variety of reactions. Matthew Dillon is surprisingly frustrated with sendmail, though Claude Assman, who is working on Sendmail X (the rewrite of Sendmail), says there are improvements.
Sascha Wildner pointed out that we get immediate, direct vendor support for Sendmail, such as the update today to 8.13.7 by Gregory Neil Shapiro, which is unlikely to happen with any other MTA.
06/13/2006
If you’re running a development version of DragonFly; namely 1.5.3, it’s time to update to 1.5.4. Be careful, as your kernel has to be updated first.
06/12/2006
Seen on KernelTrap, then OpenBSD Journal and then Slashdot: BSD support (specifically OpenBSD) hardware support is improving faster than Linux in some cases.
I did not realize this, but if you want to browse SMB shares using KDE, KDE has to be compiled explicitly with support for it. The message linked happens to cover ‘show-options’, a handy pkgsrc option.
There’s been some conversations about getting OpenVPN to work, though it’s still not complete.
06/10/2006
Stefan Krüger’s writeup of how to do a stress test on DragonFly is now on the wiki.
06/08/2006
Stefan Krüger has written up a nice description of how to use Peter Holm’s kernel stress test on DragonFly.
UnixReview.com has a much larger than normal set of new (new since I last linked) articles up; instead of linking to individual ones, I’ll just say “go visit“.
06/07/2006
Due to a disk problem, some of the archived mailing list messages/articles on the news server are missing. The mail archives appear OK, however.
06/06/2006
Preview, the halfway step between ‘safe’ and bleeding edge code in DragonFly, is due for an update soon.
06/05/2006
Joerg Sonnenberger’s been building from the most recent branch (2006Q1) of pkgsrc, and the binaries are now available. His existing packages were built from the current version of pkgsrc, i.e. from CVS.
06/03/2006
Ever have your console filled with messages from some bizarre hardware issue? Bill Hacker knows how to fix it.
Max von Seibold identified a nice installation guide for DragonFly. (His other question about bootblocks is answered later.)
06/02/2006
Joerg Sonnenberger is removing old versions of postgres from pkgsrc, and reconfiguring the PHP, PEAR, and Apache packages to make the installable combinations a little more comprehensible.
Joerg Sonnenberger added a ‘-p’ option to kdump, so that only data for a specific PID is recorded. This can greatly reduce the output.