Archive for June 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.
UnixReview has a review of the ActiveState Tcl Dev Kit version 3.2, and a book review of “Software Security: Building Security In“.
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)
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!)
‘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.
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.
UnixReview.com has a larger-than-normal number of new articles: book reviews of “The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 4: Generating All Trees“, “The Definitive Guide to SQLite“, and “Eric Sink on the Business of Software“, a game review of SolarWolf, a Regular Expressions article on dictionary skills, and a note on Disaster Recovery.
I’ve been traveling, and not posting – sorry! Back to a regular schedule tomorrow.
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.
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.
Demokritos University of Thrace (Greece) is the newest DragonFly mirror – links are on the download page.