Matthew Dillon posted two tidbits of information: ‘large mode‘ in BIOS can be needed to make disks visible, and why console messages are often limited in rate.

bfconfig has been removed, as ifconfig now contains all of brconfig’s features.

Producing a trace from kdgb can be difficult, especially if the crash involved kernel modules whose symbols are not necessarily visible.  Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has directions on how to resolve this.

Hubert Feyrer found a handy way to view/keep those embedded website movies (like on YouTube) that are difficult to play on BSD: keepvid.com.

As part of a larger discussion, Freddie Cash described some possible IDE disk and CD combinations that make sense for various tasks.

As a side effect of the new release, the various ISO images located on dragonflybsd.org and mirrors have been cleaned up to reflect only actual releases; there were some out-of-date intermediate versions in there.  Daily snapshots are still available.

SATA drive donations are being solicited (in the form of cash) for the machine that hosts the FreeBSD Diary, FreshPorts,  FreshSource, and BSDCan.

What’s the first thing to check when troubleshooting?  Hardware, like power cords, and any other connections.

This week on UnixReview.com: 4 articles, the first two of which may be of limited use to this page's audience:

Security: The adventure continues - SELinux
Book Review: Unix to Linux Porting
Certification: Test Your Knowledge of A+ Essentials Topics
Product Review: Spyforce-AI

Martti Kuparinen is looking for some testers for Xfce 4.4 beta 2.  See his email to pkgsrc-users@ for details.

NYCBSDCon, held in New York City (surprise!) is being held October 28-29th on the Columbia University campus. If you want to present, your abstract is due August 15th.

Java 1.4.2_11 and earlier works on DragonFly, and a number of further tips came up on the mailing lists.  (See similar previous entry.)

It is possible to build a custom install CD that adds additional packages and/or changed configuration files to the ‘normal’ DragonFly installation.  How do you do it?  The answer is in ‘man release‘

There’s new bsdtalk interviews every week, but this week, it’s Matthew Dillon, talking about the upcoming 1.6 release. A notable comment he made was that DragonFly is now more stable than even the much-vaunted FreeBSD 4.x releases that it came from. (Credit goes to Sascha Wildner for noticing the interview first.)

Eric Jacobs said “I’d like to work with LWKT“.  Matthew Dillon said, “How about userland VFS?” , and Eric said “Sure!“.  Then, Matthew Dillon went into unsummarizable details.

The DragonFly ISO images (the recent builds) now include system source – not enough to rebuild the whole system, but enough to patch and rebuild the kernel in situations where the source can’t be downloaded.  Like, say, network cards that require manual tweaking to support.

Yury Tarasievich was able to get Java 1.5 working, and he  mailed out details of the process.  Along the same lines, ‘walt’  was able to get Java 1.4 working from the ‘wip’ branch of pkgsrc, which only requires some minor elbow grease.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been using Roundup as a bug tracker for DragonFly  for some time now; it works well, and Matthew Dillon plans to make it official.  Tickets are created from traffic on submit@ and bugs@, and it works quite well im my experience.

A question about open source led several people to point out that there are a number of histories of BSD available – Steve Mynott pointed at excerpts from Kirk McKusick‘s O’Reilly book. Sascha Wildner also included GrokLaw’s excellent and long history, and McKusick’s BSDTalk interview (.mp3). Local ‘expert on old things’ Bill Hacker added that BSD-style sharing of code was happening before Linux, GNU, or even Richard Stallman had been born.

‘walt’ is looking for other people interested in using ‘csup‘, the written-in-C replacement for the written-in-Modula3 cvsup, used to update source code.  For now, there are premade cvsup binaries for DragonFly, though a working csup in the base system would be nice.

This week, UnixReview.com has two book reviews: “Perl Best Practices“, and “Advanced Host Intrusion Prevention with CSA“. I have the Perl Best Practices book myself, and it’s excellent.

Mid-month, says Matthew.

A short thread about ACLs or Capabilities for another layer of security starts here – read through for some explanation.  Work like this, though interesting, has to wait until the userland vfs/clustering work is done.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has shifted the ‘Preview’ tag to add in a recent bugfix.  This issue just interfered with some packages compiling in pkgsrc, so this is not an urgent update.

Sascha Wildner has set the utility ‘whereis‘ to work with pkgsrc the same way it used to with ports – finding where in the pkgsrc tree a given port is located.

I mention this because I tied to do this myself some time ago, and didn’t get it right.  It’s a darn useful command.

Emiel Kollof, who at one point had managed to get the NVIDIA binary video driver working for FreeBSD, doesn’t think it’s going to happen again.