Archive for July 2006
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.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch that updates the em(4) driver (that’s a network chipset, if it’s unfamiliar) to the latest version from Intel’s website. Give it a try if you’ve got the hardware. It’ll be in the tree in two weeks.
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.
Matthew Dillon has removed the thread pointer argument from all device operations. What does this mean? Glad you asked.
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.
Hubert Feyrer put together an interesting chart that shows the Makefile dependencies in pkgsrc. I’ve always wondered how people make directional charts from text data like that…
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has committed his support for building a AMD64-native world. (Not kernel, not yet) I have an example link; it touched a lot of files. Check commits@ for more.
As part of a larger discussion, Freddie Cash described some possible IDE disk and CD combinations that make sense for various tasks.
Sepherosa Ziehau has two patches for people to try: miibus(4) for network PHY chips and nfe(4), for NVIDIA ethernet controllers.
Joerg Sonnenberger is temporarily taking packages.stura.uni-rostock.de down for disk reorganization; there’s a bulk build of pkgsrc packages running for 1.6. Most packages built for 1.4.4 will work with 1.6, in any case.
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images located on dragonflybsd.org and mirrors have been cleaned up to reflect only actual releases; there were some out-of-date intermediate versions in there.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.
DragonFly 1.6 is released, (see announcement) with highlights including:
- even better pkgsrc integration, with over 93% of pkgsrc’s 6,000+ packages building on DragonFly
- significant 802.11 improvements including ath(4) support
- clustering progress
- and many other changes.
- See the diary or the release page for exhaustive update detail.
ISO images and/or source updates are available from a number of mirrors, though I suggest the torrent.
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.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has more AMD64 patches for testing, and Joerg Sonnenberger has potential support for Tekram controllers (trm(4))
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
If you’re thinking about buying a wireless card to use with DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau recommends cards supported by the ath(4), ral(4) and acx(4) drivers. No, I’m not sure which those are.
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.