Archive for August 2006
Charles M. Hannum, one of the originators of the NetBSD project, posted what I’ll call a rant about the state of NetBSD; he wants NetBSD to lead system development and he blames the organizational layout for slowing development.
It appears he wants to return to the less complex organization of the early days of NetBSD; I don’t think that’s relevant in this stage of NetBSD’s development.  (Is NetBSD the oldest existing open source operating system project?)
It’s a sparse week on UnixReview.com, this week: 2 book reviews, one of “C++ Standard Library Extensions” and the other of “Linux Phrasebook“.
A recent users@ conversation about using UTF-8 and other character encodings has some interesting tidbits.
Joerg Sonnenberger regularly builds binary packages for pkgsrc, for DragonFly, in parallel. This eats up a lot of disk and RAM.
He could use another 2 Gb of DDR2 RAM. This would greatly speed up builds. Got spare RAM or cash? Please help, (he’s at joerg@britannica.bec.de) as this benefits every DragonFly user. (And to a lesser extent, every pkgsrc user.)
Jeremy C. Reed has put together a new book on the pf packet filter, originally from OpenBSD but now found in all the BSDs, including DragonFly. It’s available from his website.
The BSD Installer mailing list currently has no online archive, but it’s possible to retrieve past mailings by mailing to discussion-get.x_y@bsdinstaller.com where x and y are the number of the first and last message you want to retrieve. discussion-help@bsdinstaller.com is also available. (Thanks, Chris Pressey)
Something I knew:Â You can set the environment variable PKG_PATH to the URL where binary pkgsrc packages are located, and pkg_add will automatically fetch from there.
Something I didn’t know: you can have multiple sites listed, as Petr Janda explains.
Sepherosa Ziehau has ported nfe(4), support for NVIDIA PCI ethernet adapters, from OpenBSD, with some changes and improvements.
ONLamp.com has a new article up: IPFW, which is one of the several firewalls present in DragonFly and other BSDs.
A memory overrun issue in ppp has been discovered in NetBSD which also applies to DragonFly. It’s been fixed, thanks to Joerg Sonnenberger. It’s also found in FreeBSD (fixed) and OpenBSD (no fix yet that I know of.)
The Cache Coherency Management System, a fiendish system which will allow crazy things like mapping memory across multiple machines, mentioned before, has been started.
The somewhat perennial discussion of microkernels came up again on kernel@; start at the beginning to read the generally useful conversation.
Another how-to for today: two ways to get Flash working: Handbook method and Wiki method.
According to a recent announcement, the second AsiaBSDCon will be held on March 8-11, 2007, in the University of Tokyo, Japan. Papers are already being solicited.
A question about multiple sound sources playing leads to this solution, which may require manual sound device assignment, though it’s not that bad. Better solutions are possible.
I’ve updated the online version of the Handbook to include the last 2 months of changes. (Available as PDF and text too.)
If there was a mailing list that had regular summaries of the posts on here, would it be useful to you? If so, would you want it daily? Weekly?
Ian R. Stephenson suggested this, and I’ve had more people than I expected agree.
As part of a conversation about headless installation, Bill Hacker describes the old-fashioned way, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert mentioned the ‘Pre-Flight Installer‘, and Matthew Dillon described how he uses rconfig.
The modular version of xorg is predicted to be in pkgsrc in October.
For those needing an explanation: We currently have the ‘monolithic’ version.  The modular form breaks the build of xorg into parts that can be updated separately, and will be the form used for future versions.