Archive for May 2007
It’s a week with variety on UnixReview.com: “More Forensic Tools“, a Shell Corner article: “Littera Delenda Est“, a Regular Expressions article: “Good Works with Real Databases“, and a product review: “Examining SlickEdit 2007: Code Quick | Think Slick“
How good is Sepherosa Ziehau? The bce(4) driver is broken with polling in FreeBSD, but he’s made the DragonFly version work just fine.
Apparently pf has some significant speedups; updating the DragonFly version would have a nice benefit at this point. (seen on Undeadly and by _hasso_ on #dragonflybsd)
Julio M. Merino Vidal, a pkgsrc developer, has a writeup on his blog about some different ways to upgrade pkgsrc, along with a link to the definitive source. (seen on NetBSD News Beat)
Matthew Dillon has changed virtual kernels so that they can be internally restarted or shut down, just like a real system. OMG.
Broadcom NetXtreme II GigE network cards are now supported on DragonFly, thanks to an excellent interaction between developer, users, and Broadcom.
This is interesting: Getting Flash to work on FreeBSD without Linux compatibility. It may apply to other BSDs - otherwise untested. (Thanks, BSDNews) If you want to do it with the Linux compatibility options, that’s documented on the wiki.
While not DragonFly specific, I think this Worse Than Failure article about what’s wrong with Agile development is interesting for its main point: strategy is not a replacement for skill.
In an effort to make testing of a new installer easier, Matthew Dillon added support for having a virtual kernel boot from a CD image. It works, though you can’t quite run an installer on it yet.
It’s a sparse week on UnixReview.com: Examining MySQL Certification, book reviews of “FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook“, and “PC Technician Street Smarts“. If you’re curious to know, FISMA stands for “Federal Information Security Management Act”, which means it’s probably only of interest to U.S. readers or people who enjoy bureaucratic paperwork.
I’m going to be cleaning leaf.dragonflybsd.org - watch out! This should not affect services located there, like developer accounts or the mail archive. I hope.
Aggelos Economopoulos’s lwn.net articles titled “A Peek at the DragonFly Virtual Kernel” are now available as a single item on dragonflybsd.org, with some additional details that didn’t appear in the initial version.
Gergo Szakal suggested using FeedBurner to put recent wiki changes onto the doc@ mailing list. I think it would work well to make sure major changes get discussed - opinions?
Matthew Dillon has done some careful reworking of the disklabel system; it will require a full make buildworld and etc. process if you are running bleeding edge code and want to upgrade. Be careful!
Incidentally, this makes a dynamic /dev possible, for anyone wanting to put it together.  Again, be careful!
UnixReview.com has 4 new items this week: A liitle quiz titled “Test Your Knowledge of PHP“, book reviews of “Apache Phrasebook” and “Beginning C: From Novice to Professional“, and a review of Up.Time 4.
If you are running bleeding edge DragonFly, make sure your next buildworld/buildkernel is a full one. Matthew Dillon has made changes to ccdconfig/vnconfig that require it.
Joerg Sonnenberger has posted his initial plans for making bulk build of pkgsrc run in parallel.
Since Matthew Dillon’s working on the disklabel code, be careful if you’re running bleeding edge code in the next few days. Disklabel errors eat data.