An aside in this post from Matthew Dillon notes that the next release (which I assume will be 2.0) will be before the end of February.

This week’s BSDTalk is an interview with Dru Lavigne, covering her new “Best of FreeBSD Basics” book and the new BSDA exam, both previously mentioned on this Digest.

To continue that topic, Dru also attended DemoCamp7 in Ottawa recently and has a writeup on the new products she saw.

boulder.tele.dk is a new DragonFly mirror, serving images and pkgsrc binaries via HTTP and FTP.

Dru Lavigne saw that the BSDA exam is through ‘beta’ and ready to go – it will be offered at a number of conferences through 2008.

An article on OpenAddict talks about managing multiple FreeBSD systems, though it could apply to most any BSD system, including DragonFly.  It boils down to “Share code via NFS.”, really.  (Via FreeBSDOS)

The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out.  There’s notes in there on some $300k (!) of grant money for Ontario, canada universities for open source projects looking to commercialize.  (Via Dru Lavigne)

As I was notified by Michael Lyngbøl, there’s a new Danish mirror for DragonFly:

Snapshots and ISO images:

• http://boulder.tele.dk/pub/DragonFly/
• ftp://boulder.tele.dk/pub/DragonFly/

pkgsrc binary mirrors:

• http://boulder.tele.dk/pub/DragonFly/packages/
• ftp://boulder.tele.dk/pub/DragonFly/packages/

BSDTalk this week is about setting up a centralized syslog server.  If you manage more than a few non-Windows systems, this is going to be useful.

Matthew Dillon wrote another one of his updates on the work being done on HAMMER; he’s moving on to balancing code next.

Seen on Undeadly: Peter Hansteen, author of The Book of PF, will be giving a full day tutorial on PF, on February 20th in Riga, Latvia.

Gerard van Essen, from the PC-BSD project, has started a blog called “FreeBSD – the unknown Giant“.    It’s news reporting, similar to this site, and it’s updated regularly!  It makes me very happy to see resources like that in the BSD world.  (Via Dru Lavigne)

Michael Neumann wrote up a HAMMER description, with some ZFS comparisons.  Matthew Dillon had some corrections, which I think have made it back to the original article.  There is an obvious bias in the article, but it does at least provide a feature list.

Hasso Tepper pointed at the usb4bsd project as a potential improvement for USB, though Jeremy Messenger saw something that may keep it out of FreeBSD, at least.

Vincent Stemen found that it was difficult to get cvsup running on DragonFly, and went looking for mirrors that supplied DragonFly via rsync. Joerg Sonnenberger handily supplied an example script, and Simon ‘codecode’ Schubert supplied a more complex example, though there are more servers that run rsync than just the one in the script. Vincent’s further tests showed better performance with rsync, though Garance A Drosihn pointed out these tests were not comprehensive enough to point out a real advantage. Csup, the cvsup replacement that isn’t dependent on modula-3, is close to working completely as a replacement, though it doesn’t remove the need for cvsupd.

Matthew Dillon posted an update a few days ago on the state of HAMMER – the short form is that he’s reworking the spike code.

A bunch of links from around the web, thrown out while I catch up on my backlog of news:

• Regex Legends, for computer history buffs.  (via the manly Joel Johnson)
• SSH Best Practices: nothing complex, but good steps to know.
• A giant robotic trebuchet that flings bowling balls.  I love things that fling.
• A multi-part computer you can assemble.  It just runs Linux, though the SDK is called ‘dragonfly’.
• StudyBSD – a site with video lessons on administering BSD.  A neat idea!  (Via hubertf)

If anyone wants to convert NFSv4 support over from OpenBSD, Rick Macklem has some tips.

Micropolis, a cleaned-up version of the original SimCity game, is now available under the GPL. Anyone know if this works on a DragonFly system? Don Hopkins’ blog is a good place to see details about the history and ideas involved, among other things. (Via lot of places)

Note that there’s already some open-source clones out there, like lincity-ng.  Feel free to comment with more links if you know them.

I love to alliterate.  The Southern California Linux Exposition schedule for their show in early February is up.  There’s some potentially BSD-related events on there, including a talk on OpenBSD failover by Jason Dixon and Dru Lavigne’s presentation on open source publishing, for which I assume she’s using a BSD platform given her authorial bent.

Dario Banno and Matthias Schmidt have both been doing a lot of cleanup work on the version of the Handbook contained in the wiki. I want to point out the work they are doing because it’s helpful, and also because it’s possible for anyone else to contribute to this. If you’ve been feeling an itch to do something, here’s your chance to contribute to DragonFly with only a few seconds of labor.

Matthew Dillon wrote an update on the state of HAMMER, and what remains to complete.  (summary: not too much)  He also wrote out some explanation of the balancing code, and the ‘spikes’ used for cluster expansion.

Matthew Dillon wants the 2.0 release of DragonFly to include HAMMER, so 2.0 won’t be ready until HAMMER’s ready too. This may mean a delay of the usual 6-month release to February.

In the meantime, the Preview tag has been moved up, for those folks following nearly bleeding-edge code.

Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer (we’ve had a lot lately!): Nuno Antunes.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s dri/drm update has a followup; you will need to update your sources to try it.  Other people (who have been reporting success) have some other tips.

Peter Avalos, in reply to a question from ‘walt’, has pointed out that DragonFly is available via git on repo.or.cz, though it’s infrequently updated.

Max Herrgard has been cleaning up bug reports on bugs.dragonflybsd.org. (Thanks, Max!) Please contribute, as many of these reports just need someone to mark them closed.

If there’s a report from you on there, make sure it’s up to date, too. It would be helpful to clean up as much as possible before the next release.

New ones are popping up everywhere!  Our newest committer: Aggelos Economopoulos.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has done what we’ve been needing for a long time: an update for DRI/DRM. That’s 3D support in X Windows, for those who aren’t familiar with the acronyms. His note contains extensive instructions for testing this update; give it a whirl and report back so it can get in the tree.

Astute reader ”Yair K.” sent along links to two things:

There is work being done on a “user-mode NetBSD“, which sounds quite similar to DragonFly’s vkernel(7) system.

4Front Technologies has placed their Open Sound System (discussed previously) under a BSD license, removing what I think was the only obstacle to using it in DragonFly and other BSDs.  A press release is out, too.

I didn’t know this existed: there’s an official OpenBSD non-profit that’s been created to handle donations.  (via)  There’s one for FreeBSD and NetBSD, so perhaps DragonFly should follow suit?

The first BSDTalk of the new year is here, with Marten Vijn about Open Community Camp, a camping/geekout event in the Netherlands being held August 2008.

The call for papers for CONFidence 2008 is out, with papers due February 1st. (via undeadly)

FOSDEM 2008,  the “Free and Open Source software Developers’ European Meeting”, is happening February 23-24th, in Brussels, Belgium.  There will be a BSD-specific room, for which we could use a DragonFly presence.  Also: beer.  (via FreeBSD-announce)

The Best of FreeBSD Basics is out now on Amazon and perhaps elsewhere, containing much (all?) of Dru Lavigne’s column of the same name from OnLAMP.com. It says ‘FreeBSD’ in the title, but I’d expect everything that isn’t ports-specific will apply to every BSD. Her columns are clear and to the point.

Other factoids:

• A portion of the book’s proceeds are going to the BSD Certification Group.
• Dru Lavigne is also the author of O’Reilly’s BSD Hacks.
• The publisher of this book, Reed Media Services, is Jeremy C. Reed, a contributor to pkgsrc and DragonFly.

Matthew Dillon wrote an update for the state of HAMMER, the new file system for DragonFly. It’s at the point where historical data can retrieved even after data is deleted, though it’s not stable yet. The most recent commit notes an interesting upcoming feature idea: historical atime and mtime tracking.