James Frazer sent along a new site design for dragonflybsd.org; I’ve got an example of it hosted locally. Mailing list discussion starts here, and of course comments are welcome.

NASPRO, a sound processing framework, recently had a 0.1.0 release – it works ‘out of the box’ on DragonFly.

BSDTalk 151 has Sean Cody of Frantic Films, a visual effects studio spread over the North American continent, who details his use of BSD at home and at the office.  They apparently sling about a huge amount of data.

Vkernels on leaf.dragonflybsd.org are now able to locally network; if you are a Google Summer of Code student that needs that functionality, tell Matthew Dillon and he will put you in the right group.

In addition, he’s created a new tool called vknetd, which enables network creation in userland. This is intended for userland applications like vkernels, though there seems to be some capability for a SSH-based VPN? Someone correct me – or better yet, try it out.

I have a number of small things, mostly old-school games, to post, so I’ll break out the bullets:

• Temple of the Roguelike has some links to roguelike applets; they need Java.
• Rob Beschizza asks on Boing Boing Gadgets, “Who’d like a portable text game console?” Me? Of course, running a BSD on a handheld (NetBSD is the most obvious choice) will get you that free.
• Parchment, a z-machine implemented in Javascript. You can play many free text games or dig up Infocom games. (via)
• Everyone has Big Kernel Lock troubles – everyone!
• The howling void has a post on “Smartphones for text SSH use” – an interesting idea, and there are some good suggestions interspersed with the bickering in the comments.
• Hubert Feyrer found an interesting thing: DracoPKG – a combination of pkgsrc and Slackware’s pkgtools.

There’s a bounty for fixing up the Linuxulator; bringing it up to match FreeBSD-current’s state will net you €250. If you want to contribute to the bounty, write your sum into the page. If you want to do the update, volunteer. (There’s already one interested person.)

As Dru Lavigne reports, the May issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on “Enterprise Readness”. I found the article on the need for project management in open source very interesting.

DragonFly hasn’t worked under VirtualBox for a long time. Several people found a cause, though not the reason for it – yet.

This question at the howling void about donating to open source projects (in this case, DesktopBSD) got me thinking. I’ve been meaning to investigate setting up a DragonFly nonprofit similar to FreeBSD and NetBSD‘s foundation efforts, in order to receive donations and have a legal entity. Anyone have experience with setting up a 501(c)3 company?

Christian Sturm put together a DragonFly mirror stats script; the script connects to and graphs the how reachable each mirror site is. Nifty!

Louisa Luciani, one of the Google Summer of Code students for DragonFly, wants to hear what people want on a LiveCD. Suggestions by email, please, though some discussion ensued anyway.

Nirmal Thacker, another SoC student, asked some questions to prepare for his anticipatory scheduler work, which incidentally led to some good links for comparing or reviewing existing FreeBSD/DragonFly code.

Some notes from BSDCan attendees have popped up. There’s pictures, too. Any other stories?

BSDTalk has made it to the semicentennial milestone of 150 podcasts, with number 150 being Alex Feldman from Sangoma.

Everybody welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Michael Neumann.

I’m breaking out the bullet points again:

• The NetBSD on a Stick idea looks interesting, in part because it’s a complete tiny system and in part because I like the name. (Via)
• The most recent @Play column draws a line between roguelike games and Dungeons and Dragons. Fun reading, if you’re the right kind of geek, or even just the right age. I think I might have to play me some Angband again.
• Oh, while talking about roguelikes: this Strafe Left cartoon. I like “sleeping zombie”.
• Also, this Procedural Content Generation wiki from an Angband variant creator. (via)
• Wow, that’s a nice gift for Perl development! (via)

It’s from back in March, but this Ars Technica article on filesystems does a pretty good job of historical coverage, though it’s doesn’t go very far into the technical specifications.

Matthew Dillon’s latest report on the state of HAMMER mentions the filesystem’s growing resilience to damage.

William Backman, that lucky guy, is at BSDCan right now. He’s also got a new interview up on BSDTalk with Justin Gibbs of the FreeBSD Foundation.

A recent ACM paper, “A Tale of Four Kernels” compares FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel in terms of code style and structure. The paper itself has a lot of blibber blabber, but it’s interesting to compare the code statistics between the different kernel types. I’d like to see a comparison between different BSD kernels; the gap between the Windows Research Kernel and Linux, for instance, is too great to be able to draw very concrete solutions. (via)

Mark Shuttleworth, the wallet behind Ubuntu, described on his blog a desire to see major Linux distributions on a common release schedule, so that major releases of associated software can match up. (via) This would be useful for the BSD world, too, though it doesn’t affect BSD releases as dramatically – Linux distributions are more important for what third-party software they handle than anything else, so their release timing is even more critical.

The various BSDs seem to be moving towards a 6-month release schedule, in any case – that’s
the stated goal for OpenBSD and DragonFly, and hopefully someone knows (please comment if you’re that someone) if there’s a known goal for NetBSD or FreeBSD.

Matthew Dillon posted a summary of work for HAMMER, noting that the last major (known) bug for undo operations is squished.  Testing is desired; please, won’t someone mangle their filesystem for the benefit of science?

Developers and Google Summer of Code students wanting to develop on leaf.dragonflybsd.org have two scripts available now for running virtual kernels. Userland networking is available as a private network, for now.

I have a number of HAMMER-related news items, so I’ll break out the bullet points:

• We have a detailed explanation of how HAMMER’s pruning system will work – follow the thread for more details and ideas.
• Matthew Dillon is trying HAMMER for his backup system. His original UFS system used hardlinks to keep all the backups together; the inodes used would be more than fsck could handle with that system’s RAM. HAMMER doesn’t need those hardlinks because of the snapshot ability, and completes the backup process much faster.
• There’s also blogbench numbers comparing UFS and HAMMER; strangely, UFS sees a performance degradation when using a large number of files when HAMMER does not. This may mean a real speed advantage or a testing anomaly; it certainly deserves investigation.

We have a page up for the AMD64 port and another for DMA enhancement. I’ve asked all the students involved to create pages, so as they finish exams, I expect more summaries to arrive.

Matthew Dillon is setting up leaf.dragonflybsd.org to support vkernels, for Google Summer of Code students that are doing kernel work. Mail Matthew with your public key and desired username if you need an account.

One of the big wins for BSD has been the packaging system.  It’s very easy to use ports or pkgsrc to download all the dependencies for a given application automatically, and even Linux tools like yum or apt-get handle this nowadays.

Ruby, Perl, Python, and etc. have the disadvantage that if you write a interpreted script that uses libraries not in the standard distribution of that language, users of that script need to perform additional software installation, assuming they have access to do so, just to run that script.  This is a major disadvantage compared to “compiled” software.  To overcome this, additional steps that turn the script and needed libraries into a single executable are required.

‘_why the lucky stiff’ has a solution that matches: Shoes, a Ruby GUI toolkit, goes and gets any needed libraries as part of its startup process. Why didn’t someone think of this 10 years ago so that it could be commonplace?

Dru Lavigne has news of the OSS Census now supporting BSD systems for counting; it’s good to participate and provide evidence of the number of BSD users out there.

She also has one of her infrequent but useful link posts up; check it and find more to read.

Google’s reporting that Unicode is finally becoming more popular than ASCII. This news is probably of most interest to non-English speakers, but it’s a good thing. How is DragonFly’s Unicode support – can someone comment? (Via)

I posted a little about this before, but here’s more prompted by several people mentioning it: a seekdir() bug found and fixed by Marc Balmer is apparently present in all BSDs, going back at least 25 years. 25 years! That’s older than some of you reading this post. His blog post delivers a very nice summary. (Thanks, Undeadly, Richard, Nega)

This Perl Buzz post talks about improving the perception and use of Perl, one of my favorite languages. I link to it in part because it’s well written, but also to suggest something: read the article, and substitute “BSD” everywhere you read “Perl”. The same suggestions apply.

The prime motivator for this digest was providing more of an atmosphere for DragonFly, and to some extent for the idea of BSD itself. Lots of people aspire to be a BSD developer/committer, when really what we need is someone having a conversation that involves BSD.

zsh is one of those things that people always describe as a best version of something, like cvs vs. git or vi vs. vim (or BSD vs. Linux?). Philip Paeps has a lengthy blog writeup of his experience trying zsh. (via)

There’s a new BSD forum site, called DaemonForums. Looking at the comments, it appears to be a replacement for the now-unmaintained BSDForums.(Via)

Samuel J. Greear did an informal comparison of zip, gzip, bzip2, and 7zip, comparing compression ratio and compression time. 7zip looks pretty good, though testing it on some more varied file types and sizes would be in order.

Martin Schütte is updating syslog (there’s an IETF standard for it, which I did not know) for one of NetBSD’s Google Summer of Code projects; he very kindly posted links to it on the DragonFly users@ list in the hopes that it could benefit DragonFly’s syslogd too.

Marc Balmer of OpenBSD posted about a cross-BSD bug in seekdir()/readdir(); a fix is forthcoming.

This week’s 16-minute BSDTalk episode has Jeremy White of CodeWeavers, the company that releases the Wine-based CrossOver products. They’re now experimenting with BSD versions of their software – specifically, for FreeBSD/PC-BSD.

Wine is coming up on a 1.0 release, which may or may not be coincidental. I recall there was some issues with getting Wine to work on DragonFly; can someone confirm or deny that?

Robert Luciani asked a question I’ve wondered about before: how do you limit bandwidth using pf? Matthew Dillon had some ideas.