The latest @Play column on GameSetWatch talks about something I didn’t know existed: a NetHack tournament. Given NetHack’s difficulty, the scores it describes are insane.
Month: October 2008
New SoC
I don’t recall if I mentioned this before, but the Google Summer of Code software (the part that Google manages) is now an open source project, for anyone to participate in. If and when DragonFly participates next year, this application is how it will be managed.
10/29/2008
DRM update to test
Hasso Tepper has posted a patch that brings DRM code in DragonFly to the very latest version, right out of the DRM repository. Give it a try; it adds support for a number of recent chipsets that may have only worked poorly before.
clisp and pkgmanager warning
“Rumko” found that after upgrading clisp to version 2.47, pkgmanager stopped working for him. Watch out if you’ve been using pkgmanager to handle pkgsrc.
10/28/2008
Musical digression
On an entirely personal note, I was having a conversation with my coworkers today about the change in technology within my lifetime; when I was young, there was no world wide web, no digital music, no timeshifting of TV programs, etc. etc. My workplace has an intern young enough to have never encountered these things.
Now, I noticed this musicmaking tutorial on Youtube. In 1985, this would have been done in a room filled with electronics, probably hand-built, with cabling run all over the place. Now, the software that accomplishes that, with a single computer, is expressly designed to simulate those old analog connections. It’s very wierd, and probably meaningless to those under 30.
Also, yay dubstep.
Git AND Mercurial
The discussion over Git vs. Mercurial continues; Jeffrey Hsu has even volunteered himself to maintain and synchronize the two repositories. He also pointed out that there is precedent for this already: the git-using Linux kernel work has a Mercurial mirror.
10/27/2008
Another installation story
Via Google, I found this Linux blog where the author installs DragonFly vith the new LiveCD; his install stops probably because of network issues, but it’s worth looking at just because you get to see a screenshot of the very pretty desktop wallpaper used on the LiveCD.
More Git vs. Mercurial
Matthew Dillon’s posted the results of the Git vs. Mercurial voting, which worked out to an even tie. (Darnit, I didn’t think to vote!) He’s posted a followup, proposing to make both available.
Also, discussion of Git vs. Mercurial for DragonFly spread to comp.version-control.git, which led to a very technical and surprisingly even-handed (for the Internet) discussion of the virtues of each program. (via Hasso Tepper in EFNet #dragonflybsd)
10/26/2008
Hammer slides available
Thomas Nikolajsen just noticed (I missed it) that Matthew Dillon’s Hammer slides from NYCBSDCon 2008 are now available on the Hammer page.
Voting complete on source control
“Voting” is closed on the source control system question; the immediate result is that people could use both Git and Mercurial read-only repositories, since both systems have a lot of users.
10/25/2008
FSOSS writeups
Dru Lavigne went to the Free Software and Open Source Symposium in Toronto; she has writeups from every session she attended:
- CSIA and Copyright Policy
- Komodo: Making Proprietary Products Open Source
- Teaching Open Source: Community’s Perspective
- Teaching Open Source: Next Steps
- Enabling Healthy Open Source Communities
- The Convergence of Open Access and Open Source
- Creative Commons and Creative Copyright Licensing
- Innovation in Open Source Development
- Subverting Proprietary Economics
- Community Building and the Architecture of Participation
10/24/2008
More NYCBSDCon wrapup
Part 2 (Sunday) of Will Backman’s NYCBSDCon2008 summary is now up. (Part 1, if you missed it.)
More Tux3 conversations
Daniel Phillips has posted again about his Tux3 work, with some more conversation. He and Matthew Dillon have been comparing filesystem notes, since they are working on (separate) filesystem projects – see previous posts for details.
10/23/2008
Automatic Hammer cleanup
Sascha Wildner’s added a periodic(8) script to run ‘hammer cleanup’, a much-desired (by me) feature for Hammer filesystems. See the hammer(8) man page for details.
MeetBSD coming up
MeetBSD is happening at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, November 15th and 16th. It sounds like quite a party!
10/22/2008
More Broadcom support
Sepherosa Ziehau’s added support for the Broadcom 5906/5906M chipset(s?) to the bge(4) driver.
Git or Mercurial?
Matthew Dillon’s collecting opinions on what source control system DragonFly should move to; the two ‘finalists’ are Git and Mercurial, though other suggestions are welcome. There’s already a lot of people that have spoken up; I count 11 for git and 8 for mercurial so far.
10/21/2008
Another pile of links
I love these.
- A new issue of the OSBR: “Building Community“. (via)
- Android is out as Open Source (Apache license), seen many places.
- The latest @Play column about roguelikes: “Much About Monstania“
- Interesting to me: another “Perl on Rails“.
- Heise has an article about Linux’s ext4 and its segue into btrfs, which has been mentioned here before in contrast to Hammer. (via)
- While talking about the howling void, there’s a post there about Git vs. Subversion. Matthew Dillon is in there asking about opinions on Git vs. Mercurial, for use with DragonFly.
- The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System*, an oldie but goodie.
sensorsd(8) synced
Hasso Tepper has synced sensorsd(8), the sensor framework in DragonFly, with the latest version in OpenBSD.
Reconnoiter through serendipity
I think I stumbled on this while looking at NYCBSDCon sponsors: Reconnoiter is a network monitoring application that is designed to monitor very large networks. It was started on OpenBSD, and works on a number of operating systems. Interesting for multiple reasons.
10/20/2008
EuroBSDCon audio, images
EuroBSDCon 2008 just concluded in Strasbourg, France. Audio (pick Formation: EuroBSDCon) and pictures from the talks are now available; check out Constantine Murenin;s talk on the OpenBSD sensors framework, as DragonFly shares that code. (via Hasso Tepper on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
10/19/2008
Support for kqueue in Hammer
Matthew Dillon’s added support for kqueue in Hammer; as part of that, he’s added a new ‘monitor‘ utility. If you’re curious about what kqueue is, look at the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Mac OS X versions. Edit: and of course, the DragonFly version.
RealTek network support updated
Hardware checksum support has been added to the re(4) (RealTek) driver by Sepherosa Ziehau, for the 8102E, 8102EL, 8168C, 8168CP and 8168D chipsets. He’s been committing a lot of other work too – this was just the easiest to summarize.
Resummarizing good links
The OpenBSD Journal has a number of interesting news items, so I’m just going to list the links and titles of each. All worth reading.
- Cross-site request forgery via ftpd(8) – don’t know if this is present in DragonFly or not
- OpenGL has been relicensed
- Will Backman’s Day 1 summary for NYCBSDCon
- Ian Darwin talks about getting OpenBSD on a ‘netbook’ – I still want one of these little laptops, even though I don’t need it.
10/18/2008
Laptops made cooler
Hasso Tepper, who has been committing a number of laptop-related fixes lately, has added a page to the DragonFly wiki with some tips on how to reduce power usage and heat on your DragonFly laptop.
Windows 7 undetails
I don’t normally link to Windows-bashing here for various reasons, but this parody of Windows 7 is darn good.
10/17/2008
AsiaBSDCon 2009 Call for Papers
The Call For Papers for AsiaBSDCon 2009 is out. It’s being held in Tokyo, the 12th to 15th of March.
Hammer on a new install
Both Matthias Schmidt and Sascha Wildner drew attention to a rconfig(8) script now in DragonFly 2.1 that, when used off a LiveCD (and modified for any differences in disk setup) will create a UFS /boot and a Hammer /everything-else.
More DragonFly tips
Matthias Schmidt has added a number of DragonFly-specific tips to the fortune file; these will be visible on login or if you run fortune dragonfly-tips (on a bleeding edge system, of course)
10/16/2008
More DNSSEC work
As mentioned previously, DragonFly’s included BIND could use the ability to be compiled with DNSSEC support, after Jeremy C. Reed’s DNSSEC presentation at NYCBSDCon. (.mp3) Jeremy’s kindly provided a patch for just that.
BSD vs. GPL presentation
The other presentations from NYCBSDCon are not yet online, but Jason Dixon’s “BSD vs. GPL” is available now on his site as an mp4 file and also at Google Video. (via comments here)
10/15/2008
Realtek 8101E and HEAD users, please help
Do you have a Realtek 8101E card? Are you running bleeding edge DragonFly? If so, Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to test out his recent changes.
Hammer on other platforms
Edwin Groothuis pointed out in a blog post that FreeBSD’s ino_t type being 32 bit, not 64 bit, was a major obstacle to having Hammer on FreeBSD. He also noted that there’s some work that may change that.
Parsing utrace(2) entries
Hasso Tepper has added (based on this FreeBSD work) the ability to “parse the utrace(2) entries generated by malloc(3) in a more human-readable format”.
10/13/2008
Post NYCBSDCon
The audio from NYCBSDCon presentations is available thanks to Nikolai Fetissov. Matthew Dillon’s Hammer presentation audio is available, along with others. I’ll link to the video/slides as soon as they are available. An idea of what Jason Dixon’s “BSD versus GPL” (,mp3) may be like as video can be gleaned from his previous work: BSD is Dying (Google Video, via).
Matthew Dillon also points out on his return from NYCBSDCon that some of the funding behind various BSD projects and developers comes from the financial institutions melting down recently; DragonFly is, luckily, unaffected.
(my IRA lost “only” 15% on Friday. Yeesh.)
More time
Sascha Wildner is updating DragonFly to tzcode2008g, which will modernize our time system, along with making 64-bit time_t possible. It also apparently fixes a recently reported problem in Python. Sascha links to this time page in his message, with more time zone link information than ever I’ve seen.
Oh, and Sascha updated timezone data, too.
10/12/2008
BSDTalk 161: More NYCBSDCon
BSDTalk 161 has 25 minutes of streamed audio from Sunday’s NYCBSDCon session.
BSDTalk 160 – Lots of NYCBSDCon
BSDTalk 160 is a longer-than-usual 40 minutes of audio right from NYCBSDCon. An interesting listen, especially if like me you wanted to go, but didn’t. (Stupid expensive NYC hotels…)
10/11/2008
Building BIND differently
Apparently the version of BIND that comes with DragonFly is not built with support for DNSSEC. Matt Dillon posted from NYCBSDCon noting that, after hearing Jeremy C. Reed’s “Introduction to DNSSEC” presentation, maybe we should. Peter Avalos has a different argument: why bundle BIND at all?
10/09/2008
Easy PFS slave creation
Matthew has a small project for anyone who wants it: automatic creation of slaved pseudo file systems, for mirroring. Do this, and you make everyone’s life easier.
Don’t continue
Matthew Dillon warns that there is a relatively unlikely chance of a crash with Hammer committing bad data to disk if you ‘continue’ in the debugger. Don’t do that, for now; it will be fixed soon.
10/08/2008
25c3 visits
Mattias Schmidt, Sascha Wildner, and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert are all going to the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin – speak up if you’re going too.
10/07/2008
Roguelikes gone international
Did you know there was a “Berlin International Roguelike Development Conference 2008“? Me neither, but there’s video to prove it. (via)
Today is apparently crazy links day.
Sysadmin’s Rosetta Stone
I find this strangely useful: a listing of equivalent concepts and commands, across a wide variety of Unix-ish systems. Be prepared to scroll, and make sure to check the extra links at the bottom. (via)
Power strip deal
I don’t normally link to things like this, but these are useful: Woot! is running a special on a 2-pack of 5-outlet Power Squids. (Sorry, non-120v-3-prong European readers; won’t help you much…) Today only, like most Woot! specials.
10/06/2008
pkgsrc results ever improving
Hasso Tepper’s continued to post better and better bulk build results from pkgsrc, and has more patches on the way for when the 2008Q3 release is done.
10/05/2008
Wierd ssh bug fixed
Hasso Tepper brought in a fix from OpenBSD for ssh; apparently empty banners on some types of network equipment would cause a disconnect. This isn’t major, but there may just be someone out there reading this for whom knowing about that saves a lot of frustration.
OSBR: A census and tools
This entry on the OSBR blog links to the recent results of the OpenLogic open source survey. It also mentions some “free software for non-free platform” bundles that I hadn’t heard of, like OpenDisc and OSSWin.
10/03/2008
DragonFly, threading, and a thesis
Robert Luciani’s EuroBSDCon bachelor’s thesis presentation on DragonFly’s threading model is available as a PDF. (anyone have a mirror? That link is intermittent.) Previous versions have been linked here before.
BSDTalk 159: Kris Moore and PC-BSD
The latest 12-minute BSDTalk has an interview with Kris Moore, one of the folks involved in PC-BSD. Version 7 of PC-BSD was just released.
10/02/2008
Two old-school game links
The most recent @Play article talks about Legerdemain, a cross between roguelikes and old-style RPGs like Ultima. It’s old school twice over.
The entries in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition are all available. (Think Infocom-style games.) (via)
10/01/2008
Hasso adds a lot
Hasso Tepper has committed Sascha Wildner’s port of FreeBSD’s devinfo(3) and devinfo(8), for “userspace access to the internal device hierarchy”. Hasso also updated acpi_battery(4), for battery monitoring.
He’s also ported devd(8) from FreeBSD, with an inital patch for testing.
