BSDCan 2010, coming up the 13th-14th of May, has put out the call for papers. The website says proposals start December 19th, but I suppose that’s just the day you start handing them in.
Month: November 2009
BSDTalk: OpenBSD enthusiast Girish Venkatachalam
BSDTalk episode 180 is a 25-minute conversation with Girish Venkatachalam about … stuff. (I am posting before listening.)
11/29/2009
Thunderbird update
Thunderbird, in pkgsrc, has been updated to version 3. This means that if you don’t want to make the upgrade right yet, you’ll want to follow mail/thunderbird2. This won’t affect binary package users until the next quarterly release.
11/28/2009
First step to linuxulator improvement
Alex Hornung pointed out that getting the Linux Test Project to work on DragonFly (using the linuxulator) would be a very helpful step in that same Linux emulation. Running the LTP does not require programming skills, incidentally.
2.5 pkgsrc builds
Updated pkgsrc-2009Q3 packages for DragonFly 2.5, for i386 and for x86_64 are available.
11/26/2009
New committer: Antonio Huete Jimenez
Welcome DragonFly’s newest developer with commit access: Antonio Huete Jimenez, also known as ‘tuxillo’ on EFNet #dragonflybsd via IRC.
11/24/2009
Death of a contributor
Jon Birrell, a contributor to a number of BSD projects (primarily FreeBSD), has died. His friend and coworker Craig Rodrigues has posted a notice about his death, along with some memories. It’s always awful when someone dies, but it always strikes me about how when an open source contributor dies, it’s noticed, quietly, worldwide.
11/23/2009
New i386 2.4 DragonFly build for pkgsrc-2009Q3
That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? There’s a fresh build of pkgsrc packages for 32-bit DragonFly 2.4, from pkgsrc-2009Q3, on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Utilities like pkg_radd should find it automatically. New builds for i386 2.5 and 64-bit 2.5 are on the way. (though pkgsrc packages built on 2.4 should work fine on 2.5.)
11/19/2009
More links again
I like linkblogging, especially because there’s been a lot of good stuff floating about:
- Matthew Dillon detailed some of the problems he had using hardlinks to create backups – problems Hammer solves.
- The History of the Internet in a Nutshell: pretty good, though it says Unix “influenced” Linux and FreeBSD. Influenced is right for Linux, but there’s parts of the different BSDs that are from UNIX directly.
- From O’Reilly: The War for the Web. The walled garden that failed in the long run for Compuserve and AOL and so on is being resurrected. (via)
- Along the same lines: The Death of the URL.
Accessing Hammer config via NFS
Thomas Nikolajsen came up with some ideas for making the configuration files for a given Hammer volume accessible, even when that volume is being presented over NFS. He’s looking for more ideas.
11/16/2009
Default SSH change
SSH, on DragonFly, now defaults to allowing root logins, but does not allow plaintext password logins. This is on new installs only, so any existing installations won’t be affected, even after upgrades. Plaintext passwords are under constant brute-force attack for some years now, so this is probably safer.
11/15/2009
Notes on unprivileged building
YONETANI Tomokazu wrote up a nice bit of explanation about compiling src and pkgsrc as non-root. He even explicitly names some useful variables to set.
Progress with clang
Several people have been working on having DragonFly compile with clang. Alex Hornung’s updated the clang page on the DragonFly site for details; if this interests you, a conversation on EFNet #dragonflybsd may be in order.
11/14/2009
pkgin, in
Sascha Wildner has added pkgin to the base DragonFly system. It’s still present as a pkgsrc package, so it’s manageable and upgradeable with the normal pkg_* tools. See prior discussion here for the history.
More less
Did I already make that joke? Oh well. less has been updated to version 4.3.6 from a patch by Jan Lentfer.
11/13/2009
A few more things
Linkbloggy, briefly:
- A view of Bell Labs, where that other Unix flavor came from, in the 1960s. (via) Best sideburns ever.
- IRC, as explained by American prime time television. (YouToooob, via) Remember, #dragonflybsd is available on EFNet.
- Stallman, Torvalds, and Knuth walk into a bar… (via)
11/12/2009
Text Game history
The National Center for the History of Electronic Games is looking for tangible artifacts having to do with old text-based games, like Adventure or Zork. The article includes some history, too.
(This place is in my town, and it’s eye-bleedingly awesome. I predict that a few years from now, when people realize what this is, it will become a game history Mecca along the lines of PAX.)
Algorithms algorithms algorithms
This blog post from Peteris Krumins lists all the publicly available Introduction to Algorithms lectures from MIT, and links to his summary for each, so you can find out what it’s like before investing in over an hour of lecture. Very specific but very valuable stuff.
11/11/2009
Socket changes
Matthew Dillon is making some changes to sockets; these should make the code significantly more simple. Look at the first patch, for instance.
New 2.5/i386 packages
There’s a new set of pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.5.x, i386, built using pkgsrc-2009Q3. Using pkg_radd will get them for you.
11/10/2009
Small undo fix
If anyone wants a project, there’s apparently a small undo bug that I’ve encountered. It is a small fix in terms of changes, for any takers.
Hammer version 4 status
There’s a status report from Matthew Dillon about his work on version 4 of Hammer, including the always enjoyable stories of tests that involve yanking the SATA cable from the drive.
BIND update for testing
Jan Lentfer has put together a test upgrade of BIND in the base system from 9.3 to 9.5.2. Give it a test run, especially if you are on 64-bit DragonFly.
11/09/2009
Tips for git
Saifi Khan asked some questions about using git; I link to two sets of answers, because these little things are useful when you are starting with git. Or, in my case, don’t use it frequently enough to remember.
OpenSSL updated
OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8l by Aggelos Economopoulos; this fixes a security vulnerability. The update is available for 2.4.1 and 2.5 – update to get it.
11/08/2009
Messylaneous for 2009/11/07
Where I get more linkbloggy than usual:
- According to the 5th slide in this presentation, Android’s libc, “Bionic”, is BSD-derived. Anyone know which BSD? It looks like “whatever” is the answer.
- There’s a video out about BSD Certification.
- Hubert Feyrer has a note about NetBSD’s not-necessarily-intended moves towards a microkernel architecture. Other “move things to userland” steps have happened in DragonFly; it seems a trend.
- Giorgos Keramidas talks about font substitution in Firefox. This should work on any platform.
- Vim plugins: a.vim lets you switch between .c and .h files with a single command.
- I should have linked to this yesterday: Epitome, a “deduplication engine” for OpenBSD, was mentioned a bit in the most recent BSDTalk. (via)
- Gopher: not dead yet. (also via)
11/07/2009
BSDCan 2010: May 13-14
BSDCan 2010 will be May 13th and 14th in Ottawa, Canada, with 2 days of classes beforehand. Maybe I’ll actually make it this year, like I wish every time…
pkg_rr extensions for the net-challenged
If you are often offline – voluntarily or involuntarily – there’s some changes coming to pkg_rolling-replace to deal with spotty online access.
Using NVIDIA on DragonFly
This has been around for a while, but I’m re-mentioning it because it’s not really linked anywhere: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA video driver that should work on DragonFly: http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/~corecode/nvidia.git. It should be possible to clone from that link, build the code, and use it. (Untested by me – if you’ve done it, some explicit instructions would be helpful to others.)
11/06/2009
It’s x86_64 now, not amd64
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has changed 64-bit DragonFly to be tagged “x86_64″ instead of “amd64″. It seems most other operating systems use that for 64-bit system architechure names. So does pkgsrc, which may fix some recent builds on amd64 x86_64
BSDTalk 179: Jacek Masiulaniec on OpenSMTPd, Epitome
OpenBSD developer Jacek Masiulaniec gets 14 minutes of airtime in the most recent BSDTalk podcast.
11/05/2009
ACPI update soon
Alexander Polakov has a further update for his new ACPI code. He now even provides a DragonFly ISO image and USB image so that a new system can be installed for testing. There’s already one positive report. It will probably go in this weekend.
More parallelism tests: NCPUs + 1 still
Saifi Khan ran Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s make parallelism test on a dual-cpu system, and the theory holds up: ‘make -j N’ where N == the number of CPUs, plus 1, will give the fastest build time. (graphed again!)
11/04/2009
BSD working survey
If you use any sort of BSD product at work, the BSD Certification group wants you to take a survey. They are building a cross section of what people are doing with BSD, and this will show what requirements should go with the certifications. Any BSD use applies, not just DragonFly. The more results, the better the tests, and the more value to the certifications, so we all benefit.
SMP tests
Do you have a SMP system, running DragonFly 2.5? Stathis Kamperis needs you to test something, to see if another set of system calls can be made multiprocessor-safe.
Update: An additional step.
11/03/2009
AHCI + DVD fix
If you’ve previously had problems in DragonFly with AHCI and a DVD drive, there’s a potential fix available.
11/01/2009
OSBR: Co-creation part 1
The first one of the Open Source Business Resource Co-Creation issues is out. Read this if any of the open source software you use has a commercial component. (Chances are, yes, it does.)
Ghostscript variants going away
The pkgsrc packages ghostscript6 and ghostscript-esp are probably going to be removed. Do `pkg_info | grep ghostscript` to see if this affects you.
Language fixes
Any readers involved with Python source? There’s two extant Python patches that Hasso Tepper put together for Python 2.5 and 2.4, languishing.
On a more positive note, an upstream fix for Perl was added promptly.
