DragonFly BSD Digest

Release schedule shifts

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:29:17 +0000

Matthew Dillon is shifting the semiannual release schedule over by two months; new releases of DragonFly will happen in March and September. The current July-December releases hit right on major (U.S.) holidays and too close to quarterly pkgsrc releases.

The message linked above also contains a list of the surprisingly large quantity of work that will go into the next release, plus some details on booting strategies going forward.

2.3.1 packages on the way

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:36:43 +0000

I’m copying pkgsrc packages to avalon.dragonflybsd.org that were built on a 2.3.1 DragonFly system; if you’re running a 2.3.1 or more recent DragonFly setup, pkg_radd should pull right from this, once the 8G of files finish copying over.

GSoC: Midterms!

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:50:40 +0000

The Google Summer of Code midterms are almost upon us. Starting July 6th (that’s next Monday), students and mentors will need to fill out a survey detailing how the project is going. There’s a preliminary version at Google Docs, so you know what to expect when they go up on the GSoC site. They will have to be completed by the 13th.

If you’re a student: make sure you have code that shows progress. If you’re behind schedule, cram.

If you’re a mentor: make sure you are aware of your student’s progress. If the student’s behind schedule, help them cram.

First Ethernet cable ever

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:06:27 +0000

From Xerox PARC: The first Ethernet cable, plus diagrams from Bob Metcalfe.

New installation option

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:41:44 +0000

Sascha Wildner has added an option to the installer to create a UFS boot and Hammer volume as an install disk, in addition to the all-Hammer and all-UFS options already available. Programs expecting the booting kernel to be on UFS will be able to find it, but users still get the benefits of Hammer.

Updated: It replaces the all-Hammer option. Thanks for the correction, Sascha!

New Hammer version

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:33:17 +0000

Matthew Dillon has a new version of Hammer, which speeds up listings from programs like ‘ls -la’ and ‘find’. This is only in 2.3.1.x code right now, so don’t force an upgrade via hammer version-upgrade if you’re still on DragonFly 2.2. His post includes some benchmarks.

On a side note: sili(4) tests look good.

Other ways to back up Hammer

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:43:24 +0000

As Jim Chapman found out, dump only works for UFS, and not for Hammer. Matthew Dillon outlined the different mirroring and snapshot methods that Hammer makes available.

New keyboard layout possible

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:39:59 +0000

I’ve heard of Dvorak keyboard layouts, but I didn’t know there’s another, called Colemak. Sascha Wildner has committed a patch from Geert Hendrickx which makes Colemak layouts available on DragonFly.

Disks done differently

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:00:02 +0000

Matthew Dillon has changed the way USB flash drives are attached, to make sure they don’t interfere with AHCI-attached disks. This is temporary, and will be replaced by a dynamic /dev.

More news, more articles

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:49:34 +0000

Dru Lavigne is going to be doing blogging/tweeting for the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation. This is a good thing - BSD in general is helped by more of a conversation about what’s going on. I daresay this Digest has established that there’s definitely enough events, just with DragonFly, for daily news.

Also, Dru’s published summaries of the articles in the upcoming July ‘Collaboration’ issue of the Open Source Business Resource.

SoC: Mentor Summit

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:39:01 +0000

Gleaned from the SoC mailing lists: the tenative dates for the 2009 Mentor Summit for the Google Summer of Code program is October 24th and 25th. Where? Probably Mountain View, CA.

@Play: Fatal Labyrinth

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:25:52 +0000

This time, it’s what happens when you take Rogue, export it to Japan, and then see what you get back as a Sega Genesis console game.

I had no idea there were so many permutations of roguelike games. A few years ago, I’d have listed rogue, nethack, moria, [zmw]angband, and ADOM, and felt like I covered it all.

BSDTalk 175 - Michael Dexter and BSDFund

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:42:45 +0000

BSDTalk 175 (the semidemibicentennial?) has a 23 minute interview with Michael Dexter of BSD Fund. Did you know you can get a BSD Fund Visa card (if you are a U.S. resident) that contributes money on each purchase and has a beastie on the card? I did not.

Mirroring with Hammer

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:53:50 +0000

Siju George described his efforts to set up a continuous, automatic backup system using Hammer, with some interesting results. Matthew Dillon chimed in with some suggestions.

One more driver?

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:43:19 +0000

Matthew Dillon is looking for one more driver to build to complement the AHCI and Sili drivers. There’s several suggestions already.

BSD Magazine, free

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:23:28 +0000

The whole OpenBSD-focused issue of BSD Magazine is available online as a PDF, plus some other articles from the NetBSD issue. (via)

Topics to write about

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:49:31 +0000

The list of monthly topics for the Open Source Business Resource have been published. The list runs through the end of the year. If one of the topics is something you’re interested in, here’s your chance to get published!

Minor Hammer changes

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:02:13 +0000

Matthew Dillon’s made some small changes to Hammer; it should result in a small speedup when copying data.

The best way to do open source.

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:54:43 +0000

It’s the weekend, so it’s a good time for a digression. This blog post from Matt Trout describes a lot of the code work he’s done for Perl, and what he thinks the best contribution is. The important part is the end of the post. He notes that for all the code he’s added, the best return has come from encouraging others to contribute. The net result has been a magnification of effort, as more people donate time.

The reason I’m posting this is to note that DragonFly, as a community, has been excellent so far at providing a low-drama environment for people to have ideas and contribute work. Keep this in mind; the best benefit to DragonFly isn’t lines of code, but people welcomed.

Git and where it puts things

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:42:53 +0000

For the benefit of others: a Git diagram that shows the different levels of storage. Useful, because git goes far beyond the ‘it’s either here or it’s there’ style of cvs/svn. (via)