p.s. we would all individually owe Alex a beer for this.

An mp3 of “PFSense II, Rocking The Datacenter” at NYCBUG, via Dru Lavigne.  Also, her “BSD for Linux Users” at the SCALE website.

A 5-part series about Scripting Vim, written by a terribly smart guy?  Interesting!  (Yeah, I did link to a part of it before…)

Have you ever wondered if building more than one pkgsrc package at a time can be a problem?  Others have too, and apparently there’s a fix.   If you don’t want to have to get to a command line to find the answer, it’s:

PKGSRC_LOCKTYPE?= none
The type of locking that will be done if competing processes
attempt to do work on one package directory simultaneously.

Possible values:
* none: No locking takes place at all.
* once: When the lock has already been aquired by another
process, the current process is terminated.
* sleep: When the lock has already been acquired by another
process, the current process will sleep for PKGSRC_SLEEPSECS
seconds and then try again.

You should also set OBJHOSTNAME when you are using the same
copy of pkgsrc on different hosts, maybe via NFS. This is because the locking process writes its process ID into the lockfile, and process IDs on different hosts are unrelated.

See also: LOCALBASE_LOCKTYPE, WRKDIR_LOCKTYPE.

Using the pkgsrc package,  put

clang_CC=/usr/pkg/bin/clang

in /etc/compilers.conf and then set $CCVER to “clang” when building:

env WORLD_CCVER=clang make -DNO_GCC44 buildworld

I haven’t tried this, so any errors in description are mine, not Sascha’s – can someone verify? I don’t have a test system to run it on right now.

Edit: see Sascha’s comment for the definitive method.

The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is up, with the theme of “Mobile”.  The BeagleBoard and OpenBTS articles are going to appeal to some specific people.

More links from Dru Lavigne.

“It’s sinking in that Sun is gone“, the vi Complete Key Binding List, and Post-quantum cryptography, all ganked from Trivium.

But: do you like even the vague concept of open source?  The iPad is expressly designed to limit your choices, especially with media consumption and the programs you run.  It’s sort of like owning a TV circa 1975 – you get what large media groups and the network (Apple) want you to see. I don’t want to come across as someone who’s complaining because it’s different – I’m complaining because it’s not different.

There’s other people arguing the same idea, with even more reasons.  This is one of the most specific.  Plus, there’s the natural progression…

The application period for Google Summer of Code 2010 starts in about a
week. We were able to enter in 2008 and 2009, so I’m optimistic that we
will get in for 2010 too.

Saying “I’m willing to mentor” doesn’t force you to commit yet; you don’t
have to work with a student on a project you don’t find interesting.
However, mentoring is a multi-week commitment to support a student who may
or may not have the best planning skills – please be ready to help.

I need to know soon how many potential mentors we have since we have to
ask for a given number of slots from Google as part of the application
process.  If you are interested in mentoring, speak up here or by email, please. If
there’s a particular project on the GSoC 2010 page that looks interesting,
put your name by it.

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsoc2010/

Details: The old behavior was to build and install directly, which “bmake stage-install” can reproduce.  DESTDIR support means that the software can be installed as non-root.

• Rui Paulo is working on an update of wireless device support in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon added libbsdxml to DragonFly as part of the prep work.
• Joe Talbott is working on unionfs; Nicolas Thery supplied some links, while Matthew Dillon wants deduplication.