The timeline shows about a week and a half for planning, and then student applications begin on the 29th of March, and run to April 9th.

If you want to participate as a student, start planning now by talking with people on IRC (#dragonflybsd on EFNet) or on the mailing lists.  You cannot be over-prepared.

If you were using it for your own mirror, switch to mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, and tell Matthew Dillon at @dragonflybsd.org your contact info so you can be notified of changes.  (If you’re not mirroring, please download from the nearest site that is.)

The port multiplier’s SiI3726 chipset might be supported, or potentially supported, by the sili(4) driver.  Someone have $110 to spare to try this out?

• Marc Espie’s post about autoconf holds true; Linux is in danger of becoming a monoculture in itself, similar to Windows.
• The BSDCan 2010 schedule has been posted.  (via)  Will this be the year I finally make it to BSDCan?  Maybe.
• This post about communities (in general, online, not just software) is interesting.  So far DragonFly has managed to avoid the drama-with-a-capital-D that afflicts other communities over time.  Here’s a reason to not want growth…
• Always have working backups.  ALWAYS.  (via)
• I once went through almost exactly this, except it was a phone system that spanned several U.S. states and China/Mexico.  Asterisk is awful, except that every commercial phone system is worse.
• A very on-target assessment of the iPad from a longtime Apple developer makes me think of something: will the iPad be good for open source?  Not as a platform, but as a way to push developers to open source systems, where program development doesn’t require approval from a single company with unclear guidelines.  Even the single interface port on an iPad is proprietary, and requires licensing.
• It’s really nice to read about a successful open-source software business that did not hinge on investors or being bought out, but rather on, you know, actually doing business, as seen in this writeup of OpenNMS.  (via)

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.