DragonFly BSD Digest

Advocacy for languages or operating systems

justin — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:38:39 +0000

This Perl Buzz post talks about improving the perception and use of Perl, one of my favorite languages. I link to it in part because it’s well written, but also to suggest something: read the article, and substitute “BSD” everywhere you read “Perl”. The same suggestions apply.

The prime motivator for this digest was providing more of an atmosphere for DragonFly, and to some extent for the idea of BSD itself. Lots of people aspire to be a BSD developer/committer, when really what we need is someone having a conversation that involves BSD.

zsh advocacy

justin — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:01:55 +0000

zsh is one of those things that people always describe as a best version of something, like cvs vs. git or vi vs. vim (or BSD vs. Linux?). Philip Paeps has a lengthy blog writeup of his experience trying zsh. (via)

Another BSD forum: DaemonForums

justin — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:58:17 +0000

There’s a new BSD forum site, called DaemonForums. Looking at the comments, it appears to be a replacement for the now-unmaintained BSDForums.(Via)

Reference card for pkgsrc

justin — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:52:26 +0000

Leonardo Taccari created a NetBSD reference card (link to 2-page PDF). The command section also applies, by and large, to DragonFly, as does the entire pkgsrc reference. (via Hubert Feyrer)

HAMMER and SSDs

justin — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:56:52 +0000

Samuel J. Greear asked about HAMMER and if it could be optimized for handling the somewhat-more-common-these-days Solid State Disk. Matthew Dillon responded, and some discussion ensued. (I’m linking to the posts because they’ve got the details.

Compression comparison

justin — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:50:03 +0000

Samuel J. Greear did an informal comparison of zip, gzip, bzip2, and 7zip, comparing compression ratio and compression time. 7zip looks pretty good, though testing it on some more varied file types and sizes would be in order.

HAMMER update : final disk structures

justin — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:52:39 +0000

Matthew Dillon posted another HAMMER status report, with handling a full file system the only remaining major item. It’s being tested now on his backup system. He’s also committing the final disk structure changes, so you will need to reformat any existing HAMMER volumes.

One month pkgsrcCon window

justin — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:37:07 +0000

pkgsrcCon 5, in Berlin, Germany, June 13 - 15, is less than one month away from closing registration. Register now if you want to attend (since the hosting university does not allow walk-ins). If you want to present, your deadline is slightly earlier, on May 25th.

A good sales idea

justin — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:36:15 +0000

OpenBSD is, as usual, selling CDs of their 4.3 release. It appears that related-but-not-directly-linked goods like The Book of PF are being sold right along side.

The sight of a thick technical book with an included (and probably out of date) CD has been common for years; however, this reversal strikes me as a good idea. Selling a good book along with the operating system that will use it is worthwhile.

Cross-BSD syslog improvements

justin — Sun, 04 May 2008 03:36:09 +0000

Martin Schütte is updating syslog (there’s an IETF standard for it, which I did not know) for one of NetBSD’s Google Summer of Code projects; he very kindly posted links to it on the DragonFly users@ list in the hopes that it could benefit DragonFly’s syslogd too.