A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
David Rhodus posted that the packages at GoBSD.com have been updated. This is the remote package location that is used by default by the ‘pkg_add‘ tool.
For instance, pkg_add -r gnome2‘ or ‘pkg_add -r kde3‘ will pull down the new versions of each. (pkg_delete existing packages first.) You can see the latest packages or the whole list.
Matthew Dillon has committed code that makes a ‘make buildkernel/nativekernel‘ remove the obj heirarchy before starting; this solves the occasional out-of-date file problem during a system build. Also, ‘make quickkernel‘ is now possible, so if you are building a system with source that has not been updated since the last build, you can save time and use the ‘quickworld‘ and ‘quickkernel‘ targets instead of ‘buildworld‘ and ‘buildkernel‘.
Emiel Kollof has updated (Jeroen Ruigrok/’asmodai’ committed) dfports/x11/nvidia-driver to version 6.1.1.3.
Micha³ ‘GiM’ Spadliñski posted a followup to his small DragonFly banner: a page full of similar buttons for various operating systems, languages, and the like.
I’ve set up a Bugzilla bug tracker at forknibbler.com, to use until a full-blown system is available at dragonflybsd.org. Be kind – it’s a woefully underpowered machine.
Leaf.dragonflybsd.org has been significantly upgraded; this is where shell accounts and the mail archive are located.
Joerg Sonnenberger has committed a large update, written by Andreas Hauser, to the port overrides for Xorg. It’s much more likely to work now, if you are looking to switch from XFree86.
“Micha³ ‘GiM’ Spadliñski” posted a link to a 80×15 DragonFly banner.
If you’re feeling religious: a petition for Flash on BSD.
The FreeBSD NVIDIA driver has been updated; Emiel Kollof has a test DragonFly version of this new update he’d like people to try out.
MAtthew Dillon warned that the ongoing VFS work will make the use of buildkernel/installkernel absolutely necessary for kernel installation, for anyone using filesystems other than those built into the kernel.
A discussion about the planned and ongoing VFS changes has led to some very informative posts (that’s 3 different links) from Matthew Dillon about what he plans to do.
The Center for Internet Security has released a “FreeBSD Benchmark and Scoring Tool“. This may also work on DragonFly.
Joerg Sonnenberger has committed the first half of Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s work on improving the IOCTL code, making support for (for instance) Linux calls much easier. Joerg also committed a change to module loading, suggested by Simon, which may allow modules such as AGP to load when otherwise they would not.
Matthew Dillon posted about the start of work on the new VFS subsystem.
Eirik Nygaard has added message-passed syscalls into the system. They aren’t running for all users by default, but they will be once proved stable.
dragonflybsd.org will be going though some upgrades soon, as Matthew Dillon noted in a recent post. Notably, leaf.dragonflybsd.org is going to be an AMD64 machine.
The qt33 override is gone; TrollTech has incorporated Joerg Sonnenberger’s patches.
dragonflybsd.org is now back on a T1, with a slightly better connection. So, now you don’t have to use the mirrors, though you should.
Matthew Dillon mentioned something of how well programming is going, and how close we are to a major step in the networking cleanup.