Not much to report lately… Spend some time reading up on a question about documentation in PDF form that strangely turned into a thread about things like the relative quality of ext3fs, reiserfs, and ufs.
The monitoring system Nagios, which I used in a previous incarnation as NetSaint, is reviewed on UnixReview.com.
Joerg Sonnenberger has removed all the old sound support that dates back to before NEWPCM was added in FreeBSD-4. This probably does not affect anyone, as this is all for old, rare equipment, usually ISA.
Stable has slipped.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, this means that the current “bleeding edge” code has been moved to “Stable” status, as there’s no outstanding problems with it. If you’re using the “DragonFly_Stable” tag in your CVSup file, you’ll have some new things to download.
Dru Lavigne has a new article in her ONLamp FreeBSD Basics column that talks about make. Most of what it says applies to DragonFly, too.
Martin P. Hellwig has an image(s) he plans to use for a shirt.
Adrian Nida posted that he’s added a “mail server with TLS” HOWTO to the wiki. It’s part of a larger HOWTO section, if anyone would like to contribute.
The Stable tag has not yet been moved forward, because of a new error found. Matthew Dillon posted another summary.
Devon H. O’Dell’s girlfriend happens to do dragonfly jewelry. That’s based on the bug, not BSD.
Adam Kirchoff described something I did not know: MergedFB is the way to get multihead, 3D video going. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been working on it, too.
The Stable tag will be slipped today; there are a few minor bugs remaining.
Update: Stable is not slipped yet.
Paul Grunwald is selling his IBM laptop, which happens to run DragonFly just fine.
This week, UnixReview.com has a review of the tools Detox and jMemorize, a Linux book review that may be vaguely related to DragonFly, a conversation about regular expressions titled “Ten Years for Overnight Success“, and some other material that isn’t really on-topic enough for linking.
Matthew Dillon found this interesting collection of quotes from FreeBSD users who have purchased amd64 hardware.
John Leimon saw that DragonFly gathered some attention on the “fox-toolkit” mailing list.
Historically, access to devices by anyone other than root has been a slight hassle under BSD. Joerg Anslik’s changes to MAKEDEV have been committed, which, among other things, allows for a /etc/devices.conf that controls individual permissions for different devices, such as the CD drive.
The upcoming DragonFly release (1.5, probably) will be good, but the next release will be huge.
Matthew Dillon has committed changes to the DragonFly CD image, put together by Eduardo Tongson, so that if one is inserted in a computer running Windows, it will autorun a web page with information and links about DragonFly BSD.
As part of a longer thread about making your computer configure itself appropriately to available networks, Freddie Cash pointed at the profile.sh work in FreeBSD. This may be convertible to FreeBSD…
Matthew Dillon listed remaining bugs before the next move of the Stable tag, and also plans for the next release, which will probably be “1.5”.