Dmitri Nikulin has a quick tip on how to remove some package dependencies in pkgsrc, in the (rare) chance that you don’t want and don’t need certain other programs.
FreeBSD committer Ruslan Ermilov’s wife has cancer, and he needs money for treatment. Please help.
Pkgsrc has regular quarterly releases, and the one for the second quarter of 2006 is starting up. These releases are designed to provide known stable points, or at least points more stable than pulling from CVS.
A few kernel options, such as INVARIANT_SUPPORT, have gone away. Watch for this when upgrading from 1.5.3 to 1.5.4. If you are a Release (1.4.4) user, this won’t affect you until the next release.
Sepherosa Ziehau has improved support for the acx networking chipset, adding WPA2 support, though not yet for the acx100.
Let’s say you want to identify the pkgsrc packages on your system that are ‘leaves’, meaning no other packages are dependent on them. Johnny Lam, on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list, has a short script to find just that.
As predicted, the Preview tag has been synced with HEAD, meaning all recent changes are now available. Now’s a good time to update if you’re not on Release (1.4.4). Because of ABI changes, there’s a specific procedure one should follow.
A short question about a warning message, while answered, led to a short discussion about optimization.
Matthew Dillon noted that due to general stability, the Preview tag will be slipped on the 16th, and the next Release will happen in July.
A proposal to remove sendmail and replace it with postfix has resulted in a variety of reactions. Matthew Dillon is surprisingly frustrated with sendmail, though Claude Assman, who is working on Sendmail X (the rewrite of Sendmail), says there are improvements.
Sascha Wildner pointed out that we get immediate, direct vendor support for Sendmail, such as the update today to 8.13.7 by Gregory Neil Shapiro, which is unlikely to happen with any other MTA.
If you’re running a development version of DragonFly; namely 1.5.3, it’s time to update to 1.5.4. Be careful, as your kernel has to be updated first.
Seen on KernelTrap, then OpenBSD Journal and then Slashdot: BSD support (specifically OpenBSD) hardware support is improving faster than Linux in some cases.
I did not realize this, but if you want to browse SMB shares using KDE, KDE has to be compiled explicitly with support for it. The message linked happens to cover ‘show-options’, a handy pkgsrc option.
There’s been some conversations about getting OpenVPN to work, though it’s still not complete.
Stefan Krüger’s writeup of how to do a stress test on DragonFly is now on the wiki.
Stefan Krüger has written up a nice description of how to use Peter Holm’s kernel stress test on DragonFly.
UnixReview.com has a much larger than normal set of new (new since I last linked) articles up; instead of linking to individual ones, I’ll just say “go visit“.
Due to a disk problem, some of the archived mailing list messages/articles on the news server are missing. The mail archives appear OK, however.
Preview, the halfway step between ‘safe’ and bleeding edge code in DragonFly, is due for an update soon.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s been building from the most recent branch (2006Q1) of pkgsrc, and the binaries are now available. His existing packages were built from the current version of pkgsrc, i.e. from CVS.