DragonFly 1.6 has been branched in CVS, with the release happening at the end of the week.
Java 1.4.2_11 and earlier works on DragonFly, and a number of further tips came up on the mailing lists. (See similar previous entry.)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s vinum changes were recently committed by Matthew Dillon. Simon follows up with a warning: ABI compatibility is broken by this, so vinum will have to be recompiled, if you are using it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ath(4) driver, for many models of wireless card, to DragonFly.
It is possible to build a custom install CD that adds additional packages and/or changed configuration files to the ‘normal’ DragonFly installation. How do you do it? The answer is in ‘man release‘
There’s new bsdtalk interviews every week, but this week, it’s Matthew Dillon, talking about the upcoming 1.6 release. A notable comment he made was that DragonFly is now more stable than even the much-vaunted FreeBSD 4.x releases that it came from. (Credit goes to Sascha Wildner for noticing the interview first.)
Eric Jacobs said “I’d like to work with LWKT“. Matthew Dillon said, “How about userland VFS?” , and Eric said “Sure!“. Then, Matthew Dillon went into unsummarizable details.
I’ve updated the Handbook, and rebuilt the web version and the PDF. Most of the changes are the addition of Adrian Nida and Erik Wikstrom’s updates for pkgsrc.
The DragonFly ISO images (the recent builds) now include system source – not enough to rebuild the whole system, but enough to patch and rebuild the kernel in situations where the source can’t be downloaded. Like, say, network cards that require manual tweaking to support.
The 1.6 release is pushed back to next weekend, instead of this week as originally intended.
Yury Tarasievich was able to get Java 1.5 working, and he mailed out details of the process. Along the same lines, ‘walt’ was able to get Java 1.4 working from the ‘wip’ branch of pkgsrc, which only requires some minor elbow grease.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been using Roundup as a bug tracker for DragonFly for some time now; it works well, and Matthew Dillon plans to make it official. Tickets are created from traffic on submit@ and bugs@, and it works quite well im my experience.
A question about open source led several people to point out that there are a number of histories of BSD available – Steve Mynott pointed at excerpts from Kirk McKusick‘s O’Reilly book. Sascha Wildner also included GrokLaw’s excellent and long history, and McKusick’s BSDTalk interview (.mp3). Local ‘expert on old things’ Bill Hacker added that BSD-style sharing of code was happening before Linux, GNU, or even Richard Stallman had been born.
‘walt’ is looking for other people interested in using ‘csup‘, the written-in-C replacement for the written-in-Modula3 cvsup, used to update source code. For now, there are premade cvsup binaries for DragonFly, though a working csup in the base system would be nice.
This week, UnixReview.com has two book reviews: “Perl Best Practices“, and “Advanced Host Intrusion Prevention with CSA“. I have the Perl Best Practices book myself, and it’s excellent.
To continue today’s all-pkgsrc day, Joerg Sonnenberger has the binaries for the 2006Q2 release of pkgsrc, built for DragonFly, available at:
ftp://packages.stura.uni-rostock.de/pkgsrc-stable/DragonFly/RELEASE/i386
(See message here) For those who don’t know it, the quarterly releases of pkgsrc are ‘known good’ releases, where all dependencies are up to date for that time, and only security updates are made to those releases. In other words, it’s like a ‘stable’ branch of pkgsrc.
Set PKG_PATH to the above URL + “/All” to be able to automatically install from that binary collection with pkg_add. If you want to upgrade, the quickest way to do so may be this strategy I thought up.
Note that packages that have known security problems at release time are not found in /All, but rather in /vulnerable. This includes Firefox!
Joerg Sonnenberger has a Google Summer of Code project, improving pkgsrc’s pkg_install. He recently posted to tech-pkg@netbsd.org with a summary of progress.
The 2006Q2 version of pkgsrc is out, with a good number of updates. The announcement contains, among other things, the total packages in pkgsrc (6,110), supported platforms (12), and several mentions of how many more packages are compiling now on DragonFly thanks to Joerg Sonnenberger.
Mid-month, says Matthew.
estd (Enhanced Speed Step Daemon), a program for controlling the speed (and therefore heat generation and power usage) of a Pentium M, now supports DragonFly.