A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
As mentioned here before and now on FreeBSD – the Unknown Giant, there will soon be “BSD Magazine“. It’s due out in 2Q 2008.
Digging around on the site shows some promotional material that says “Linux” where it should say “BSD”. This is probably because it’s repurposed from one of Software Media LLC’s other publications. It should be interesting. If you have a itch to write, they are taking submissions, though it sounds like they’ve already got the first issue ready.
2.0 will be branched on the 9th and released on the 23rd of this month. If you have something you want in that release, hurry! HAMMER will be included in an alpha state.
Matthias Schmidt has created a ‘mobile devices’ (meaning laptops) section on the DragonFly wiki; there’s already a section there for two different IM laptops. Please contribute if you have run DragonFly on other mobile devices, especially if you are one of the people who has mentioned it before.
Matthias Schmidt and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert have put together ‘dma’, a local mail delivery agent that can replace sendmail for most common needs, with the benefit of being simpler and smaller. It’s already in the system.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert mentioned plans to eventually build an encrypted network file system; Matthew Dillon added a description of how that could work with HAMMER.
Vincent Stemen did a good amount of testing of cvsup vs. rsync in terms of update speed. Rsync came out way ahead, though as a few people noted, rsyncd’s load relative to cvsupd on a server serving many clients is unknown. In any case, cvsup does not build on DragonFly via pkgsrc, so it looks like rsync is generally a better choice, plus most mirrors are using it now. HAMMER may provide a better alternative, in any case.
While on the topic: Ulf Lilleengen’s blog post about improving csup.
Vincent Stemen put together a tool for automatically updating his DragonFly systems. It’s called ‘mirror’, and he has an explanatory web page up for it now. Give it a whirl.
Hasso Tepper has added “bthcid(8) – Bluetooth Link Key/PIN Code Manager and btpin(1) Bluetooth PIN utility”, along with “rfcomm_sppd(1) – RFCOMM Serial Port Profile daemon”. These all originate from NetBSD, so I’ve linked to the man pages there for further details.  That’s the lowest consonant to vowel ratio I’ve had in a while.
I had an Apple ][+ when I was younger, and Gamasutra has an article up all about pre-Mac Apples, exploiting my sense of nostalgia. (Via the howling void)
While we’re on the subject, there’s an online Apple ][gs emulator at virtualapple.org. One of these days I’ll get around to scanning my original Castle Wolfenstein disk just to show how old-school I am…