Matthew Dillon’s committed some initial support for streaming mirroring. With this, two disks can be synchronized over a network link of any speed or reliability – it can be restarted and immediately begin where it left off, and the amount of bandwidth used can be controlled. This sounds neat.
Upgrading WordPress to 2.6 yesterday broke the direct links to articles on the Digest. It’ll be updated in the 2.6.1 release of WordPress, but until then I’ve changed the links to correct for the issue.
I really like pkgsrc. It’s a big system that works well for managing a huge variety of software packages, across multiple platforms, and it’s been beneficial to DragonFly for making a lot of programs instantly accessible.
The issue nobody’s fixed – yet – is that there are plenty of ways to upgrade, some of which don’t work (make update), or involved homegrown solutions that miss the goal most people have: the ability to say simply “Upgrade this” and have it work. This is why programs with the same functionality but simpler usage become popular.
(Prompted by a number of recent “How do I upgrade pkgsrc?” questions on DragonFly and pkgsrc mailing lists.)
Gergo Szakal noticed that there is now ath9k, an official open source driver for Atheros 802.11n wireless chipsets. (‘Sunnz’ pointed out it’s still not as open as people would like.)Â There is an existing community-built ath(4) driver.
Edit: Gergo Szakal pointed out ath(4) is 802.11b/g and ath9k is 802.11n, so it’s not a direct overlap. Thanks, Gergo.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s committed his ETHER_INPUT2 networking upgrades, which moves networking a bit closer to getting out from under the Giant Lock.
Damian Vicino is presenting a 40-minute talk on Hammer at the “Jornada Regional de Software Libre” in Argentina, August 20-22.
Dashu Huang has posted a patchset and a link to his design document (PDF) for his work on RFC3542 support, which is one of the DragonFly Summer of Code projects.
Versions of DragonFly later than 2.0 now have bsdcpio, a BSD-licensed version of cpio, as the default version of cpio, instead of the GNU-licensed one. Thanks to Peter Avalos for adding it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for JMicron Gigabit/Fast Ethernet chipsets, apparently with the support of Ethanat JMicron and Pyun YongHyeon of FreeBSD.
Here’s another one of those Flash shakycam presentations: Danny O’Brien talking about Web 2.0 and personal info. I link to this because it’s interesting: lots of newer web sites like Flickr, LiveJournal, etc have absorbed people’s creativity. While that’s good, it’s dangerous in a way that’s been seen before. Having your own system with your own operating system (hint: DragonFly) lets you own your own data and interests. If you can get past some of the joking at the beginning, the video makes that point at some length. I post this not to make with the tinfoil hat attitude, but to point out that in some ways, handing your writing or art off to a remote hosting service makes as much sense as renting a paintbrush.
The Open Souce Business Resource for this month is about Accessibility. (via) This means
Pedro F. Giffuni pointed out something interesting: a project to bring LVM to NetBSD. We could use this too.
The most recent quarterly branch of pkgsrc is out. Read the release announcement for details of new changes, which include an improved Ruby Gems framework and Joerg’s work on DESTDIR (staged installs) support.
The binary packages on pkgbox for DragonFly were built with a prerelease version of this branch. (Please, use a mirror as soon as it propagates.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch for anyone with an ICH9 chipset-using motherboard. Give it a try.
Pedro F. Giffuni happened to catch Daniel Phillips’ announcement of a new Linux filesystem, Tux3, which he compared to Hammer. The followups between Daniel Phillips and Matthew Dillon are interesting, and go deeply into the design decisions being made for each product. It’s a lot of words; be prepared, and I think there will be more conversation past what I’ve linked here.
Tip 1: You can’t have too big a volume for Hammer.
Tip 2: Snapshots are the easiest way to track historical data.
Pulled from previous comments: there’s a Last.FM DragonFly group.
I’ve completed a full build of binary pkgsrc packages. However, bandwidth to dragonflybsd.org is getting hit pretty hard right now, so please, be patient and use a mirror if possible. (once they update…)
The DragonFly 2.0 release announcement is popping up in various places around the web: DistroWatch, Unix.com, LinuxQuestions.org, and of course KernelTrap.
I’ve created a DragonFly BSD group at LinkedIn, a business networking site. If you’re already using it, search for that group name and add yourself – I’ll get the request and approve it. There’s no major purpose, other than getting a group formed. It is a good place to find potential job candidates…