Hasso Tepper has some things he’d like to see for the next release, and he put them together in a wish list. His hands are full with pkgsrc, but if any of these projects look interesting to you, now is a good time to take advantage of the delay before the next release. (there’s already some work done.)
This blog post talks about the identified reasons Ubuntu has been so successful in growth over the past few years. The post uses it as a comparison to Perl, but it holds some lessons for DragonFly. Some items we have now – a Live CD, simple install, regular release schedule – and they’ve been very useful.
On the other hand, the available applications is something that can improve – as nice as it it to build from source, immediate installation of binaries is best. Heck, some companies base their business around it. Pkgsrc is getting closer to creating an “app store” for DragonFly. We’ve got a civil community, but I’d like to figure out ways to make it even more accessible.
(Nobody mentions this when talking about Ubuntu’s success, but having a large, privately-funded company backing your open source project also helps.)
While on the subject, I would love to have a job like Jono Bacon’s. He works with all the issues that I think about.
Dennis Melentyev was trying out AHCI support, and as part of that process, Matthew Dillon described the steps needed to deal with disk renaming issues that can come from a NATA -> AHCI switch. This isn’t needed for most people right now, but I wanted to link to it just in case someone hits that moment of panic.
Matthew Dillon fixed a problem with AHCI on July 2nd. If you are running AHCI from before that date with a port multiplier, you may want to update. Further tests have completed without issues.
Alexander Polakov has put together an update of PCI bus and ACPI interrupt handling code taken mostly from FreeBSD, and ported it to DragonFly. Please try it out – if you previously had booting issues with DragonFly, this may have cured them.
Firefox 3.5, which is in pkgsrc-wip, is working on DragonFly. There’s some HTML% audio/video problems that can be attributed to the somewhat stale OSS code in Firefox; if you can contribute a fix, please do.
I’ve been traveling the past few days, so there’s a huge backlog of things to post. I’ll revert to bullets. Some of this stuff merits individual posts, but I need to clear out too much. I haven’t even reached my email yet.
- The July version of the Open Source Business Resource is available.
- Sometimes I take my roguelike interests too far. (needs Flash. Via.)
- Still roguelike: New Nethack variants: Sporkhack and UnNethack, at @Play.
- Open source only comes in one edition: awesome.
- X text copying made less likely to fall down: autocutsel. (via)
- BSDTalk 176: 13 minutes on the Unbound DNS resolver, with Wouter Wijngaards.
- OpenBSD imported tmux. That seems like a good idea.
- Microsoft really is getting better at open source. This is something that probably requires more arguing than I have the desire to do. (via)
Matthew Dillon is shifting the semiannual release schedule over by two months; new releases of DragonFly will happen in March and September. The current July-December releases hit right on major (U.S.) holidays and too close to quarterly pkgsrc releases.
The message linked above also contains a list of the surprisingly large quantity of work that will go into the next release, plus some details on booting strategies going forward.
I’m copying pkgsrc packages to avalon.dragonflybsd.org that were built on a 2.3.1 DragonFly system; if you’re running a 2.3.1 or more recent DragonFly setup, pkg_radd should pull right from this, once the 8G of files finish copying over.
The Google Summer of Code midterms are almost upon us. Starting July 6th (that’s next Monday), students and mentors will need to fill out a survey detailing how the project is going. There’s a preliminary version at Google Docs, so you know what to expect when they go up on the GSoC site. They will have to be completed by the 13th.
If you’re a student: make sure you have code that shows progress. If you’re behind schedule, cram.
If you’re a mentor: make sure you are aware of your student’s progress. If the student’s behind schedule, help them cram.