DragonFly 2.4 1 should be out Thursday. There’s a few bugfixes to add, still.
Seen via Richard Bejtlich’s excellent Taosecurity blog: the 6th issue of BSD Magazine is out.
Don’t forget, the first 3 issues (scroll down on that link) are free to download in PDF format.
Installation of pkgsrc packages that were built on a different version of DragonFly than the one running during that installation will cause a warning. This can cause some confusion, since the tool appears to be warning that something may not work, but there’s no further output. I’ve seen users think it means the install failed, for instance.
There’s potential ways around this, but the best would be this pkg_install modification suggested by Jeremy C. Reed. Anyone who implements this gets my eternal gratitude.
Yay, another BSDTalk! Will Backman talks about where he’s been for the past month in BSDTalk number 177, and plays back a talk with FreeBSD developer Giorgos Keramidas.
DragonFly 2.4.1 is slated for release this Wednesday, 2009-09-30. This will have fixes for the installer and 64-bit DragonFly, among other things.
Do you have a recent ASUS system? Constantine Murenin has a patch for you, for hardware monitoring.
If you’ve got a really, really old DragonFly installation that been upgraded from… 1.8? Perhaps earlier? The system will be using libc_r instead of lib_xu. If you want to change to lib_xu, which is the long-term goal, Hasso Tepper has the simple steps listed.
If you’re setting up a DragonFly workstation, and you want to use two monitors, here are some suggestions on what video card to use.
The general plan for binary pkgsrc packages are to keep them around for the current release and the previous release. Some people say “delete now!“, some say “No, wait!“. What’s your opinion?
This Internetnews.com article makes a good point: DragonFly has thrived since splitting from FreeBSD 5+ years ago, and the difference between the systems is more apparent now, with the introduction of DevFS and Hammer.
The freeze period for the 2009Q3 release of pkgsrc has started, and should result in a release around the end of September.
Binary packages built from 2009Q3, for DragonFly, should be available approximately a week after that.
Edit: See? Definitely started now.
A script I was running on avalon.dragonflybsd.org yesterday afternoon removed the packages, iso images, and snapshots stored there. (Sorry!) Hammer saved my bacon, with a snapshot of the 182G of missing files immediately available.
If you were bit by the bug where the 64-bit version of DragonFly wouldn’t boot from CD/DVD on your system, Matthew Dillon has some test images of DragonFly 2.4 for testing. Please use and report if it was successful.
Stathis Kamperis, as part of his Summer of Code work, ported NetBSD’s POSIX message queues to DragonFly. He has a writeup of all the details, and even has test cases! It should be showing up in 2.5 soon.
The utilities pkg_radd and pkg_search now support a BINPKG_BASE variable. This variable can point to alternate binary download sites, in case the defaults aren’t working well for you.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.4 on amd64, you may have noticed trouble with USB drives or separate issues with ACPI. Both seem to be fixed by the same commit. It’s been merged to the 2.4 branch, so updating on that branch will get the fixes without moving to 2.5.
Some months ago, Nikita Glukhov started working on a port of tmpfs to DragonFly. It’s incomplete, but Alex Hornung has put together a nice summary and is looking for someone to take it up again. I’d sure like to see it active again; it’s much better than mfs.
DragonFly’s newest committer is Jordan Gordeev, whose name may already be familiar. He’s the student behind the 2008/2009 Summer of Code projects for AMD64 support in DragonFly. You’ll notice the 2.4 release has a 64-bit version, in no small part due to his effort. Welcome Jordan!
There’s now a Git repo of pkgsrc. This is just a copy from cvs every 15 minutes, so it won’t allow changes back to pkgsrc, but it’s much faster to download via git than it is via cvs.