Dru Lavigne is interviewed for 28 minutes on BSDTalk 188. It’s about her new book, and also about the new BSD Professional Certification.
In this recent note about the new wireless driver framework, Rui Paolo noted how to add a ath(4) device as wlan0 automatically.
DragonFly 2.7.1 has been tagged, mostly because of a problem with version numbers caused by the recent wireless driver merge.
Sascha Wildner has ported MultiMedia Card support from FreeBSD; SD, SDHC, and MMC cards should work in DragonFly now. Man, there’s been a lot of new additions recently.
Alex Hornung’s I/O scheduler is now in DragonFly; all reports I’ve seen from users say it makes interactivity much better. It’s not on by default; read his very detailed post and followup for details.
An entertaining infographic, posted over the break cause it’s big:
Thomas Nikolajsen wrote some tips on starting a NFS client on DragonFly; I’m linking to them both because they’re generally handy and specifically so I can have them for later…
Rui Paulo’s work porting the current set of FreeBSD network drivers over to DragonFly has been committed; there’s about a zillion commits (via Matthew Dillon) today to show for it.
If you’re worried that your Hammer disk may be going bad – and I mean bad like physically bad – you can check it with dd, or see what the hammer tool lists as bad.
Gergo Szakal mentioned some ideas he had about binary upgrades; among other parts of the conversation, Samuel J. Greear/Sascha Wildner reminded everyone that Matthias Schmidt had ported the FreeBSD binary upgrade system over in late 2007, and it’s still around to play with.
Rui Paulo’s work on wireless drivers will be entering 2.7 very soon. (2.6 is unaffected.) This will cause problems if you are running acx(4), bwi(4), iwi(4), iwl(4), rtw(4), rum(4), or ural(4), until someone writes a driver that matches the new framework. If you’re on 2.7 and you need these drivers working, hold off on updates for a bit…
Jan Lentfer’s posted the exact steps to migrate from BIND as part of the base system to BIND out of pkgsrc. The actual commit hasn’t happened yet.
This will only affect you when upgrading 2.7; DragonFly 2.6 still has BIND in it, and this won’t affect non-2.7 users until the next release.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has posted his results from testing Alex Hornung’s experimental I/O scheduler. Results are positive, and he also lists exactly how to download the code and test it on your own system. It’s worth trying, especially if you have DragonFly for a desktop.
Here’s some explicit instructions for upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6.
If for some reason you don’t have a /usr/src directory:
mkdir -p /usr/src cd /usr/src && git init git remote add origin git://git.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git git fetch origin git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
If you already have a /usr/src/ directory, you can just do the last 3 steps:
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
And then you can perform the normal “make buildworld…” steps outlined in /usr/src/UPDATING.
We’ve got 28 applications for Summer of Code, approximately what we had last year. If you’re a student, hold tight. We’ve got until the 21st to get everyone matched up, student <-> mentor.
Do you want to give a talk at pkgsrcCon 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, May 28-30? Make sure to mail in the details.
David Shao is working on improving DragonFly’s DRM (kernel graphics drivers, not that other thing). That’s a good project to start, and also Antonio Huete Jimenez is willing to test it. We can always use more guinea pigs; if you want to contribute to DragonFly without writing code, testing someone’s dramatic changes is a big help.
Jan Lentfer’s ready to remove BIND from the base system; test out his changes if you’re running a DragonFly-based name server and want to see how it’ll work.
I suspect most people who are interested in BSD or open source in general have the same reaction to the iPad: it’s pretty, it looks neat, and hey Apple wait what do you mean I can’t use it the way I want to? I’ve managed to hold out for a few days on commenting about it, and the benefit is a bit less incoherence.
It’s relevant because it’s a BSD-based device without the normal freedoms you’d associate with it. I’m going to just point at these three articles that do a good job of describing what rubs me the wrong way.
The 4th issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the theme “Hosting BSD“. It’s a free download, and they now have a “questions from users” section that you can write in to.