I updated the projects page for DragonFly with some labeling of potential work for Google Code-In. Pratyush Kshirsagar suggested porting busybox, which Chris Turner countered with flashdist/flashrd. ‘joris dedieu’ followed with beastiebox.
The early bird registration (a cheap $95) for NYCBSDCon has been extended an extra week to match how long they ran it previous years. November 7th, it goes to $125 and walk-in will be $145.
Chris Turner is working on ral(4) support, specifically the eee901’s 2860 network chip.
See the announcement and the release notes.
The index page of the DragonFly site has been updated by Matt Dillon with some notes regarding the status of the 2.8 release. Among these, it is mentioned that the GUI image will be making a return for 2.8! There will be no DVD image this time, only an image suitable for writing to a disk, such as a usb stick.
I’ve coded some tasks on the DragonFly projects page for Google Code-In. (Application is in already.) If there’s any additional DragonFly projects appropriate for 13 to 18-year old students, that’s the place to add it. The application period ends the 29th at 23:00 UTC, so don’t take your time.
If you’re using DragonFly x86_64, and set LANG to something other than English, you will get crashes from programs using pkgsrc’s gettext-lib. Francois Tigeot has a fix which is going into pkgsrc, though I don’t know if this will show up in pkgsrc-2010Q3.
The 2.8 release hasn’t quite happened yet. But soon!
Siju George has been fleshing out his ‘afterboot’ style page, though now it’s “Environment Quick Start“. Good to look at if you are, say, installing a 2.8 DragonFly image.
DragonFly 2.8 (technically 2.8.1; see here for the .1 changes) is due to be released tomorrow. There should be at almost the same time pkgsrc 2010Q3 packages available. There will also be a LiveDVD for this release, too, though the window manager has changed.
DragonFly has shipped with a uniprocessor kernel by default forever. Shipping with a SMP kernel may not work as well for all possible combinations. With some recent changes by Matthew Dillon, both types of kernel are present and can be picked from at boot time – with the LiveCD!
Chris Turner posted details of how he gets jack (“a low-latency audio server”) to run on DragonFly. Your mileage may vary.
The BSD Show! has a 20-minute interview with John Hixson, known for working on pc-sysinstall. (See also)
Whoops! This should have gone up last night. I’m almost waxing nostalgic for this one.
- Two words you never thought you’d see together: “heartwarming” and “single system image computing”. I think this is how we should document everything for DragonFly. (via)
- Apple’s bringing the App Store to the Mac platform, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Ani Dash has a writeup of the various “app store” platforms out there. pkgsrc (and FreeBSD/OpenBSD ports) would certainly count. Surprisingly, the application count for pkgsrc exceeds most of the other stores he lists.
- Aw, no more cassette Walkmans. (via) Nowadays, it’s difficult to not take music with you wherever you go. In the 1980s, there was no other way to bring your music with you, except maybe a lot of batteries and this. I loved my crappy JVC dual tape deck.
I am totally stealing the horizonal evocative image idea from things magazine.
There’s still no support for KMS/GEM on any most BSDs, though there are people interested in it for FreeBSD. One of DragonFly’s Summer of Code projects was just that, though it’s not in a state where it can be really used.
Scott Ullrich, who has worked on several BSD-related projects, including DragonFly, has something called vCloudBSD, about which you now know as much as me. It looks to be a FreeBSD auto-installer for virtualization, though I’m sure I’m overgeneralizing.
OH CRAP I WAS JUST HOLDING SHIFT. IF YOU HAVE USED THE INTERNET FOR MORE THAN 1 YEAR OF YOUR LIFE, THIS LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING TO YOU. ENJOY CAPS LOCK DAY.
Hasso Tepper helpfully forwarded announcements for the Call for Papers for both EuroBSDCon 2011 and AsiaBSDCon 2011.
Also, there’s probably going to be DragonFly people at 27C3, and I know there’s going to be some at NYCBSDCon 2010. The early registration discount for NYCBSDCon only lasts about 10 more days, so jump on it while you can; it’s crazy cheap.
I’ve applied on behalf of DragonFly for Google Code-In. It’s similar to Google Summer of Code, but focuses on 13-18-year-olds and smaller tasks. It runs over the year-end, and we’ll know if we’re in by November 5th.
In the meantime, if you have ideas that could fit the program (see task list at the Google site), please put them on the DragonFly project page.
Alex Hornung has some patches that allow KDE4 to build on DragonFly. They aren’t in pkgsrc and not all in KDE yet, so try them out directly if you want KDE4, for now.
Update: based on something Alex said on IRC… they’re in KDE4 now.