Alexander Polakov has suggested that nvi (what you get when you type vi) should be replaced with traditional vi, since that would deliver UTF-8 support, and nvi appears to no longer be updated. Other than one objection on split screens, I daresay everyone who needs more features treats the system vi as a fallback and has moved to a new editor. (or that)
Jan Lentfer has created an update for ncurses in DragonFly, but wants further testing. Give it a try if you use a curses-based application.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.5, Matthew Dillon has changed thread and process structures, meaning that a full rebuild of kernel and modules is necessary on the next system update.
I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to this before, but: Oliver Fromme has a graphical bootloader (see example) which can work on DragonFly. I’d love to see this on DragonFly.
Coincidentally, this article makes an argument for graphic improvements for BSD systems in general that I agree with.
Matthew Dillon has moved the Big Giant Lock off of a whole bunch of syscalls. This should make a noticeable difference in a multiprocessing context, though I don’t have measured results to point at. (hint, hint…)
I have a wrapper script I use for bulk builds of pkgsrc that I think others would find usable. If you are interested in building some/all of pkgsrc to generate binary packages using pbulk, may I recommend “simplepbulk“? I’d like to see if anyone uses it on non-DragonFly systems.
Several people really want a USB update, even offering a bounty. Alexander Polakov has volunteered himself for it – a large but worthwhile task. It’ll be the USB4BSD code, as Alex Hornung recommends.
Thanks to Michael Neumann, it’s now possible to remove a drive from a Hammer volume. It’s experimental, so all the standard warnings apply.
This can’t be done on a root volume, for hopefully obvious reasons.
I’ve been building this entry up for a while, so some of these entries are newer than others.
- From the howling void: OpenSolaris or FreeBSD. I’ll admit I haven’t tried OpenSolaris, but I’m also biased to BSD.
- cpdup, originally-on-DragonFly software, has had an update.
- This description of the Content Pyramid talks about web content and links, but it could be stretched to open source software. There’s always been an implicit value to being at the top of the pyramid – hence the prestige not always fairly attached to “the commit bit”.
- Old computer facts (storage sizes) presented in handy infographic form? Sign me up!
- vitunes, a curses-based playlist manager. OpenBSD-specific, but may work on DragonFly. I like the look. (via)
- Video4Linux support is being worked on for FreeBSD, as apparently the headers are available without having to accept the GPL. This makes it potentially available to all the BSDs, which is nice.
- FreeNAS is moving to Linux, which is a mistake bummer. Except iXsystems stepped in and now FreeNAS is continuing as a FreeBSD-based item. A story that seemed bad but came out well, thanks to iXsystems. (Quick, buy their hardware!)
- “If you know of surviving software on 1/2″ tape, paper tape, cards, DECtape, etc. from users groups or computer manufacturers, please contact us. Equipment is available to recover these bits, and in some cases can be brought on-site.” (via)
- 3 BSD-themed holiday gifts.
- what.
Did you know you a Hammer volume can span multiple disks? And that you can add extra disks later on? There’s no RAID-like features – it’s just a straight multiple-disk volume, but it works. The Hammer command to do it is now “hammer volume-add“
There’s more people showing up for DragonFly at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress, in Berlin December 27th-30th. I’ve posted about it before , but it’s worth mentioning as the end of the year draws close. Speak up if you can join in.
A number of recent changes will be important to you if you develop on DragonFly:
- Sascha Wildner has added a indent(1) profile that matches what is usually done in DragonFly.
- Also, there’s a dragonfly.el for emacs users.
- Now new, but worth mentioning again: there is an excellent development(7) man page.
- Alex Hornung has ported and modified FreeBSD’s minidumps, so crash dumps can now be kept smaller than your total physical memory size.
Matthew Dillon has made version 4 of Hammer the default; the upgrade is a relatively painless ‘hammer upgrade’ command. This new version cuts out a chunk of the disk syncs needed, speeding up Hammer disk operations.
Please welcome the newest committer for DragonFly: Jan Lentfer.
Alexander Polakov has imported OpenBSD’s hotplugd(8). It monitors for hotplug-style events, like disk additions and removals, and executes corresponding scripts to handles those events.
It’s now possible to boot a vkernel using an NFS share as the root. Now, you can have a networked virtual system!
Aggelos Economopoulos has committed Jan Lentfer’s update of BIND to 9.5.2-P1. It fixes CVE-2009-4022, though that bug never affected DragonFly by default.
Thunderbird, in pkgsrc, has been updated to version 3. This means that if you don’t want to make the upgrade right yet, you’ll want to follow mail/thunderbird2. This won’t affect binary package users until the next quarterly release.
Alex Hornung pointed out that getting the Linux Test Project to work on DragonFly (using the linuxulator) would be a very helpful step in that same Linux emulation. Running the LTP does not require programming skills, incidentally.