John Marino’s written an extensive page about wireless and DragonFly, on dragonflybsd.org.
If you’re looking to change your DragonFly system’s keymapping to support a non-US character set, use this users@ post from Adolf Augustin as a cheat sheet to make all the right changes.
Matthew Dillon answered some mailing list questions on how clustering and data copies will work in HAMMER2 – no due date, of course, because this is very complex. If you’re really into it, there’s always watching the recent commits.
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the Locking and Synchronization documentation for DragonFly. Keep this in mind the next time you say “Which lock should I use for this new software/ported software?” There’s also locking(9).
The other day, I updated some packages using pkg. The default version of PHP went from 5.4 to 5.6. I ended up doing what /usr/dports/UPGRADING says and making a list of all PHP packages on my system, before removing PHP and its dependencies. I then reinstalled the packages that used PHP, bringing the needed packages back in at the right version. pkg 1.4 didn’t handle the transition cleanly, unfortunately. I also had to specify mod_php56 because pkg was trying to get the 5.4 version despite it not being default.
None of these are insurmountable problems, but it never hurts to be forewarned. pkg 1.5 is on the horizon and may have an easier time with sorting these types of dependency/version changes. This may apply to FreeBSD in addition to DragonFly.
I’ve tagged version 4.0.5 of DragonFly, and it’s available at your nearest mirror. This revision is mostly to incorporate the newest OpenSSL security bump.
OpenSSL has yet another security update, and Sascha Wildner has added it to DragonFly. It probably justifies a 4.0.5 release, so I’ll be working on that.
As a side effect of the new ipfw3 import, the sshlockout script included with DragonFly now has -pf and -ipfw options.
Some recent users threads pointed at SSD wear stats, along with what Matthew Dillon has seen on dragonflybsd.org machines, and good filesystem books.
Bill Yuan’s work on a new ipfw has been committed, and for clarity, called “ipfw3“.
Next time you’re building or installing world on your DragonFly system (running master), your computer will do a better job letting you know the status.
Matthew Dillon pulled in a new USB update from FreeBSD to DragonFly. What does it change? I’m not completely sure, but he did it to get apcupsd working, so that may be a hint.
If you have a HDMI-connected monitor, but no sound, this trick about increasing available memory may help.
DragonFly 4.0 has had a minor point release, to 4.0.4. There was a bug in the initial install where the rescue image installed on disk would be incorrect. This was fixed after the first time a build/installworld was done, but might as well have it start out right. There’s some other small fixes, and the release commit will show you the summary. Download from your nearest mirror or update normally.
John Marino has removed Sendmail from DragonFly (as part of the base system), and replaced it with DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent. If you just need delivery to local users, DMA will do the trick.
The announcement message covers what you need to do to deal with it (potentially nothing), and there’s more in-depth documentation to cover how to switch if you need more full-featured software.
The newest BSDNow episode talks with Sean Bruno about poudriere and QEMU. He’s using those tools on FreeBSD, but poudriere is useful for building dports on DragonFly, too. The usual news collection is there, too.
If you’re monitoring your DragonFly systems with Nagios, here’s a way to check the health of your Hammer mirror-streams. Thanks, Mike!
If you are on DragonFly-master and you upgraded during select hours on the 25th of February, you may have been bit by a makefile error. The fix, as listed in that link, is simple:
cp /usr/src/share/mk/sys.mk /usr/share/mk
If you are not on -master or you did not upgrade in that timeframe: never mind.
Michael Neumann has switched out pkgsrc packages for dports packages for building DragonFly with a GUI. There’s no built image to download right now, but I’m optimistic the next release will have it. You can build it now on a DragonFly system using src/nrelease. With all this video work going in lately, it will give us something to show.
If you’ve been sitting with a Radeon-based video card and wishing you had all the nice updates i915 users are getting, today is your lucky day. Michael Neumann has brought Radeon support equivalent to Linux 3.9 into DragonFly, and he has a 3.10 branch for testing if you feel adventurous.