NVIDIA, and 3D in general

Since DragonFly has been diverging from the FreeBSD 4 model, and because NVIDIA no longer produces a FreeBSD 4 X11 driver, there is no 3D acceleration for NVIDIA chipset video cards under DragonFly. It’s frustrating, though there are efforts to deal with this.

Looking at the latest version of xorg, there is mention in a few places of 3D support for more recent ATI cards, though it’s not reflected in the radeon man page.

Pesky multibyte characters

A little tip picked up from Liam Foy Adrian Nida on #dragonflybsd on EFNet: If you have a 16-bit UTF file, cat and less will read it with ^@ characters all through the file. The pkgsrc package converters/recode will allow cleanup like so:

cat file.utf16 | recode utf16..ascii > file.ascii

Update: Several people pointed out that iconv can do the same thing.

Atheros + WEP possible

Adrian Michael Nida has created a patch from Andrew Atrens’ work that will allow a Atheros-based wireless card to work on the current release of DragonFly and use WPA. Andrew Atrens does have some corrections. If you have this hardware, please give it a whirl; as patches for this have been around for a while, and it would be nice to have it in the tree.

Fun with cscope

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert gave a little summary of how he uses vim and cscope to view (without leaving the editor) a definition of the current identifier, and so on. Beats having to browse a separate archive, and it works without having to go out to the network.