Category: Goings-on

Chriss Pressey announced the 2005.0721 version of the BSD Installer. This version can partition disks and leave existing installed operating systems intact. Also, the entire session is saved in a repeatable script that doesn’t even require the installer to run, similar to RedHat’s Kickstart or other technologies.

There’s more changes, and a new upgrade feature that needs testing. Check the announcement for details.

BSDCertification.org has a new newsletter out, and a monstrous 143-page summary of the Task Summary Survey they conducted some time ago. Interestingly, 3.8% of respondents use DragonFly at school/work, which is more than I expected in this part of the development cycle.

OnLAMP/BSD is back in action with an article on the latest trend: Live CDs, this time for OpenBSD.

Also, UnixReview.com has new material,including a number of book reviews such as “Silence on the Wire” and the goofy-sounding but probably useful “Spring into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists“.

It’s a slow news day, for once, so here’s a minor bit of information: a definition of “rollup” for patches.

By the way, it’s time to renew your The Perl Journal subscription. The magazine’s successfully survived a full year, even printing in dead-tree format.

FreeBSD has 18 different Google Summer of Code projects, one of which is integrating our very own BSD Installer, among other very interesting ideas. There’s a wiki with information on a few of the proposals. NetBSD is also particpating, though there’s no list of accepted proposals online, yet. (hubertf will probably have something soon.)

Update: There’s a SourceForge project for the NetBSD Summer of Code work. (thanks, anonymous poster!) Ooh! Someone’s working on zeroconf!

Sascha Retzki brought up the idea of using a neural network scheduler, which would be possible to add in with other schedulers, in the future.

I knew what it was, but I never checked to see what a phy looks like.

David Leimbach brought up a different journaling implementation that originated with Plan 9.

Updated: Matthew Dillon thought about this, and realized userland VFS is closer than he thought.

S/Key’s PAM module is out, so you may want to remove it from pam.conf.

(Corrected; thanks, Joerg)

Here’s a nice little summation of how to use the experimental ath driver (not in the base system).

The T1 for dragonflybsd.org is apparently having some trouble; it should be fixed soon.

Yeah, yeah, it’s for Linux, but it’s good to see a game review for a Unixy operating system. Many games will play on BSD as well as Linux, sometimes natively.

Speaking of reviews and such, the ONLamp BSD page hasn’t been updated for almost 2 months. Come back, ONLamp! The main site has an interview with Mark Breyer of Covalent about the BSD license, though.

Joerg Sonnenberger has proposed for the removal of S/Key from base. Would anyone object?

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s update rampage continues with an update to OpenSSH, bringing it to 4.1p1. Anyone want to update libedit, to match?

Hiten Pandya needs some disk space for DragonFly development. 300G would be enough, in the form of a RAID controller and multiple drives, or just a big IDE disk.

Man, drives are getting bigger and cheaper these days. Unfortuantely, somewhat disposable, too.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s crosscheck now has a search engine for commit messages.

Joerg Sonnenberger has updated his patchset for pkgsrc (link to diff file) which fixes FireFox compilation, among other things.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s “crosscheck” site is now available (again). It contains up-to-date source code for multiple BSD operating systems, to allow for easy comparison.

While it would be nigh-impossible to use DragonFly’s journaling implemenation within Linux or another BSD, it would be possible to have other operating systems able to receive the journaled data.