A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
UnixReview.com has a number of new articles:
– A review of the new “MySQL in a Nutshell” book, complete with a link to a sample chapter.
– An examination of the Cisco CCIE certification.
– And, something I didn’t know could be done: tracking the mouse with a shell script.
Matthew Dillon sent out notice of his recent journaling work, which now actually works for mirroring a partition. He sent another update, with more details.
For those readers who didn’t read the original description of journaling, this is different than the usual “fast reboot” version of journaling that other operating systems have. This scheme is intended to allow for rollback to arbitrary spots in disk history, or mirroring of data to other drives or other network locations.
If you’re having trouble with a Serial ATA controller, try setting it in BIOS to “compatibility mode”. This problem has hit a few people.
UnixReview.com has a new book review up for “Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization“.
Most third-party software work for DragonFly seems to be happening with pkgsrc these days, but Andreas Hauser is still building packages for DragonFly using the FreeBSD ports system. Pick one of the libc.so.4 directories if you’re running 1.2, or libc.so.5 if you’re on the bleeding edge of DragonFly development.
OSNews has an interview about what’s planned for FreeBSD. Not much bearing on DragonFly, other than it’s interesting to see where the design goals match and diverge.
Matthew Dillon hints that using polling may be a way to get a finicky PCMCIA network card to work.
Hiten Pandya describes ‘makewhatis -o local-manpages.txt‘ as a quick trick to make a reference list of available utilities.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert is looking for people willing to test his DRM/DRI changes; if you’ve got a 3D card (ATI Radeon, Matrox, etc.), contact him for instructions on testing.
UnixReview.com has an article on some miscellaneous tasks that can be accomplished with some clever shell scripting.
George Georgalis put together a little note on getting a cvsup daemon running.
The Handbook is at 828 7″x9″ pages, going by what Jeremy Reed produced. (Link goes to a PDF.)
Jeremy C. Reed, of bsdnewsletter.com fame, is the newest DragonFly committer, and has been tackling the dangerous task of documentation!
Chris Pressey announced a new version of the most excellent BSD Installer. Among other changes, it is rewritten in Lua, allows kernel module loading, gettext support, and … go read the announcement yourself.
The wiki has a HOWTO document on Icecasting on DragonFly, contributed by Adrian Nida.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert posted these steps for trying out gcc 4.0, which is in DragonFly but not yet part of the build process.
There’s 28 BSD projects in Google’s Summer of Code project. The 8 NetBSD-sponsored projects are already listed. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer.)
Chris Coleman has BSDUpdates.com, with free binary security upgrades for FreeBSD 5.3. There’s a good description on BSDNews about the service, though it doesn’t cover how it works in-depth. “BSDUpdates” suggests that this may be extended to the other BSDs at some point; it’d sure be handy for DragonFly once the development pace slows.
Joerg Sonnenberger is working on pkgsrc for DragonFly, as are a number of other developers; you can obtain his latest changes at: (Caveat emptor!)