A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The package x11-themes/dragonfly-wallpapers exists, thanks to John Marino, and gives you DragonFly-themed backgrounds in KDE. Or probably any other window manager, if you install it and point your wm at the directory.
Update: John Marino helpfully posted a link to the images. It’s not yet built as a binary, but it’s not exactly time-consuming to build from source.
It has finally happened: There’s no more IPv4 addresses left to allocate, at least for ARIN – and that’s going to affect most people reading this. Ask your ISP for IPv6 access. The next step is being forced to implement either wonky 6to4 mappings, or just plain IPv6 networks.
If you happen to still be running DragonFly 4.0 – that’s two releases ago and not supported – you may be noticing less ports are building. There’s been enough significant changes in DragonFly since that release that it’s reducing the number of buildable ports.
DragonFly 4.0 to 4.2 is not a difficult jump, so jump when you can. The converse of this, of course, is that there’s even more building on 4.2 and DragonFly-current.
I mentioned Endless Sky in the last Lazy Reading post as a game that might run on DragonFly. ‘Romick’ took that as a challenge and got it working; he’s posted the steps he took so that anyone else can do so.
John Marino’s committed libc versioning. He has a post describing it, along with a note that anyone DragonFly-current should do a full buildworld/kernel and also update all installed packages. (Update: those new packages are on the way.)
BSDNow 106 is up. The interview is with Nigel Williams about, you guessed it, multipath TCP. There’s the normal roundup and not a pun to be seen anywhere. I feel so confused!
If you missed last night’s DNSSEC presentation at CDBUG, here’s the slides.
Why buy ECC RAM? This is a discussion I’ve seen many times. I’ve always heard that without the error checking, you can’t tell if a random bit was flipped by a cosmic particle. That seems like a very remote threat. Over the last week, I went to Science North in Sudbury, Canada, and saw the Diffusion Cloud Chamber. I took a photo myself. Both of those picture represent an instant in time, and each of those squiggles in the chamber in that instant represents some particle zipping through space that miiiiiight scramble your RAM. That’s… a lot more common than I thought.
There’s been a bugfix-release to the release version of DragonFly, bringing it to 4.2.4. This is to fix a rare crash on issuing ‘shutdown -h now’. If you haven’t had this problem, there’s no rush to upgrade.
If you are sure you don’t need to look at your boot menu for very long in DragonFly, you can make it zip by quickly.
A DragonFly machine with a lot of network traffic will have a significant amount of memory consumed by all the running network connections. (as with any system) It’s now possible to adjust the amount of memory set aside for those operations, live. This sort of fine-tuning will only matter if you run an extremely busy machine, but it’s worth it if you do.
DragonFly ships with wpa_supplicant, for setting up WiFi. However, there’s no guarantee it’s the latest version. A solution exists: security/wpa_supplicant in dports. However, this has a chicken-and-egg problem, where you need wpa_supplicant to get online and download the dports version of wpa_supplicant. So, DragonFly still includes wpa_supplicant in the base system, but you should upgrade to the dports version when possible.
Hey, my stickers arrived! You can order your own.
There was a newer release of OpenSSL (1.0.1p) last week, so there’s a new revision of the DragonFly release – 4.2.3. There’s little major change other than the security fix for OpenSSL.
Those readers who can count past 2 may notice that there wasn’t a 4.2.2. We went straight from 4.2.1 to 4.2.3. That’s my fault. I screwed up tagging and Git doesn’t like repeated, deleted tags.
I don’t know enough about Erlang and LFE to say much other than “Hey, look at this article about installing LFE on DragonFly!” (via)
Something I’ve wanted for a long time: DragonFly stickers. Or ‘decals’, if you want to sound fancier. Markus Pfeiffer has them set up on Stickermule.
I just created an account there, and apparently I can supply a referral link which gets you and me both a $10 credit, if you use that. It’ll make you sign up, then you’ll probably have to go back in with the direct link for the DragonFly sticker.
BSDNow 096 has the usual new links, even more BSDCan 2015 video links, and an interview with Jun Ebihara about some of NetBSD’s lesser-known architectures.
(I like trying to guess the interview subject from each week’s obscure title; I was going to guess RetroBSD… which would make a good topic to explore.)
There’s a minor update for DragonFly 4.2 – this covers a problem with i915 support, so it’s worth upgrading if you have an Intel video chipset.
DragonFly 4.2 is officially released! You can go to the 4.2 release page for details, go to the mirrors page to download, or read my users@ post for upgrade steps.
Update: news stories and commentary seen on lobste.rs, Hacker News, and linux.fr.
