Samuel Greear posted a progress report on his kqueue Summer of Code project. There’s code available now to try it out. It sounds grand, though I can’t identify what effects it will have for the end user.
CVS has traditionally been used to distribute the files in pkgsrc, but there’s been a converted git version for DragonFly for a bit now. It looks like there is now an official version (i.e. for everyone, maybe to replace CVS?) at Github.
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource magazine is out, talking about starting open-source based businesses. It also announces a name change, to “Technology Innovation Management Review”. The reason, according to the editor, is that the original purpose of the magazine was to explain how you could make money creating or using open source software. People seem to have figured that out now…
The question now is how do you make your (probably open source using) business grow. I totally believe that now based on the number of businesses that have sprung up based around open source software; it used to be much harder to find a commercial backer for a project that let you see the source code. Now, it’s practically commonplace. (examples added off the top of my head.)
We went from feast to famine, and now back to feast. grok.v12.su is back up and running, for your source comparison needs. It complements the one at pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org – plus it still contains source for multiple operating systems.
Note/update: grok.v12.su is having some problems keeping Tomcat running, so your mileage may vary…
I’m throwing this in as a late update as I catch up on what happened while I was on the road last week.
- Venkatesh Srinivas is doing The Right Thing and making sure patches get applied to the original software, not just in pkgsrc. (bitcoin, in this case.) Thanks!
- Hey, more reviews (they agree with mine) for Practical Packet Analysis, from other No Starch authors.
- RetroBSD: a tiny version of BSD, based on 2.11BSD and running on MIPS hardware, is available. That was the one that ran on PDP-11 systems, so the small footprint is no surprise. (According to the site) It uses a tenth of the memory, can run its own C compiler, and can fork. Apparently uClinux can’t do any of those things.
Your unrelated link for the day: Rotate Your Owl. (via)
BSDTalk 207 is 15 minutes of conversation with Mohammed Farrag about ArabBSD. It’s good to see open source being supported in a part of the world I daresay has been underserved. This is the Internet, so I say that without supporting evidence, of course.
(I have a lot of catching up to do; more posts soon.)
Posted in the past, for the future. I always build these up over the week, so if the links seem dated (as in more than 24 hours old), that’s why. My commentary will add the flavor.
- This NYT story about Dwarf Fortress has been linked lots of places, but I want to point out the one paragraph:
Growing up, Tarn was enamored of Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien, but he has never been a lockstep member of the geek culture so much as a wanderer on the fringes. He didn’t read superhero comics as a kid, and later, he never became obsessed with the “Game of Thrones” books, say, or with “Lost.”
Are you over 35 or so? Then maybe you remember a time when there wasn’t a designated ‘Geek Culture’. It’s something specific to a period in time, like when pay phones were still common, or when people were on average still thin. It strikes me that the interviewer assumes that a computer programmer should become consumed with a TV media event; that it’s part of what makes them what they are. It’s as if all accountants need to have brown shoes, and all artists have to wear berets and ‘get’ abstract art. Maybe I’m just hipster complaining.
- “...while Bell Labs’ parent company AT&T flatly refused to believe that packet switching would ever work” – Have I linked to Shady Characters before? I think so. Anyway, this is part 1 about the @ sign, and it’s of course talking about email and the early days of the Internet, back when it was the ARPANet. Be sure to check the references at the end of the article; it contains gems like this ad for a 65-pound portable TTY.
- Tim Paterson has a blog. DOS is his fault. Worth reading, for the early hardware details. (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
- Removing the Internet’s relics. An article about how FTP should die. It will… once there’s no place where it’s needed. Like gopher!
- Comparisons like this are usually cheesy, but this one made me laugh: Text editors as Lord of the Rings locations.
A not-yet-finished guide to setting up software RAID on DragonFly has appeared on the site from user ‘Markus’. Read and/or add to it if you are interested; I have always favored having RAID controlled by separate hardware, but this question on using software comes up repeatedly.
I put together a post on users@ about updating to pkgsrc-2011Q2. I’ll just repeat it here after the break:
There’s an OpenGrok install being set up at: http://pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org/ – right now it just covers DragonFly, but I think there will be more soon.
I recently saw some terse notes on tech-pkg@netbsd.org about compiling using clang for pkgsrc. I haven’t tried this on DragonFly…
Francois Tigeot has fixed wip/jdk16 to build on DragonFly. Note that this is in pkgsrc-wip, not ‘normal’ pkgsrc. The secret is to build lang/kaffe to bootstrap it, which requires CCVER=gcc41 to be set. Apparently kaffe will not build under gcc 4.4.
Why did he do it? To run OpenGrok, of course. He’s posted instructions on getting OpenGrok running on DragonFly. Note the Java crashes he reports in DragonFly 2.11 may already have been fixed.
p.s. I hated “Stranger in a Strange Land”.
Lazy reading is easy when it’s been this hot out. In fact, I may melt before this article gets published.
- Ecdysis – a NAT64 gateway program. I link to it for two reasons. 1: You will probably need to NAT 6-to-4 sooner or later, and 2: it uses PF and so is BSD-compatible. (via)
- Don’t not copy that floppy! (also via) My original Apple ][ disk for Castle Wolfenstein is probably no longer functional. Not that I have equipment to play it on…
- World timezones, as a visible map. (via) I mention time zone updates here on occasion, and this is a immediate guide to what a strange patchwork of zones it is. You can’t even see some of the really tiny/crazy ones.
- A crappy way to start your day. Nobody ever enjoys that call from work…
And now, a link that has nothing to do with this.
Background: You may remember some time ago, I posted a review of Michael Lucas’s Network Flow Analysis. He’s written several BSD books and so I figured it was worth reading further, knowing that this network-specific book would be BSD-friendly. Also, he made it easier by sending me a copy.
No Starch Press, the company that published all the books linked in the previous paragraph, asked if I’d read/review another book from them. This would be Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd edition. (Review continues after the break…)
I spied a bulk build of pkgsrc using clang. It’s interesting to see the results… It’s on NetBSD, but it should be possible to try the same thing with CCVER on DragonFly. Any takers?
Remember the benchmark tests I linked a few days ago? There’s been ongoing discussion about them, and a recent comment from Matthew Dillon sums it up pretty well: the benchmarks differ depending on whether you favor reads, or favor writes.
About a month from now (August 10-14), the CCC Camp is being held outside Berlin. Bring a tent and (I assume) something capable of getting a wireless connection. It only happens every 4 years, so jump on it now. There will be at least one DragonFly-using person there – Matthias Schmidt is going.
Irina Pre?a has posted a nice summary of the Google Summer of Code project “Checkpointing vkernels.”
One of the perpetual questions about Summer of Code is “Why can’t there be documentation projects?”, since most open source projects need docs as badly as code. There’s various reasons that I’m too lazy to research and type out, I’m sure, but Google is sponsoring a “Doc Camp“, in October. You don’t have to be in Summer of Code; you just have to be willing to spend the 17th through the 25th writing documentation. Google pays for room and board, and you can apply for transportation cost coverage. A classy idea, all around. Someone participate and report back!
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q2, has been branched. There’s no formal announcement yet to describe the highlights, but I’ll link it when it shows up. I’ve already started building binary packages for DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.