Goings-on – Page 46 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/05/23

NTFS vs. battlestar

Apparently the mail(1) and battlestar(6) source code caused a problem when checked out onto a NTFS volume. Sascha Wildner fixed it, and Alexander Polakov found an explanation as to why. How long has this problem been around? Well, look at the email addresses at the end of the man page for battlestar(6), for instance, or guess how long mail(1) has been around…

2011/05/232011/05/22

EuroBSDCon paper deadline looms

EuroBSDCon 2011, which is being held at Maarssen, The Netherlands, is October 6th through 9th of this year. If you want to get a paper in, the deadline is in a week – May 30th. Get a move on if you want to present!

2011/05/232011/05/22

OpenJDK to try

As noted by reader eirik in a previous story comment, OpenJDK 7 is supposed to run on DragonFly (i386). Anyone want to try this?

2011/05/222011/05/22

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/22

This week, the links are generally fun.

Hey, can this work on BSD? Cause this. (yeah, I know, hype.)
PC emulator in Javascript. Here’s how. From the same fellow who produced qemu. Here’s another level on top of that.
Michael Lucas has a summary of his experience at BSDCan 2011. His third point – anyone can experiment and publish results – is something I’d like to see. I love graphs, and I love being able to see quantifiable results.
The many slides for ’10 years of pf’, also from BSDCan 2011, are online. (via) The background images are entertaining, though it’s using that font. Slide 78 mentions that other BSDs have much older versions of pf. I think DragonFly’s running the newest old version of any of them, actually, though the slide doesn’t mention it.
There’s Gnome people saying “Ignore everything that isn’t Linux“. No, wait, it’s not that bad!
The history of the computer mouse. Something I’d always heard about, but not with this detail.
Git aliases. I don’t think it’ll save you hours of your life as the author claims, but it may be handy.
How to build your own gaming PC. The author went for funny and true, rather than the multipage exposition of out-of-date numbers and graphs that usually make up these articles.
Where the octothorpe came from. It has to do with Unix and telephones, which are close to the same thing if you go back far enough.
Speaking of Unix-ish stuff, here’s an interview with Ken Thompson, who recently won the Japan Prize for the creation of Unix, along with Dennis Richie. (via) Yes, it’s their fault!
“First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook.“

2011/05/21

Java and DragonFly

Here’s some recent notes on running Java on DragonFly; I may have posted something similar before, but it doesn’t hurt to keep the information out there.

2011/05/21

Updates: binutils, drill, Chromium

Several updates, all at once: Jan Lentfer has updated ldns/drill (changelog) to 1.6.9, John Marino has updated binutils to 2.20.1 (changelog), and Matthias Rampke has built Chromium 11 for DragonFly, and has a package available. I assume the Chromium version posted about here before was version 10?

2011/05/19

Sendmail, updates

Sendmail in DragonFly is now at version 8.14.15, thanks to Jan Lentfer. (Have you seen this new MeTA1 thing?) See the changelog changes for the nitty-gritty.

2011/05/19

LibreOffice for DragonFly

Francois Tigeot has got LibreOffice working for DragonFly. See his post for build/download details. LibreOffice, if you haven’t heard of it, is the recent offshoot of OpenOffice, with much less Sun/Oracle involvement.

2011/05/17

New pkgsrc bulk build results

I have them, for DragonFly 2.11/i386 and DragonFly 2.11/x86_64 (see pkgsrc-bulk), on pkgsrc-2011Q1. I think I even uploaded them correctly this time.

2011/05/16

DragonFly in Turin in September

Ferruccio Zamuner will be doing a talk about DragonFly at the Italian Perl Workshop in Turin, in September. It’s a free event. He’s working on slides, and is looking for feedback on them (I assume once he has them.)

2011/05/16

Device Mapper mirror page

Adam Hoka, a student in Google Summer of Code for DragonFly, has created a wiki page for his device mapper mirroring project. Not a lot there, but I’m happy to see the reference.

2011/05/14

Finding free memory

If you’ve used ‘free’ on Linux to find available memory, Steve O’Hara-Smith has described the way to do the same thing on DragonFly.

2011/05/13

Intel vs. AMD: a speed shootout

Matthew Dillon did some tests building both with an Intel i7 2600K and AMD PhenomIIx6 1090T CPU, and posted the results. He follows up with a note that the lower electricity cost of the Intel i7 makes it price-comparable with the AMD chip within a year and a half.

2011/05/13

A project reminder for the idle

For anyone who missed/couldn’t join Summer of Code, there’s still lists of potentially interesting projects, as Alex Hornung points out.

2011/05/122011/05/13

More on Hammer design

I mentioned it before, but Matthew Dillon’s updated his Hammer document, and posted about it. Read on, especially if you like extremely complex plans.

Edit: first link fixed, plus there’s a followup.

2011/05/11

Chromium on DragonFly: success!

Thanks to Matthias Rampke, Chromium builds on DragonFly. He’s posted with notes and even a screenshot, and has a working i386 binary.

2011/05/10

SSDs and how to portion them

There’s been some discussion on buying a SSD and how to match it with a hard disk, and/or swapcache. Follow the thread for more details.

2011/05/082011/05/04

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/08

Let’s see, what do I have now…

Did you know we just released DragonFly 2.1? Neither did I.
The AppleCrate II (][?), a set of parallel Apple //e systems. It makes me so happy. I love to see how ~~simple~~ uncomplex the old Apple systems were, almost at the level of programmable logic controllers today. I was struck by the fact that the Apple //e requires less than 5 volts, which means it could run off a USB port. (via lots of places)
Removing the internet’s relics: a call to kill FTP now that it’s 40 years old. There’s no easy alternative, though…
20 years of Adobe Photoshop. (via) Obviously that’s not found on any BSD platform, but almost every raster-based image editor out there tries to emulate Photoshop in some way, on every platform. It casts a long shadow. Plus, I remember the Photoshop 2.0 loading screen, so now I feel old.
Is tech blogging becoming worse? i.e not really tech any more? I’ve mumbled about this before, since this site is arguably a tech blog. Sites tend to diversify and lose focus to grow their audience. You can see the same pattern in the magazine market, back when there was a magazine market. You don’t have to worry about the Digest – I’m targeting BSD users, so I’m totally not growing my audience! (Joking, joking. Readership is staying even to slightly up, over the last while.)

On a separate note that has nothing to do with DragonFly: if you live outside the United States and have a postcard handy, can you send it to “St. John Neumann School, 31 Empire Blvd., Rochester, NY 14609 USA”? My daughters’ school is collecting international postcards this month as part of their geography lesson. It doesn’t have to have anything specific, other than be interesting to 8-year-olds.

2011/05/06

GSoC: kernel file descriptor event subsystem

And here’s one last writeup/introduction for Google Summer of Code projects on DragonFly: kevent part 2. (Apparently school exams prevented this from being written sooner.)

2011/05/05

BSD Magazine for May

The May issue of BSD Magazine is out. The cover says “Embedded FreeBSD” as a continuation of last month’s theme, but there’s really a wide mix in there. Of course, there’s a DragonFly news section from me, talking about 2.10. I’ll point at the zsh article that opens the magazine, since every zsh user I’ve met talks about zsh rapturously. Also, the iXSystems ad on page 2 has a rather fun illustration…