If you’re using DragonFly x86_64, and set LANG to something other than English, you will get crashes from programs using pkgsrc’s gettext-lib. Francois Tigeot has a fix which is going into pkgsrc, though I don’t know if this will show up in pkgsrc-2010Q3.
The 2.8 release hasn’t quite happened yet. But soon!
Siju George has been fleshing out his ‘afterboot’ style page, though now it’s “Environment Quick Start“. Good to look at if you are, say, installing a 2.8 DragonFly image.
DragonFly 2.8 (technically 2.8.1; see here for the .1 changes) is due to be released tomorrow. There should be at almost the same time pkgsrc 2010Q3 packages available. There will also be a LiveDVD for this release, too, though the window manager has changed.
Chris Turner posted details of how he gets jack (“a low-latency audio server”) to run on DragonFly. Your mileage may vary.
Whoops! This should have gone up last night. I’m almost waxing nostalgic for this one.
- Two words you never thought you’d see together: “heartwarming” and “single system image computing”. I think this is how we should document everything for DragonFly. (via)
- Apple’s bringing the App Store to the Mac platform, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Ani Dash has a writeup of the various “app store” platforms out there. pkgsrc (and FreeBSD/OpenBSD ports) would certainly count. Surprisingly, the application count for pkgsrc exceeds most of the other stores he lists.
- Aw, no more cassette Walkmans. (via) Nowadays, it’s difficult to not take music with you wherever you go. In the 1980s, there was no other way to bring your music with you, except maybe a lot of batteries and this. I loved my crappy JVC dual tape deck.
I am totally stealing the horizonal evocative image idea from things magazine.
There’s still no support for KMS/GEM on any most BSDs, though there are people interested in it for FreeBSD. One of DragonFly’s Summer of Code projects was just that, though it’s not in a state where it can be really used.
Scott Ullrich, who has worked on several BSD-related projects, including DragonFly, has something called vCloudBSD, about which you now know as much as me. It looks to be a FreeBSD auto-installer for virtualization, though I’m sure I’m overgeneralizing.
I’ve applied on behalf of DragonFly for Google Code-In. It’s similar to Google Summer of Code, but focuses on 13-18-year-olds and smaller tasks. It runs over the year-end, and we’ll know if we’re in by November 5th.
In the meantime, if you have ideas that could fit the program (see task list at the Google site), please put them on the DragonFly project page.
Alex Hornung has some patches that allow KDE4 to build on DragonFly. They aren’t in pkgsrc and not all in KDE yet, so try them out directly if you want KDE4, for now.
Update: based on something Alex said on IRC… they’re in KDE4 now.
The dragonflybsd.org website is a wiki (ikiwiki, to be exact) and any page on it can be edited. You have to create an account, first, which only requires picking a username and password.
However! If you have an account on leaf.dragonflybsd.org where it is hosted, you can check it out via git, edit any number of pages using your favorite editor, and commit it back and the pages will automatically rebuild. The commit will even show up like any other change.
Pratyush Kshirsagar has put together a website describing his proportional RSS work for DragonFly. He may have more content in the future.
DragonFly 2.8 has been branched, with the release anticipated for the end of this month. I’m building packages right now for it, so we should have binary packages ready at release. A convenient git-summarized changelog exists to track differences since 2.7.3, at least.
Something for everyone this week.
- Via sjg/IRC: The next platforms for DragonFly: Dragon 32 and Dragon 64.
- chmod -x chmod: a slideshow of possible solutions. (via) As ‘blinkkin’ pointed out on IRC: “hammer history /bin/chmod” and “cp /bin/chmod@@0xtransaction_id” would also fix it.
- 328 slides of git-wrangling tips (also via)
- How to pretend to be busy. I wish I had time for this.
- The first MUD, as a solution for class conflict, and not the fighter-vs-mage-vs-cleric type. (via)
Siju George found no equivalent of OpenBSD’s ‘afterboot‘ quick-start page in DragonFly, so he went and created it himself. Go, read.
Found via a random Google search: SSHGuard. It’s not available in pkgsrc, but it’s in other BSD packaging systems, and it lists DragonFly on the site as a possible host. It monitors various services and blocks access to overly aggressive connections using (on DragonFly) pf. This is similar to scripts discussed here in the past. It also may be useful in light of the recent FTPd problem.
Something that always got with with Linux binary support was that I couldn’t get the Linux /proc filesystem to automatically mount on boot. I’d end up doing it by hand later, right after I tried to start a Linux binary and had all sorts of issues. Pierre Abbat had this same problem, and Sascha Wildner has the answer: “linux_load=yes” in /boot/loader.conf.
For those using the release version of DragonFly, the new C-based loader in 2.8 will look like this. Well, not exactly. This is from a proposal from Alex Hornung that removes some extra lines, but I expect this is what you’ll see.
The 200th (yay!) episode of BSDTalk has 14 minutes of conversation with Kjell Wooding, talking about mg, a sort of teeny emacs included with OpenBSD.
Matt Dillon and Venkatesh Srinivas conspired to fix another nmalloc issue, which should resolve any remaining problems people were having with Firefox, and possibly other applications as well. Due to an oversight of sorts, all locking operations on nmalloc’s depot were ineffective, as if there were no locking at all. Curiously, it worked remarkably well considering such a large race condition was present.