A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The short answer is: works great. The version in dports lags, cause it’s based on what’s in the FreeBSD package collection, and that’s not updated as quickly.
This is technically the prerelease, since the official one is a few months off. TeX Live binaries can be downloaded directly for DragonFly.
This happened a little bit ago but I wanted to be able to post a solution to the pkg upgrade issue (yesterday) before mentioning it: there’s a freshly built batch of packages for DragonFly, so now is a good time to upgrade with pkg.
If you upgrade pkg on your system, it may start erroring out. This is because the default config will confuse the newer version. To fix this, you can copy over a working config and the problem will go away. I expect this may only be a problem until the next release.
Thanks to liweitianux, the mirrors page on the DragonFly site has been updated. Check again to see if there’s a mirror near you, if you haven’t looked recently.
The next release of DragonFly will be 6.0, mostly because 5.10 is an annoying version number rather than any significant version changes. We’re due to release by the biannual calendar schedule – but there’s a DRI bug that needs to be fixed; I plan to tag as soon as that’s done.
I’ve seen this multiple times over the years: if ifconfig suddenly stops working, especially after an upgrade. your kernel and world are out of sync. Rebuild and make sure you get both updated.
The ChiBUG monthly meeting has gone virtual, so go now if you are interested. The thread about it also includes some notes on how to connect under BSD that may be useful beyond this immediate event.
If you delete all your installed packages, you will also lose the certificate used by pkg to verify the connection to download new ones. There’s several workarounds for this problem.
A complete set of new dports binaries have been built, for 5.8 and for -current, so now is a good time to upgrade. Update to 5.8.3 if you haven’t yet, while you are at it.
DragonFly 5.8.2 was missing two CVE fixes – CVE-2019-1547 and CVE-2019-18408. They are fixed and the new 5.8.3 release has them.
See my users@ post for upgrade details.
Michael W. Lucas is doing a talk on Introductory Jails as part of FreeBSD Friday – mentioning it now instead of saving for In Other BSDs, cause Friday is tomorrow.
Here’s a recommendation (and a usage lesson) on pkg-provides, a tool for matching a file to the installed pkg that brought it. It goes with the pkglocate article some weeks ago; it seems like this should be standard functionality. Thanks to Nelson H. F. Beebe.
Screen switching, where an xterm’s contents return to what it was before starting a full screen program, was turned on and then back off for DragonFly. It would have only affected DragonFly-current users, and even then only for a short window of time. If you encounter it anywhere else, though, here’s how to turn it off using Xresources.
There’s work being done on a DragonFly hypervisor, based on NVMM. The theoretical next milestone is tomorrow.
Vincent DEFERT put the DragonFly handbook and other notes into epub format, and you can download them now.
As part of installing DragonFly, Jonathan Engwall happened to create a script to install every part of xfce4 that he wanted. I’m linking to it in case you want it too.
(xorg and web browser install not included)
For those of you who like csh, or are too lazy to switch away from it, it now includes the current directory in the prompt on DragonFly. Another of those “hey, this can still get updates?” moments for me.
This can’t wait for the In Other BSDs weekend: ChiBUG is meeting at Giordano’s, in Oak Park, 6 PM on the 11th. Go if you are anywhere near Chicago.
It’s odd to think this, but the process of swapping out something entirely from RAM perhaps doesn’t really apply any more (except for compatibility).