BSDTalk was recently linked here interviewing Randal Schwartz. Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte, who create a podcast called “FLOSS 101 Weekly”, now have an interview with Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler about pfSense. (via) It’s a nice bit of symmetry, and Scott was an early contributor to DragonFly – specifically, the installer.
Everything that _why the lucky stiff did. (via) _why is one of those things that only the Internet lets exist. And he used DragonFly!
Roguelike games, evaluated via the Berlin Interpretation, on @Play. Also, a dedicated Roguelike handheld?
Naoya Sugioka is working on bringing tmpfs to DragonFly – I am a big fan of that idea.
top now uses CTIME, not WCPU.
BSDTalk (4 years old!) has 24 minutes of talk with Randal Schwartz, talking about a whole pile of different subjects. I met Randal before – he’s a decent guy.
A recruiter found me through my administrative role for DragonFly in Google’s Summer of Code, and passed along a job description. I’ll paste it after the cut. If you’re looking for a job (or know someone who might match this job), contact me and I’ll pass contact information around.
Edit: The recruiter has a similar but non-BSD job also available…)
Man, I hope this works out. In the job climate we’ve had the past year or so, helping someone get a job is very fulfilling. Plus, the job sounds cool…
I didn’t set anything up with the Digest and tumblr… Please speak up, if you did it. (found via Google)
Avalon.dragonflybsd.org was power cycled, so pkg_radd works now, as does git.dragonflybsd.org.
I love love graphs, and Alex Hornung has created a graph showing the lock contention on a DragonFly system during a buildkernel. (ganked from EFNet #dragonflybsd on IRC)
avalon.dragonflybsd.org is temporarily down, so pkg_radd will not work unless you set $BINPKG_BASE to a new mirror.
Following a link from vitunes (which has been updated), I see vimprobable, a vi-ish web browser. Interesting both for its relentless focus on keyboard controls, and for its old-style quietly angry help (from the FAQ):
How will I know if a website is genuine without a phishing filter?
Use your brain.
Also along the same lines, vimperator.
BSDTalk 182 offers a very timely 12 minutes of talk with Josh Paetzel of iXsystems, talking about the recently not-BSD then BSD-again FreeNAS. (see previous item)
Speaking of iXsystems: they have a new facility.
Alexander Polakov has suggested that nvi (what you get when you type vi) should be replaced with traditional vi, since that would deliver UTF-8 support, and nvi appears to no longer be updated. Other than one objection on split screens, I daresay everyone who needs more features treats the system vi as a fallback and has moved to a new editor. (or that)
Jan Lentfer has created an update for ncurses in DragonFly, but wants further testing. Give it a try if you use a curses-based application.
The freeze for pkgsrc-2009Q4 starts December 16th, which means the tentative date for the branch release is right at the start of the new year.
The package for libtool has been updated in pkgsrc, which touches almost every package. If you follow pkgsrc-current, that may mean a lot of packages get dragged in for upgrades.
In somewhat less eventful news, postgres 8.4 and python 2.6 are now the default versions of Postgres and Python in pkgsrc.
I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to this before, but: Oliver Fromme has a graphical bootloader (see example) which can work on DragonFly. I’d love to see this on DragonFly.
Coincidentally, this article makes an argument for graphic improvements for BSD systems in general that I agree with.
Several people really want a USB update, even offering a bounty. Alexander Polakov has volunteered himself for it – a large but worthwhile task. It’ll be the USB4BSD code, as Alex Hornung recommends.
Open source is good for clashes, and the latest is a vote by GNOME on whether to continue as a GNU project. (via) The triggering event appears to be a request from Richard Stallman for GNOME to not mention software that isn’t open source.
The long-term problem with something like that is that closed source software doesn’t go away if you ignore it. If people want to talk about the closed-source software they are using instead of open-source material, then you have to make the open-source software worth talking about. Programs don’t improve by beardo fiat. Plus, it only makes a difference as long as the producers are the consumers of the same software. (via)
Proposed changes in pkgsrc:
- JDK 1.4 and perhaps JDK 1.5 will be removed.
- Kerberos 4 also will be removed.
- There’s not too many packages without DESTDIR support left; please help if you can. (DESTDIR support means being able to install packages as non-root, to other directories.)
- Testers are needed to test the Perl upgrade to 5.10.1, and SpamAssassin 3.3.0beta1.
Please follow each thread; they’re still in progress, so some of those removals may get canceled, or testing completed by the time this is read.
I’ve been building this entry up for a while, so some of these entries are newer than others.
- From the howling void: OpenSolaris or FreeBSD. I’ll admit I haven’t tried OpenSolaris, but I’m also biased to BSD.
- cpdup, originally-on-DragonFly software, has had an update.
- This description of the Content Pyramid talks about web content and links, but it could be stretched to open source software. There’s always been an implicit value to being at the top of the pyramid – hence the prestige not always fairly attached to “the commit bit”.
- Old computer facts (storage sizes) presented in handy infographic form? Sign me up!
- vitunes, a curses-based playlist manager. OpenBSD-specific, but may work on DragonFly. I like the look. (via)
- Video4Linux support is being worked on for FreeBSD, as apparently the headers are available without having to accept the GPL. This makes it potentially available to all the BSDs, which is nice.
- FreeNAS is moving to Linux, which is a mistake bummer. Except iXsystems stepped in and now FreeNAS is continuing as a FreeBSD-based item. A story that seemed bad but came out well, thanks to iXsystems. (Quick, buy their hardware!)
- “If you know of surviving software on 1/2″ tape, paper tape, cards, DECtape, etc. from users groups or computer manufacturers, please contact us. Equipment is available to recover these bits, and in some cases can be brought on-site.” (via)
- 3 BSD-themed holiday gifts.
- what.
Some of the ikiwiki configuration files on dragonflybsd.org were accidentally overwritten during a software upgrade. Normally this would mean some work to locate and replace them from backups, but since it was a Hammer volume, a quick look in /var/hammer/usr/… found them for me.
I want to point out what Hammer does, here. Restoring from backup isn’t new – it is in fact probably one of the most basic and necessary of system administration duties. However, Hammer makes it so easy that the incremental work of using it falls to almost nothing. There’s no extra preparation or syntax to learn for retrieval, which is wonderful. Hammer’s easy fix has helped me out several times now, saving me time that, while probably still successful with any other backup system, would have been taken up just restoring things back to normal.