A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
This post on Blog Pseudoaccidentale described, by way of a parable, how many people think, incorrectly, they can’t contribute to open source. (The article says “FreeBSD”, but the rule applies to any open source project) It’s a matter of doing something, no matter how small, consistently.
I’d even use that analogy differently and say, “How do you eat an elephant?” Hint: see title.
(Thanks, Matthias Schmidt, for the link)
There’s an extensive article on “Unix’s Magical Moment” up on the O’Reilly site, with more details about that upcoming 1234567890 epoch time. That moment is probably happening very close to the same time you are reading this.
There’s a new issue of BSD Magazine out, and it’s (almost) all NetBSD. Apparently there’s been several issues, and I’ve been slack in covering them. (via)
Not only is there going to be BSDA exams available at AsiaBSDCon, but there is now a permanent testing facility for the BSDA in Brazil.
BSDTalk 170 has Marshall Kirk McKusick (His first name’s Marshall? Thought it was Kirk.) talking almost an hour of BSD history at the recent DCBSDCon. I’m assuming it’s going to be the first of several recordings coming from that event.
Matthew Dillon posted another summary of the road to the 2.2 release, scheduled forFebruary 15th. Among other things, this release will be available in a LiveDVD form which looks to be about a gigabyte in size with all the added packages.
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to give people money to work. (pdf) Specifically, they have USD $30K to give to people wanting to work on FreeBSD subsystems. Fight global recession!
EuroBSDCon 2009 is being held September 18-19th in Cambridge, UK. That’s a long way off, but they just opened their call for papers.
Art & Code is March 7th, at Carnegie Mellon. “Programming for Artists” – it’s cheap, and the output should be interesting. (via)
I like the smaller font size on the DragonFly website, because it packs in more information, but it throws off the visual balance of the sidebar. How about: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/testblock/ ?
@Play has a new column up, this one about “Spelunky”, a tile-based underground exploration game. This game’s new and has been getting some buzz; it’s a sidescroller game that has aspects of roguelike play.
Also, this column is the 50th @Play column and, at the bottom of the page, has a nice list of past articles by topic.
This has been all over the Intarwebs at this point, but: there’s a good rumor that the next Sidekick phone will be running NetBSD on the inside. Danger, the company that makes the Sidekick, was bought by Microsoft, which makes this a BSD-based phone produced by Microsoft. I never thought I’d type that sequence of words together.
The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on “Commercialization”.
A post from Matthew Dillon notes that development will go into a ‘mini-freeze’ for two weeks while the 2.2 release is put together, along with news of a DVD release for 2.2 that includes many prebuilt packages, and some Hammer details.
Dru Lavigne has an article up at Wazi talking about open source alternatives, on a product by product basis. I’m looking forward to part 2, where she will look at Visio alternatives. (via)
The Wazi site has some other interesting comparisons, too, on databases and licenses.
There’s a Xapian-powered search function on www.dragonflybsd.org now; it should be easier now to figure out where I shuffled everything.
You’ve got about 24 hours left to register for DCBSDCon 2009, which starts in 6 days. You should go, and pick up a DragonFly LiveDVD, among other things.
There is, as of this writing, 245 bugs listed in the DragonFly bug tracker. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert and other have been doing an excellent job of fixing/cleaning items listed there, but it can always use more input.
If you’ve posted something to bugs@, it’s in the bug tracker. Please, especially if it was fixed, make sure the ticket is closed.
University videos on How to Program a PDP-11. Watch and feel relieved at how far technology’s come in terms of convenience.
Recently noticed: OpenSSH 5.1, which was imported into DragonFly some time ago, reversed the preferred order for host keys from DSA to RSA, which will give you a changed host key warning when logging into a newly updated DragonFly host. If that bugs you, there’s an easy fix.
The most recent DCBSDCon blog post mentions that there will be FreeBSD and OpenBSD goodies for sale at the conference, plus DragonFly media. That’s me; I’m burning a pile of DVDs with a LiveDVD image of DragonFly 2.1, which should be freely available at the convention.
There’s RSS (and Atom) feeds available from the DragonFly website now – these feeds cover changes to the site, including the former wiki-only content.