DragonFly BSD Digest – Page 444 – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2004/01/06

Hostname, mixer, sound

A bunch of changes came in:

hostname now takes a -r option that will set the hostname based on reverse lookup of an IP address, or -i which does the same using the computer’s primary IP. It also works on IPv4 or IPv6. This very good idea comes from Kent Ibbetson.

mixer has had FreeBSD-5 changes added in. It now can take relative volume changes, thanks to Craig Dooley.

Jeroen Ruigrok added in support for the SoundBlaster Audigy and Audigy 2, apparently sourced from “patches by Orlando Bassotto, which were taken from the ALSA Project and the SoundBlaster OSS repository”.

2004/01/06

if_xname in

Max Laier’s if_xname patches have been commited; If I recall correctly, this allows for some different ways to refer to existing network interfaces. Here’s the original post.

2004/01/05

Booting Fun

Aaron Malone created a patch for src/sys/boot/forth/beastie.4th (now committed) that replaces the ‘beastie’ boot with a dragonfly. He’s working on a dragonfly ASCII console screen saver, too. Now we just need a graphical one too…

2004/01/04

pkgsrc pronounced passive

Michal Pasternak posted a plea for use of Pkgsrc to the submit discussion group. Given that he specifically said he wasn’t participating in that group and wasn’t going to do any work to make pkgsrc compatible, and that VFS is not yet complete, that’s probably as far as it will go. I’m editorializing.

2004/01/01

Lap relief

YONETANI Tomokazu reported his laptop was running very hot with DragonFly. The CPU was running when it didn’t need to be; Matt Dillon fixed this.

2004/01/01

Scheduler switch stuff

Peter Kadau has been talking about changing the userland scheduler (which could be done dynamically, as Matt Dillon pointed out) and a post out of that discussion by Matt Dillon does a nice job of summing up the differences between DragonFly and FreeBSD-5 process management.

2004/01/01

New-SB, clones

The USB system from FreeBSD-5 has been brought in wholesale. Matt Dillon reports his camera, hard drive, mouse, and memory key all working and un/repluggable.

Also, the network interface cloning API from FreeBSD-5 has been brought in, from work by Max Laier and David Rhodus.

2004/01/012006/03/25

Lotsa ports

Joerg Sonnenberger has been adding a lot of port overrides – freetype2, xmms, etc. Always make sure to check dfports first when you want to add software.

2003/12/27

Promises, promises

David Rhodus added the pst driver to the GENERIC kernel, so if you are trying to install to a machine using a Promise card as disk controller (for RAID, I assume), it oughta work.

2003/12/23

Exalting execline

Dan Melomedman, during a discussion about using/not using bash in the base system, pointed at execline as a better alternative to shell scripting.

2003/12/23

Sendmail, BIND updated

Sendmail 8.12.10 and BIND 8.3.7-REL are in, thanks to David Rhodus.

2003/12/22

NEWCARD test

Joerg Sonnenberger has a patch that takes NEWCARD (PCMICA card support) from FreeBSD 5 with the most recent hardware support. You’ll need his other PCI compat and bridge (sorry, can’t find a link) patches.

2003/12/20

USER_LDT on by default

The kernel option USER_LDT is now on by default, as it’s useful for ports like Wine, or mplayer, and will be needed for threading. Suggested by Craig Dooley.

2003/12/17

KDEbase builds

David Leimbach and others have kdebase from CVS building now.

2003/12/17

Yukon, not Cornelius

The Marvell Yukon chipset now supports multicast. A small thing, but I’m hurting for news.

2003/12/16

dragonflybsd.org down

dragonflybsd.org appears to be down, and the news server is not responding. I don’t know if this is planned or not.

Update an hour later: It’s OK.

2003/12/16

NVIDIA, RCNG, mailarchives

Not much happening right now. A few people have noticed that the binary NVIDIA driver doesn’t seem to work; big surprise there, with the system being in rapid change. Otherwise, puttering with the new RCNG services layout continues. In local news, I have the DragonFly mail archive mostly working now, including the kernel list.

2003/12/132006/03/25

bsd-airtools update

A dfports update for net/bsd-airtools has been committed; Craig Dooley noted that the device layout for DragonFly has changed, making this override needed.

2003/12/12

Even more RCNG goodness

Matt Dillon has enhanced the varsym/RCNG system to support the following “states” for various services:

running	The service is running
failed	A start or stop operation failed
disabled	The service is disabled
irrelevant	The server is not needed
configured	The non-process service has been configured
stopped	The service has been stopped

He also posted the following:

“Call for volunteers! There are many rc.d/ scripts which do not support ‘stop’. Things like sshd and rwho, for example. It would be great if interested parties could start adding ‘stop’ functionality to the more common services. Submit patch sets to submit@dragonflybsd.org”

2003/12/12

USEBSD SIG Session

From Murray Stokely by way of Matt Dillon; a request for papers about BSD system use to present this summer in Boston:

“UseBSD will be a one-day special interest group session hosted as part of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston (June 27 – July 2, 2004). The focus of UseBSD, as the name implies, will be on showcasing ways in which creative members of the BSD community are making use of BSD-on the desktop, in embedded applications, in corporate data centers, in computational clusters, in business environments, and more!”