Blogging All About BSDs

They are located in the normal place, in .img (USB) and .iso (CD/DVD) formats.  I haven’t made the desktop DVD yet; let’s see how these untested versions do…

http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/

Peter Avalos updated libpcap and tcpdump.  This is on master, not the 3.0 branch.

A bit of symmetry in that title, there.  Old ATA, which was replaced years ago, is finally gone.  This should affect nobody…

If you need to use ISDN with DragonFly, speak up now.  I think it may get tossed otherwise.

I received an email from No Starch Press about reviewing this book, and my first reaction was to say no.  I assumed this was essentially a book about using Bash, and therefore probably not useful to people reading the Digest.

I read it despite my knee-jerk reaction, and I didn’t need to reject it so suddenly.  Almost all of

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Note that it’s branched, not released.   I’m building and uploading binary pkgsrc packages for it now, and hope to have a ‘release candidate’ very soon.  This is the prep work before the release, really.  There’s a catchall ticket for tracking remaining work.

There’s a whopping 250 euro bounty up now on the DragonFly Code Bounties page.  It’s for supporting the newer Intel video chipsets, and there’s already examples in FreeBSD to start with.

(David Shao, where are you?  If you’re reading this, hop into #dragonflybsd and tell us how things are going with your GEM/KMS work)

I even have some comedy in here this week.

• Here’s some interesting ideas on improving the standard terminal window.  (via)
• Hey, a Windows Phone application that aggregates BSD news!  Including this one, I think.  No way to test it because Windows Phones are rarer than hen’s teeth.
• This article about Bruce Perens has some good quotes

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I’m going to have at least 1 book review up next week, 2 if I can make it.  I’ve done this several times now, so I’ve added a ‘Book review’ category so that they all can be found together.

‘Live dedup’, where a DragonFly system makes a deduplicative reference to copied data instead of actually copying the data, is now off by default.  There’s no definite issue linked to it yet that I know of, but it never hurts to be careful just before a release.

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.0g.  It’s so new I can’t find anything in the OpenSSL changelog to describe why there was an update, but I suspect it was this.

John Marino has added support for RELRO in DragonFly, which makes it the first BSD to have it.  That’s great news!  What is it?  Apparently a guard against memory corruption or overflow in the linker.  His commit message gives better details.

Matthias Schmidt found a discussion about DragonFly’s password encryption.  The result, if I am reading it correctly, is that brute-forcing the password from available hashes is quicker than it should be.  Matthias also found a contributed fix.  Samuel Greear updated to match the reference SHA implementation also in Linux, with this very pertinent warning.

If you liked KDE3, you may like Trinity.  Matthias Drochner would like you to help get it in pkgsrc.

Matthew Dillon has a very detailed commit message with changes to make sure Hammer will run overnight cleanups in situations as low as 256M of RAM.  I think you can find that much RAM in breakfast cereal boxes these days.