Blogging All About BSDs

This is the BSD-licensed version of libiberty, which was removed because it didn’t ever actually make it to being a replacement.

As noted in announcements, pkgsrc is entering a 10-day freeze period starting tomorrow.  If everything goes to plan, the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q1, will be released April 3rd.

There’s a DragonFly BSD group on identi.ca, the not-as-creepy-as-Facebook social site.

APIC support has been updated, so not only will some machines work better/at all with a multiprocessor kernel, more machines will boot.  Not only that, but Sepherosa Ziehau has a newer version of ACPI and interrupt routing available.  This is wonderful news!  We’ve needed this update for some time.

My first bulk build of pkgsrc with gcc 4.4 has completed; the results are available.   Notice that most of the errors are from checksum problems with downloads, not actual problems from the compiler change.  I’m starting a new build to see if the checksum problems go away with fresh downloads.

The Daemon & Penguin podcast has a new 50-minute podcast about GhostBSD, a FreeBSD/Gnome install, and a review of the horror movie Parasomnia.

For the curious, or for those who plan ahead, I posted what’s on the Google Summer of Code student application for DragonFly.

This all came together at the last second.

• The DragonFly Doji – unrelated, but I like the juxtaposition.
• I found it interesting to read this vinyl enthusiast magazine (PDF) and contrast it to BSD Magazine as a narrow-focus publication.  (via)
• Self-publishing a technical book.  (via)  Compare and contrast this with repeat BSD author Michael Lucas’s

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If you were thinking of working on a disk scheduler for DragonFly, this is your lucky day!  Brills Peng asked for some overall guidance on how to start on a Summer of Code project.  I threw out some general tips, Alex Hornung talked up resources on kernel programming, and Venkatesh Srinivas described exactly what you’d need to write

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We made it into Google Summer of Code for a 4th year!  (yay!)

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd

If you want to mentor, apply here:

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/mentor/request/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd

(You will need to create a login if you don’t have one.)  I’m assuming the applicants are going to be people I know with a direct history with DragonFly; otherwise be prepared to give a good history. 

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The newest BSDTalk has a roughly 15-minute talk with Dan Langille about the upcoming 2011 BSDCan and PGCon events.

This shouldn’t be a surprise considering recent events: AsiaBSDCon 2011 has had some event cancellations; specifically the tutorials and meetings.  The paper presentations starting on the 19th, and the banquet, are still on, however.  (via)

Google Search turned up something new: Daemon & Penguin oggcast.  It’s a podcast, with every episode covering something Unix-ish – usually BSD.  Each episode also reviews a horror movie.  It’s not a mix I would have predicted, but I can see how it would work.  The first oggcast has him installing DragonFly.

Samuel Greear has been working on a module to translate Hammer snapshots into Windows-style shadow copies, so a Hammer volume’s snapshots would be accessible when shared to a Windows machine, or anything that understood shadow copies, so Samba.

He’s put up his work so far; it’s not finished, but he has schoolwork to get to and wants to make

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A new page has popped up on the DragonFly website: How to Port to DragonFly.  The work is very thorough, and the author is ‘srussell’, which I think is Stéphane Russell?  Thanks, person who I may be misidentifying!

Edit: corrected name spelling

Nice big pile of links this week.  Enjoy the reading, especially if you’re still recovering from St. Patrick’s Day festivities.  (does that happen outside of the U.S.?)

• I like this “Insufficiently known POSIX shell features” item, because too many of the shell tutorials out there assume you have bash.  (via)
• The decline and fall of disk

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Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wish I knew more about kqueue!”  Well, here’s a link (PDF) from Vlad GALU that can help with that.

dragonflybsd.org is down right now, so if you’re looking for the Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly, I have a local mirror of that page.

Update: dragonflybsd.org is back up, but I’ll keep that mirror there just in case…

This month’s issue of BSD Magazine is titled “The Wonders of Blender”, but there’s a lot more articles in there with other topics.  There’s a two-page spread of DragonFly news that may look familiar to readers of this site…

The GIF format, or rather the LZW format it uses, is no longer patent-encumbered.   (GIF patent worries led to the creation of the PNG format, if I’m not mistaken)  Matthias Drochner has changed pkgsrc to use giflib instead of libungif.

According to Wikipedia, the patent expired more than 5 years ago, so this isn’t really news other than

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