Blogging All About BSDs

The June issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the title being “NanoBSD and Alix”, but there’s plenty more articles in there.  DragonFly news is on page 25 – if this month is better for me than last month, I hope to have more in there.

Stéphanie Ouillon has posted extensive details on the Virtio Google Summer of Code project; a few questions are included for anyone who wants to jump in and offer feedback.

I added a Google “+1″ button to the site, over on the right.  Not that the site really needs it, but it tickles me that they’re using an old (but still in use) meme for this idea.  I’d link to places it was used on our own DragonFly mailing lists, but searching for “+1″ isn’t working too well.

Fresh from BSDCan 2011, an interview with Ingo Schwartze and Kristaps Dzonsons, mostly about mdocml.  (Which is already present in DragonFly.)

I moved to DragonFly 2.10 over the past few days, and I tried out deduplication, to see what kind of results I would get.  The procedure is outlined below.  I’m using /home here as an example, just to reduce the amount of text pasted in.

/pfs/@@-1:00004     966000640 566434576 399566064    59%    /home

Move my various Hammer pseudo-file systems to version 5,

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Whee!

• Do you like the Opera browser?  Apparently all it takes is a little misspelling to confuse it with a U.S. daytime talk show host.  The “Best of Oprah emails to Opera“.   (via)  Mistaken identity on the Internet is always fun.
• Popular free software licenses, described.  (via)  One of the better, non-polemic descriptions

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This new build is on x86_64, pkgsrc-2011Q1.  It’s already uploaded, if you want to update.  i386 coming soon.   Several packages freeze up during build, so it’s been turning into a manual process.

I managed to build openjdk7 on a DragonFly 2.9 system, and run a Minecraft server… but I can’t connect to it.  Anyone want to hazard a guess as to why?  I haven’t used Java much in the past few years, so I’m not sure where to troubleshoot.

One of the Google Summer of Code projects that will be valuable for DragonFly even though it isn’t a DragonFly project: “Add other package formats to pkgsrc”, where pkgsrc can interpret rpm, dpkg, and FreeBSD Ports files.  Anyway, the project has a Sourceforge site.

I haven’t covered recent disk encryption work evenly, here, so I’ll point at a recent discussion instead.  Alex Hornung mentioned a cryptsetup(8) man page that may help, as does any dm-crypt tutorial out there on the Internet.  (DragonFly has the same userland tools.)   The DragonFly installer will create encrypted disks at install time, too.

If you follow this thread, it has some discussion on how to handle a multi-disk setup and Hammer.  If a disk is going bad, you can try mirroring, though you have to be careful how your pseudo-file systems are set up.

The SMP option is now in the GENERIC kernel config.  This means you’ll have a SMP-capable kernel even on an uniprocessor machine, unless you configure a special kernel.

Apparently the mail(1) and battlestar(6) source code caused a problem when checked out onto a NTFS volume.  Sascha Wildner fixed it, and Alexander Polakov found an explanation as to why.  How long has this problem been around?  Well, look at the email addresses at the end of the man page for battlestar(6), for instance, or guess how

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The I/O APIC is now always on unless you say otherwise.  This may not make a clear difference to you, but enabling that kernel option has always been a somewhat iffy thing; working for some configurations and not others.  Now, it’s one less thing to worry about.

EuroBSDCon 2011, which is being held at Maarssen, The Netherlands, is October 6th through 9th of this year.  If you want to get a paper in, the deadline is in a week – May 30th.  Get a move on if you want to present!

As noted by reader eirik in a previous story comment, OpenJDK 7 is supposed to run on DragonFly (i386).  Anyone want to try this?

This week, the links are generally fun.

• Hey, can this work on BSD?  Cause this.  (yeah, I know, hype.)
• PC emulator in Javascript.  Here’s how.  From the same fellow who produced qemu.  Here’s another level on top of that.
• Michael Lucas has a summary of his experience at BSDCan 2011.  His third point –

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Here’s some recent notes on running Java on DragonFly; I may have posted something similar before, but it doesn’t hurt to keep the information out there.

Several updates, all at once: Jan Lentfer has updated ldns/drill (changelog) to 1.6.9, John Marino has updated binutils to 2.20.1 (changelog), and Matthias Rampke has built Chromium 11 for DragonFly, and has a package available.  I assume the Chromium version posted about here before was version 10?

I posted something about this before, but now it’s definite: bleeding-edge users of DragonFly can boot a multiprocessor kernel on a single-processor machine.