Blogging All About BSDs

The Call for Papers for the 28th Chaos Communications Congress is out, as Matthias Rampke noted.  Each year, there seems to be at least a few DragonFly people there…

BSD Magazine’s September issue is out.  This time, I have an article in it about data recovery with Hammer:

We’ve all experienced instant regret. That’s the feeling that comes within a second of executing a command like “rm -rf * .txt” (note the space) or of cutting the wrong cluster of wires at the end of a long conduit. Not

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Sascha Wildner has updated ndis(4), the wrapper that makes Windows network drivers usable on DragonFly, with an extensive description of what’s changed.

It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America.  About time, too!  I don’t like the heat.  Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…

• Yet another git cheatsheet, this time for KDE.  (Via TGEN on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

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Sascha Wildner updated time zone files again.  It’s a regular thing, but I wanted to draw attention to this little change:

Samoa moves from east to west of the international date line (changes from UTC-11 to UTC+13). It will skip December 30, 2011.

2011/12/30 in Samoa will never exist or have existed, which is entirely odd.

Brills Peng has written up a nice description of his scheduler work for Google Summer of Code, with details on what it does, and how to try it out.  Best of all, he plans to keep working on it!

Sascha Wildner has added safe(4), which will help if you have a SafeNet chip on your crypto accelerator card.  Untested, so you know what to do if you have this hardware.

Another batch of code has arrived from Google Summer of Code student work.  In this case, it’s code from Adam Hoka’s “Implementing a mirror target for device mapper” project, committed by Alex Hornung.  I think there’s potentially more to come.

Ferruccio Zamuner is doing a lightning talk about DragonFly at the sixth annual Italian Perl Workshop, September 9th in Turin, Italy.   I mentioned this back in May, but now there’s a concrete date, and it’s about a week and a half away.

If DragonFly/x86_64 fails to install on your system, but DragonFly/i386 works, try again.  Sepherosa Ziehau has a fix for the keyboard controller that may make x86_64 systems boot DragonFly when previously they did not.

The next release of pkgin, the binary package installer for pkgsrc, is imminent.  I link to the note about this because the new features list sounds good, including a significant speedup.

Google Summer of Code for 2011 just finished, and there’s already source code from it showing up in DragonFly.  In this case,  scheduler work, including multiple schedulers.  I’ll have a more detailed report soon…

There are only 45 packages out of over 10,000 in pkgsrc that do not support being installed by people who aren’t root, or in different locations.  Thomas Klausner has that list of 45 packages.  It’s very close to zero packages with this problem at this point, so if you want to make a big difference…

As part of a larger thread, Chris Turner went into a longer explanation of how PPTP connections work.  Do you have PPTP working on DragonFly?  Please share details!

If you’re committing something to DragonFly, or even just working on your own Git repository so as to submit a patch, the new-to-me-and-not-actually-secret committer(7) man page has a lot of tips.  I’m linking to it because it holds a lot of information that otherwise would be something you’d have to soak up over time from the community, maybe.

Tim Bisson has posted a new batch of patches putting TRIM support into DragonFly.  He has a graph in there too!