News
Death of a contributor
Jon Birrell, a contributor to a number of BSD projects (primarily FreeBSD), has died. His friend and coworker Craig Rodrigues has posted a notice about his death, along with some memories. It’s always awful when someone dies, but it always strikes me about how when an open source contributor dies, it’s noticed, quietly, worldwide.
New i386 2.4 DragonFly build for pkgsrc-2009Q3
That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? There’s a fresh build of pkgsrc packages for 32-bit DragonFly 2.4, from pkgsrc-2009Q3, on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Utilities like pkg_radd should find it automatically. New builds for i386 2.5 and 64-bit 2.5 are on the way. (though pkgsrc packages built on 2.4 should work fine on 2.5.)
BSD Magazine online editions available
The recent PC-BSD and FreeBSD issues of BSD Magazine are available as PDFs. (via)
More links again
I like linkblogging, especially because there’s been a lot of good stuff floating about:
Matthew Dillon detailed some of the problems he had using hardlinks to create backups – problems Hammer solves.
The History of the Internet in a
Accessing Hammer config via NFS
Thomas Nikolajsen came up with some ideas for making the configuration files for a given Hammer volume accessible, even when that volume is being presented over NFS. He’s looking for more ideas.
Default SSH change
SSH, on DragonFly, now defaults to allowing root logins, but does not allow plaintext password logins. This is on new installs only, so any existing installations won’t be affected, even after upgrades. Plaintext passwords are under constant brute-force attack for some years now, so this is probably safer.
Notes on unprivileged building
YONETANI Tomokazu wrote up a nice bit of explanation about compiling src and pkgsrc as non-root. He even explicitly names some useful variables to set.
Progress with clang
Several people have been working on having DragonFly compile with clang. Alex Hornung’s updated the clang page on the DragonFly site for details; if this interests you, a conversation on EFNet #dragonflybsd may be in order.
pkgin, in
Sascha Wildner has added pkgin to the base DragonFly system. It’s still present as a pkgsrc package, so it’s manageable and upgradeable with the normal pkg_* tools. See prior discussion here for the history.
More less
Did I already make that joke? Oh well. less has been updated to version 4.3.6 from a patch by Jan Lentfer.