Issue 5/2008 of the German FreeX magazine has an article by Ulrich Habel titled "Festspeicher statt Festplatte" ("hard storage instead of hard disk"). It illustrates how to replace your EeePC's 1.8" harddisk with a CF-card adapter, and install NetBSD on it.

BTW, FreeX is always looking for (german language) authors, too!

The daemon for handing bluetooth PAN that was proposed last week is imported in NetBSD-current now, and will be part of the upcoming NetBSD 5.0 release. Ian Hibbert has also updated the Bluetooth chapter in the NetBSD Guide with examples of a PANU (Personal Area Networking User) client. Ian will also continue to work on NAP (Network Access Protocol) and/or GN (Group ad-hoc Network), but that's some work todo. If anyone wants to help Ian out, feel free to contact him - see his posting for more details on the basic setup.

After a few days of offline-experience, here's a short summary of what happens that I haven't seen mentioned widely:

• NetBSD achieves permanent charity status: ``The Foundation has been a 501(c)(3) charity since 2004, but previously the status was given under an advanced ruling period, i.e. it was of limited time. The permanent charity status is also known as 170(b)(1)(A)(vi).

  Being a public charity is important to us, as it means that we are eligible to receive employer matching donations, as well as to enjoy the most beneficial tax treatment. ''

• Metadata journaling support added to FFS: ``In case of a crash or unexpected power loss however, the journaled file system will not need a lengthy file system check at boot time, but instead the kernel will replay the log within seconds. This allows faster crash recovery, less overall downtime and higher availability.

  Converting an existing system to use the log feature is as easy as updating (both kernel and userland), making sure the kernel option WAPBL is selected (this is the default for GENERIC kernels now), adding a ?log? option to /etc/fstab and rebooting. Note that WAPBL is not compatible with soft-dependencies, so please ensure that you first remove the ?softdep? option if present. See the wapbl(4) manual page for more information. ''

  Kudos for this go to Wasabi Systems, Darrin B. Jewell, Simon Burge, Greg Oster, Antti Kantee, and Andrew Doran!

• Uli 'rhaen' Habel wrote me that he wrote a blosxom plugin for gnats: ``During my work for pkgsrc I started to write articles for my blog and I referred to several PRs from the NetBSD gnats system. However I just wanted to type the PR in the form of e.g. NetBSD PR pkg/39230 and would like to have my blog software to link to the webpage automatically''.

  Blosxom is the blogging software that Uli and I use, and you can learn more about his GNATS plugin, and download it, here. (Apparently I didn't get to install this plugin yet, that's why you don't see a link on the above quoted text :-).

• Stefan Schumacher wrote me that the german magazine Die Zeit has an article on operating systems showing screenshots of several operating systems, starting with C64 Basic V2, going over MS-DOS and Windows to more esoteric ones like Mac OS X, Solaris, and *cough* BSD. Check the screenshot of the latter one! ;)
• Another one from Uli Habel: His (NetBSD|pkgsrc) blog is now syndicated on www.onetbsd.org.

  

• Wilhelm Buehler hints me at EuroBSDcon 2008: ``EuroBSDCon is the european technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. EuroBSDCon 2008 will take place in Strasbourg, France 18-19 October 2008 at University of Strasbourg.''
• There's an article by Warren Webb titled "Free software encircles embedded design" at Electronic Design, Strategy, News (EDN). The article starts by illustriating open source software as a natural (and cheap, or course) alternative to commercial systems, describes benefits of the development model and the wealth of applications and how they can be used in an embedded environment. It continues talking about licenses, tools, and alternatives to Linux, including NetBSD.
• Those into funky gadgets may like the MoPods may be for you: ``As if a little charm pet wasn't reason enough for being, the MoPods are actually practical. When your mobile phone rings or receives a text within a metre of your MoPod then the little blighter will get in a tizz, spin round and round and a little light will flash wildly in reaction. The perfect visual warning if your phone is on silent or you are in a noisy bar.

  Whether hung on your bag, your clothes, your keys or your mobile, MoPods are a must-have, or as they say in Japan, a "hitsuyou".''

• Back to our fine operating system: Ian Hibbert, who has written NetBSD's bluetooth stack, has worked on a PAN daemon for NetBSD. This allows to perform personal area networking in various ways:

  NAP

  Network Access Point is like an ethernet bridge

  GN

  Group ad-hoc Network is a NAP with no external network

  PANU

  Personal Area Networking User in both host (like GN but a single connection) and client (the device that connects to all the others) mode.

  All this will come in an upcoming NetBSD release (well, and FreeBSD too, it seems, as they like it :-) near you pretty soon, see Iain's mail to tech-net.

Mathias Schler has an interesting blog posting about the difference of using journaling on file system performance. The test he did was extracting NetBSD 4.0 sources.

• With plain FFS, the extract took 15:19 minutes
• With journaling, it took 3:24 minutes.

Spam: I've got a bunch of german-language books that I'd like to get rid of. Novels, some comics/mangas, no computer-stuff. For more information, click here.