As planned before, I am now downloading DragonFlyBSD’s live iso and tend to install it soon.

I have posted a question on kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org about this. In fact, I received a useful suggestion from Joerg, one of major DragonFly committers, as I can mount DF’s live CD under FreeBSD and then load it into another partition. I’ll have FreeBSD prepared the partitions and then, label it with DragonFly’s own tools. A cvsup will be run after this, and then sync the repository, a buildkernel/buildworld will start soon after this.

DragonFlyBSD is essentially a fork from FreeBSD 4-STABLE last year. The project lead, Matthew Dillon is respected because his outstanding work on FreeBSD’s VM area. The major committers, hsu (Jeffrey Hsu, or XU, Minjie) and hmp (Hiten Pandya) are also committers at the FreeBSD camp. Matt was a FreeBSD committer too, until February 2003, core@FreeBSD has removed his commit bit for undisclosed reason, they kept this secret because it was considered to be “dirty liene”.

The DragonFlyBSD has a different design in the kernel synchorization mechanism, and a much higher step adopting new features from both FreeBSD 5-CURRENT and other BSD’s. It seems that FreeBSD and DragonFly are going to heal the fork by merging code apply to the counterpart. Matt often send his suggestion to FreeBSD and there are also many people (I am among these ;) ) to send headups to DragonFly in order to get FreeBSD 5-CURRENT features to DragonFlyBSD.

I’m not really sure whether Matt’s approach is better or not, however, I believe that difference is important and hence it is valuable to have an actual installation of DragonFly. I have already left 20GB of space for DragonFly’s partition on my disk, which is half of the old disk.

By this time, it is necessary to install DragonFly by hand. There’s a brief instruction on how to do this on every live CDs.

Finally I really hope we can see Matt back, while this seems to be impossible in the near future, I wish DragonFly a good success.