MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I was going to write about my progress with pidgin tonight.  Its now included in ports (2.0 beta 7) with 2.0 release almost working. 

I could write about how ctriv has fixed many of the ports in devel and several other categories lately.

That's not the big news though.  One of our largest hurdles has been getting a native web browser on MidnightBSD.  When I say native, I mean really native.  Opera was working before our mports fake changes, but that's technically a FreeBSD binary and it won't be "native" forever.  Tonight, I managed to get mozilla 1.7 semi working on my box.  Currently only the browser component (Navigator) is compiling with debug flags.  The fake and install targets aren't up to snuff yet so you can't install it just yet, but its possible to run it.  In fact, I'm writing this post from native mozilla!  Even after I get this working much better, we'll have to figure out how to unbrand it since we can't distribute official builds of their browsers. 

Archite did most of the work on mozilla.  He should get most of the credit. 

I don't know if we will make the June date for release or not now.  It might be possible to do it. 

The linux versions of these ports should be properly installing their linux-portname script to start them.  Previously, the path was wrong and set to a fake destdir.  I fixed this last night.  The port versions were not bumped though.  If you installed any of these ports before the mports changes, you don't need to do anything.

I'm committing a few improvements to src/sys/dev/firewire today.  Most of these changes were done in the FreeBSD project by Hidetoshi Shimokawa. 

I committed a fix for the architecture issue with the mozilla port.  Next step is to try to fix make package and work on some of the other "options" like mail, calendar, etc.

The other BSD projects seem to be actively working on SMP.  This could promote more code reuse between the BSDs. 

OpenBSD has added some nice UltraSparc III support.

Lastly, if you've been reluctant to check out ports since our big todo, this might finally be a good time to do it.  Quite a few ports do work now.  We've also started updating ports again with security updates and things. 

I'm debating what to do with the installer.  For the first release, we planned on using sysinstall and then writing a new installer.  sysinstall does not scale well in terms of adding distribution sets.  It uses a bit for each one limiting the total to 32.  Since we have a lot of packages to install for a desktop system this isn't very helpful.  The easy hack is out. 

While we're still working on it, I am now able to make install the mozilla browser.  We still need to get mail, chatzilla and other things working with it.

seamonkey or firefox would be nice as mozilla is a bit old.  I do hope we'll get there eventually.  Mozilla still runs faster than the linux browser on my system.

Special thanks to archite and ctriv for helping with this port.