MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I've updated our cafepress store with new items. Some of the items now include a picture of Midnight the cat. I've ordered one of the green t-shirts with midnight on the back. I'll take a picture when it arrives.

http://www.cafepress.com/midnightbsd

The calendar is pretty cute.

http://www.cafepress.com/midnightbsd.162548881

I did a bsdtalk interview yesterday. I'll post a link when the interview is live. It will be on http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/

We've added nwcc to mports. The current version in mports is not designed for everyday use, but we hope to help find bugs and such. Eventually, it might be included in the base system. There is a newer version on sourceforge with bug fixes. We'll be adding that as a devel port later. This version requires nasm or yasm (depending on arch).

Obviously we will still ship gcc in some capacity for GNUstep development.

Most of the Etoile ports have been fixed.

x11-themes/etoile-camaelon is still broken. It is looking for a header that does not exist in newer GNUstep releases. The Etoile project has a fix in their SVN repository. One of our new developers, Seirei@ has offered to update the Etoile ports to a newer version. (0.2) He's started working on that.

I'll post an update when we have everything back in action.

Since the release, we've had quite a few reports on broken or misbehaving ports. We've been working as quickly as possible to fix the ports and in some cases update them to newer versions.

We've fixed several ports including some of the GNUstep related ports, and some of the KDE ports. Opera and linux-opera were updated to 9.23.

Ports with problems:

GNUmail is known to be broken. It crashes on most systems.

Subversion was updated to 1.4.4 and it works except for a few of the non default options like mod_dav_svn. We're still working no that port

KDE3 meta port sometimes fails. A file with the configuration information is copied into /usr/local instead of the fake directory. copying the file in the right place fixes that port enough to install. We'll fix that when we get time to test it thoroughly.

Firefox (native) is flat out broken.

Seamonkey (native) only works as a browser. The other features (mail, ldap, etc) are broken.

Mozilla (native) works with everything except LDAP.

Gorm and ProjectCenter fail on some systems and work on others. We haven't determined the cause although it started after we upgraded the GNUstep ports.

The GNUstep cd player port was reported broken.

Most of the Etoile ports are not working presently. They all need GNUstep 2 + fake fixes. I'm going to look at that soon.

plus any bug reports in bugzilla.

Working:
compat4x was fixed today.
aspell can fetch files again.
qmake
all shells in ports work
limewire
linux-realplayer
freebsd binary java ports
poppler-qt
poppler (path fixed for include files)
apache 2
apache 2.2
lynx
links
neon
perl
linux-firefox
linux-seamonkey
linux-thunderbird
xorg
ruby
python 2.4
mysql 4.1, 5.0, 5.1
bind 9.3.x, 9.4.x
sendmail
spam assassin
pine
pico
emacs
vim
terminal.app
textedit.app
windowmaker
wterm

plus many other ports.

I think the last estimate was 1,300+ ports total (working and broken)

I've added some DNS entries tonight.

ftp.midnightbsd.org maps to stargazer (but this may go round robin soon)
ftp1.midnightbsd.org maps to stargazer (our official ftp) which is slow.
ftp2.midnightbsd.org maps to the ISC mirror
ftp3.midnightbsd.org maps to the ALLBSD mirror.

It has come to my attention that the MidnightBSD 0.1 release iso does not work on Parallels if the VM mode is set to any form of Windows.  Make sure you create a new VM with FreeBSD 6.0 selected.  I've tested this on a Mac Pro. 

Obviously, releasing an operating system is a very complex process. We've made several mistakes in the process.

1. Our testing methods are not sufficient.

Several issues were found just after release. Packages for the release were not tested on another machine before it shipped. (big mistake) Several ports were broken that we didn't know about. mports was not included in 0.1-RELEASE, but rather the old method of gererating ports.

To clarify, bsd.port.mk was being used instead of bsd.mport.mk. This single difference results in most of our ports not working. There are assumptions in our ports. We could fix each port, but how do we detect the OS version? OSREL won't catch the fixes we made right after release in RELENG_0_1 and the kern.osreldate is not incremented yet.

2. The videos needed to be posted on mirrors and/or google video. The most common complaint we get in IRC is that our videos were hosted on our own site and their size. These videos were generated on a Kodak digital camera which creates quicktime videos using a very old codec which does not compress well. It is 640 x 480 video with sound. Today, I moved the install video links to google video and the demo is on a mirror with a faster pipe.

3. mports don't work. Quite a few mports were not fetchable or had other build problems. We don't have an automated build/testing system setup yet for MidnightBSD ports. There is no tinderbox/pointyhat for us. We don't have the hardware to make a massive build cluster. Thankfully, a few new users have been testing ports and reporting success/failure to us. We've fixed over 20 ports reported to us and found many others that had bugs. Several ports (particularly database ports) have been updated this week to new versions. We know these ports work in CURRENT, but testing on 0.1 is still not adequate. They *should* work with post 0.1-RELEASE ports fixes. I'm setting up an old HP Pavilion 700mhz system with a refurb Western Digital drive today. (yes a drive failed on me during this process) WD sure waits to ship a drive during an RMA.

4. We are not even close to usable yet for the average joe. The majority of issues reported to us are actually usability issues. People have trouble with the website, installation, installing ports, and other issues. One of our goals is to make things easier and we have failed in that quest to date. I promise it will get better.

We take bug reports seriously. If you have trouble doing something, using something or even surfing our website, report it to us. You can use http://bugreport.midnightbsd.org/ (preferred) or post it to our mailing list midnightbsd-users@midnightbsd.org. Subscription to the list is not currently required to post to it. This may change if we get a lot of spam, but for now it is easier to get reports. Please feel free to ask questions on this list. It's like freebsd-questions and freebsd-hackers rolled into one plus some bug reports.

5. Hardware support

We do not have a list of supported hardware for MidnightBSD. As a rule of thumb, if it works with FreeBSD 6.0, it will work in MidnightBSD. In some areas, we are near FreeBSD 6.2 hardware support. ATA and sound are current. Video card support is comparable although we have xorg 6.9 instead of 7.2. Intel gigabit network support is a little behind. Intel ICH8 boards like the intel 965LT work (i have one). ICH9 support has not been merged in yet. Wireless support is not that good. We do not yet have the FreeBSD firmware loading stuff in place so loading support for newer Intel wireless or other vendors is not there yet. My laptop has a broadcom wireless adapter (linksys) and it's working with ndis wrappers, albiet a little buggy at times.

Intel Macs do not work with MidnightBSD. Mac Pro and MacBook Pro systems are known not to work. We have not tested MacBook, iMac or Mac Mini systems with MidnightBSD.

Cross compiling for PowerPC is also not working properly for G4 based systems.

I've tested MidnightBSD on Mac Pro, Dell Precision 650 workstations, home built systems with the intel 965LT, a ThinkPad T30 laptop, a Dell poweredge 2300 (p3 xeon), HP Pavillion 700mhz celeron, a compaq with a cyrix 366mhz (i think it was) chip, an iBook G4, and a Sun Ultra 10 3d creator.

The Macs didn't work. The Dells work perfectly with all devices including SCSI working. The IBM Thinkpad does not "sleep" properly, but everything else works. The HP and Compaq work as expected. The sun system worked early on but died on me last september or so. I don't know the current state of sparc64 support. The intel board has not been tested with sound, but everything else works. I have a creative labs soundblaster audigy gamer in there (audigy 1) and it works in i386 perfectly but amd64 causes weird problems during DVD audio playback.

----

Remember, this is our first release and we selected 0.1 for a reason. Until MIdnightBSD hits 1.0, don't expect it to be ready for regular people.

RELENG_0_1 includes two fixes with issues found in 0.1-RELEASE. The first update fixes the CVSUP standard-supfile example (see http://www.midnightbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/src/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfile).

The second update turns on the new mports system. 0.1-RELEASE uses the older bsd.port.mk file. Packages built for 0.1-RELEASE relied on the old system as well.

It is recommended that users install the new gettext package from our FTP server or build the port and replace the version included on the install CDs. This fixes several problems with the ports not running with missing libraries.

The m4 port was backed back down to 1.4.9 to fix some issues with older software requiring automake/autoconf in mports.

Submit any bug reports using http://bugreport.midnightbsd.org/ or midnightbsd-users@midnightbsd.org

Finally, the ISC mirror finished rsyncing.

Apparently, we were featured in an article.

http://www.cul.de/data/freex52007inh.pdf

We are proud to announce the first RELEASE of MidnightBSD for 32bit Intel systems. (Intel Pentium, Core, AMD Athlon, etc) .

http://cs.emich.edu/mbsd/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/0.1/
(rsyncing right now)

http://www.midnightbsd.org/ftp/MidnightBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/0.1/
(official mirror)

Here is a list of issues with the release:

ERRATA

Installation issues

projectcenter.app package is missing dependancies on disc2.
mutt package is missing urlview dependancy on disc2.

GNUstep package includes gdnc which is missing libgcc_s.so.1.

bash 3 and gmake missing libintl.so.6. This can be fixed by uninstalling gettext and building it from the port. The port is not including the shared library for some reason. We are investigating.


System issues

CVSUP example for updating src fetches CURRENT instead of RELENG_0_1

Using Virtual PC for Windows:
If you install MidnightBSD in VPC, you will need to set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" in /boot/device.hints This will help with the "calcru: negative runtime of" issue.

I've already tagged the release.  It's the first time I've done this so expect a few hiccups.  The i386 version should be out in the next 24 hours unless something weird happens.

I already forgot something.... the example csup file is wrong..
http://www.midnightbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/src/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfile?annotate=1.2

So here's what I did do:
RELENG_0_1_0_RELEASE is tagged
mports was tagged as RELEASE_0_1_0
src/sys/sys/param.h was bumped.
changes were made to various files in src/release
sysinstall was altered so that several documentation menu entries are not present.  This release does not include documentation (beyond man pages).

If there are any glaring issues, I'll do a 0.1.1 release.  Remember this is a 0.1 release for a reason.  It should be fairly stable, but there are many things we have not done yet.  0.1 does not use many of the mports changes and things of that nature.  Users interested in that will want to move to CURRENT (0.2). 

A few closing words, try to download from a mirror!

We're working on last minute fixes before the 0.1 Release.  Most of the issues are in ports.  I'm test building some packages and hope to get the new ones on the FTP server in the next 24 hours. 

All security issues have been dealt with in 0.1 and CURRENT that we are aware of at this time.  There are quite a few out of date ports.  I'm trying to patch ports with security issues first.

CUPS was at 1.2.7 which is quite out of date.  I've managed to update it to 1.2.11.  The new version fixes several security issues.  The MUTT port has some issues.  I'm working on that now.  astro/xearth is broken.  A recent GNUstep fix was backed out to solve problems building gnustep-back.  razor-agents was updated to fix a build issue with the p5-Mail-SpamAssassin port. 

OSVERSION checks were removed from all ports.  This should speed up building various ports and prepare us for switching kern.osreldate to our own value.  We still need to go through the src tree. 

A few obsolete file systems were removed from src in CURRENT.  The autofs and umap are no longer included.  The former was never finished and the latter was seriously broken.  We enabled HPFS for testing, but we do not yet know if this will be permiment.  I'm going to install OS/2 Warp 4 to test it after the 0.1 release cycle.  Work continues on removing alpha and pc98 support.  We do not have the machines to support either architecture so it is best just to remove the code.  The arm, ia64 and sparc64 code will remain for now.  I'd like to support sparc64 and arm down the road.  We're debating what to do with PowerPC.  If we can get it running on a system, it's very possible we will support it.  Several of the developers have older Macs. 

Seirei has been working on a German translation of the website. It is still a work in progress, but I've linked it in on the first page of the English site. I'll probably work on adding the link on the rest of the site and trying to add the images and movie to the russian site if I get a chance.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/de/

I added some new mailing lists tonight. There is now a users, kernel and cvs list. You can follow ALL cvs commits, discuss issues with midnightbsd on users or talk about kernel issues and development. Actually, the kernel list should be used for more technical questions in the same manner as the DragonFly lists. We're not big enough to warrant having so many lists like FreeBSD. I'm rather new to setting up GNU MailMan so if anything is borked, let me know.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/mailman/listinfo

MidnightBSD currently maintains the FreeBSD osreldate of 601000 as we have most of the patches and elements from 6.1 Release. However, osreldate is a very useful tool to make adjustments between versions in ports. The ports tree relies on OSVERSION values for FreeBSD. All uses of this must be purged before we can switch over to using our own value.

All new ports should not use the value and any existing ports found should remove the dependance on it. I went through the mports tree and cleaned out about half of the uses today. When mports are updated, you may notice a lot of changes. Few ports had any significant functionality change.

Also, we are getting reports that some ports have not been fixed from the mports transition. Please file bug reports or let one of the developers know if a port is broken. Any developers should mark them broken and file a bug report so we can look at them later. If it is an easy fix or you have time, fix it and submit. compat4x is known to be broken. The firefox (native) port is also broken.

MidnightBSD 0.1 and 0.2 (CURRENT) have been patched for the recent vulnerabilities in BIND and Tcpdump.

While we don't have this in mports, it's still of interest. Etoile has released 0.2 as well as a live cd.

http://www.etoile-project.org/

The LiveCD
http://download.gna.org/etoile/etoile-livecd-0.2-build-A2.iso

Please note that Live CD does NOT work on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for Windows or Microsoft Virtual PC 7.02 for Mac. It did boot up on my IBM Thinkpad T30. Their Live CD is based on Ubuntu. It uses a username/password combination of etoile/etoile.

I may try to do something with this later in the week. I'm still working with sysinstall in current.

A new 0.1 snapshot is available for MidnightBSD.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/ftp/MidnightBSD/snapshots/i386/0.1-070726-SNAP/0.1-20070726-SNAP-i386-disc1.iso

It is recommended that you download from a mirror instead.

This snapshot continues to use GNU cpio 2.4.2. It does have two outstanding security issues.

1. The recent BIND 9.3.4p1 update is not included in either branch yet.
2. The tcpdump issue has not been patched in 0.1 yet.

This is now the recommended snapshot for a MidnightBSD install. Please report any issues as we are nearing a release on this branch. Packages are missing and aside from the above issues, we need to remove some menu options in sysinstall.

I've added four quicktime movies demonstrating the process to install MidnightBSD as it stands now.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/ftp/MidnightBSD/videos/

These files are on the FTP server and should be available on the mirrors in the next few days.  I'm also attempting to add them to Google video.  I'll post the relevant links later.