MidnightBSD Developer Journal

We've recently added webkit to mports.  Install the midori port to try it out.  It's based off a nightly build, but seems rather stable.

We also recently removed gaim (replaced by pidgin) and updated openssh and bzip2 in CURRENT.

http://www.freebsddiary.org/xorg-two-screens.php

This is a nice tutorial on how to setup multiple displays with X11.  I've managed to get mirroring and extending to worth with my IBM Thinkpad T30.  

This affected the strfmon function in libc. It has been corrected in CURRENT. A memory leak was also corrected.

References:
http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2008-1391

http://www.midnightbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/stdlib/strfmon.c

We've got a screenshot of Gnome 2.20 running on MidnightBSD. We're still working on some of the Gnome related ports.

This image was captured from a MidnightBSD current install in Parallels running on Mac OS X.

WebKit has been added to mports.  Now MidnightBSD users have the option to install WebKit.  We are working on adding a few WebKit front end applications.

Use mports/www/midori in mports to try WebKit.

We encountered a problem sometime this morning with the latest run.  We ran out of disk space on the database partition.  Everything is up and running at the moment, and we are working to correct the problem.

A side effect of this is that you may have had trouble accessing the website this morning.  I apologize for any problems you may have experienced with the MidnightBSD site this morning.

First, Magus has been quite busy lately.  Laffer1 and ctriv have been very busy fixing broken packages.

The second sparc is almost up and running. 

Big update, laffer1 has been updating autotools.  You will need to rebuild autotools.  Laffer has been adding upgrading autotools and integrating the recent autotools wrapper changes from FreeBSD. 

Last night, laffer1 installed MidnightBSD on two Sparc64 computers.  The most recent Sparc64 current snap does not work.  Right now you need to use the 0.1 snap.

As promised, we are posting more about MirPorts on MidnightBSD.

First, there is some information on how install MirPorts here, http://www.mirbsd.org/ports.htm

I'd like to thank the developers at MirBSD / MirOS for porting to MidnightBSD. 

We still consider mports as our primary ports system but we felt it was necessary to give our users more options.

Laffer1 wants more time for coding so I (Raven) will be handling some of the MidnightBSD blog updates from now on.

We were not accepted into the Google SoC program.  It's a bummer but let's move beyond that.  It looks like FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD were accepted (interesting no OpenBSD).

The ideas page will remain up.  http://www.midnightbsd.org/soc/

If you're a student  (or just a regular old developer) and would like to join the project, go to the developers page, http://www.midnightbsd.org/developer/index.html. 

The build cluster is back up at EMU.  We've moved the status site to http://www.midnightbsd.org/magus/

As the database schema has changed, the site is still undergoing work.  ctriv@ has done an excellent job with the new version.

We're now able to run multiple architectures and OS versions at the same time. 

MirPorts is now working on MidnightBSD. This now gives users a choice between two ports systems. I'll post more on this when I get time. MirPorts also run on MirBSD and Mac OS X.

mports:

Anyone using Dovecot should update to the new version in ports. There was a recent security issue.
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-1218

We're still upgrading gnome ports for the 2.20 release. After that, we'll probably update KDE to 3.5.9 and then look at 2.22 gnome.

Chris and I did an interview regarding mports late last year. it's now on the NetBSD website.

http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/pkgsrc-interviews.html#mports

There are many interesting interviews about various ports systems in the BSDs on that site. Check it out.

We're working on a new MidnightBSD wiki. It will contain some documentation, todo lists, and other elements that developers and users want to collaborate on.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/wiki/FrontPage

The FSF has a nice list of supported wireless chipsets on Linux systems.  I have not yet reviewed the list to confirm that all of them are supported in MidnightBSD, but if not it might be a good area investigate.

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards.html

A third party is selling MidnightBSD 0.1 CDs.

http://www.linuxcd.org/view_distro.php?id_distro=394&PHPSESSID=8bb30f794a15cc2f17704dd93982b3cf

We do not get any economic gain from the sale of these CDs, but it might be an option for those on low speed connections.

First, a security update was applied to CURRENT for users who turn on the random IP id feature. It is off by default. This feature has a flaw in the random id generation.

See http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/27647/info

Second, we've updated a large number of ports in the last few days. The astro, archivers, accessibility, and net (except samba3) ports have been updated with the latest versions where possible. I'm currently working on the audio category.

Progress on Gnome 2.20 is still going strong as well. ctriv had a bit of a hardware snafu which has slowed the deployment of the new cluster software. I'm hoping to have many new port updates ready when it's back online.

Magus has been down since december for a rewrite. I've discussed this previously. The build master was brought down for a faculty member to take the video card in the last week. It had been up 113 days which is a record for any machines I'm running. The website has not been restored as of yet, but the system was upgraded to 1GB of RAM.

ctriv hopes to complete the software soon.

I've modified the analog port to report several additional BSDs including MidnightBSD, MirBSD and Dragonfly.

CURRENT now has a patch to correct a potential security issue with sendfile. Files were not checked prior to serving which would allow a file that was write only to be served. While this scenario is rare, we decided to fix it anyway.

sendfile is used by many daemons including Apache httpd.