MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I've been working on hardware support. Several users have been having problems running MidnightBSD on newer hardware.

src/sys/dev/ata

Last night, I merged some things from FreeBSD to support newer ATA and SATA controllers form NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD into CURRENT. I also added a few to 0.2 that I can test here. We've got a few devices that FreeBSD does not support as well.

src/sys/dev/msk

I added an experimental msk(4) to 0.2 and CURRENT. It is built as a module only at this time. I'm also experimenting with a device on my iMac Core 2 Duo and msk(4). To test this, kldload if_msk

src/bin/sh

sh changes are now available on 0.2 and CURRENT which fix some GNU configure scripts like those found in recent versions of graphviz.

src/bin/*

I've brought in several changes from FreeBSD 6.3 to CURRENT. Several commands have updated man pages, new flags, and bug fixes. bin/cp needs the most testing.

We're getting the mports tree ready for 0.2-RELEASE. On the last magus run, we had 28 failures and 30 untested ports.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/magus/runs/83

These results are promising. Due to the nature of this release, we need a larger number of packages built.

The idea goal would be to get KDE, Gnome, and GNUstep related ports in shape for the release. We'd like to have packages for all three environments. Most people tell me they would like us to focus on either GNUstep or Gnome. KDE comes into play because it was easier to get working, and at this point we're depending on Firefox for Gnome which we can't ship in package form. (ported versions of firefox can't use the name or artwork unless approved by Mozilla Corporation) I'm going to try to get some unbranded variant of a mozilla browser available for package building if possible. It takes a long time to get a port working due to build times and complexity. Firefox 3 is out of the question right now. It requires new versions of many ports that would be disruptive this close to a release.

I'd like some feedback from users about their preferred environment. When I started this project, I wanted to focus on GNUstep. I'd like to know that's what people want. If so, we need to overhaul the GNUstep ports and get some patches upstreamed. I personally feel that KDE is well covered by PC-BSD and DesktopBSD folks.

If we get more port maintainers, it might be possible to keep all of them and allow choice during install and/or different ISOs.

After the release, ctriv@ is going to do some disruptive changes to the structure in mports/Mk

I've just migrated about half the nodes to 0.2-PRERELEASE. I've also started a new build run on that release. The remaining nodes will move to CURRENT (0.3) soon.

I've copied some packages from magus (run 80) to stargazer.  We still have some symlink problems with a few files, but there are a great number of packages available.  (2.3GB)  A few were not included for distribution issues.  For instance, the gnome ports will work, but you'll have to manually provide firefox.  Not all the gnome ports built anyway on that run.  We're still fixing a few issues with them. 

it's still the largest distribution of packages we've provided to date.  ( ~  1890)

I pruned these using the ports marked restricted.  It's possible not all the ports were caught.  Please let me know if you see anything that shouldn't be there.  These packges will work on 0.2 branch systems too.

I started working on a linux-firefox3 port, but ran into several problems.  First, it uses TLD which means we can't use it on amd64.  Second, it requires libpangocairo, which I updated/added.  now there is a linux-cairo port too.  Finally, it requires GTK 2.10.  I can't work around this one without upgrading our linuxolator. 

This is a big problem for us.  Not only can we not ship a native firefox at this time, but when mozilla drops firefox 2 support, we'll be without an updated linux browser. 

Some of our developers are taking time off for the summer. At least two of them will be on vacation within the next few weeks. I'm currently taking a summer class which ends at the end of the month. At that time, I plan to pick up on work. (laffer1@)

mports commits might get slower during the next few weeks as I start working on src. We do plan to get gnome ports fixed up.

There has also been a change in plans for 0.2 and 0.3. We plan to release 0.2 sooner than planned. MidnightBSD 0.1.1 comes with many outdated packages. Most of our users are installing from CD and not updating mports. We feel that it is necessary to release something in the next two months with updated package and security updates. So 0.3 will be the feature release that 0.2 was supposed to be.

Prior to the release, we want to stabalize mports and fix one outstanding bug in src. There will also be some installer changes.

Opera software recently released Opera 9.50. Normally, we'd like to include new versions of browsers anyway. However, this version also includes several security fixes. The mports/www/opera port has been updated to 9.50, but it may be tweaked as we move forward. The structure of the port changed quite a bit. We're not doing any config file changes yet. Paths for plugins might be incorrect, etc.

We were not able to update the linux-opera port. That was marked broken as the new versions require qt4 or are debian packages we don't have support for right now. If you don't care about the security risks, just comment out the BROKEN= with a # in the Makefile for the port.

I made some progress on open office 2.4 and kaffe today.  The former installs freedestkop style entries for gnome/kde menus, but does not execute quite right yet.  I suggest you use soffice with this port.  (linux-openoffice24) 

kaffe seems to work fine, although registervm does not properly set the path to the jdk with the javavmwrapper yet.  There's a file /usr/local/etc/javavms (as i recall) that has the invalid path to the ports directory.  Fix that after installation and it should work as expected.  This and linux-blackdown 14 are installable without a lot of fuss. (if you need java in a hurry) 

java/netbeans was updated to 6.1 tonight.  It works aside from a nag message about a missing solaris file.  The old version had fetching problems, so we went with the latest despite this bug. 

Either myself or one of the other port maintainers can tackle these at a later date.

ctriv and I met today to discuss current and future work with midnightbsd.  We've got an idea what our next steps are going to be.  I'll probably post more about my work soon. 

The gnome 2.22 fallout is still at play with mports.  This was compounded by perl bug that should be fixed.  It was not the perl port, but rather some code that sets the default version of perl within mports.  The next magus run should be more productive as we've isolated a few gnome issues and this perl fix should restore the mports collection.

Finally, stevan@ reported a bug in csup awhile back.  I finally got time to test it in a similar environment.  It is recommended that users use cvsup or cvs to checkout mports and src instead of csup at this time. 

Midori port updated to .18. ports index updated on stargazer. Fetch it with make fetchindex in /usr/mports

We've got a new bind 9.5.0 port.  dns/bind95

I added editors/linux-openoffice2 today. Please report any problems to the maintainer email addresss.  This is our first OpenOffice.org port. 

We're still working on upgrading Gnome to 2.22. 

We're in the process of updating a large number of ports. This will cause ports to be broken, etc. (gnome 2.22)

Feel free to file bug reports, but things should be fairly unstable for another few days then back to normal.

This was sparked by a recent security vulnerability that requires us to update gnome to fix.

I created a flyer for MidnightBSD.

http://web.mac.com/lucasholt/Site/Podcast/Entries/2008/5/25_midnightbsd3_files/midnightbsd.pdf

I've been working on a new Live CD for MidnightBSD. It is based on
0.2-CURRENT from earlier in the month. It does not include X yet, but
has several other useful tools like lynx, bash, nano, screen, vim,
perl, and irssi. (also viteris for smultron)

The current version uses md devices for /root, /var and /usr/local/
etc. /etc is read only and I'd love suggestions on working around
that. unionfs is a no go, but I may end up making / a md to get
around it.

dhclient is run for several different network interfaces automatically
and i've hard coded my DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf since the file
system is read only for now.

The ISO is 264MB.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/wiki/livecd
http://people.midnightbsd.org/~laffer1/livecd0.2.iso

It is an i386 iso as that will run on most systems. I'm not sure what
the minimum memory requirements yet. I've been testing it in a vm
with 512MB RAM allocated.

I added a new page to monitor the state of mirrors. As of yesterday, there is a timestamp file on each mirror that shows when it was last synced. The timestamp is updated every hour on the main server, and the freshness of mirrors is checked hourly as well. (about 20 minutes apart)

http://www.midnightbsd.org/mirmon/

Note that ftp1, ftp2, and ftp3 are stargazer, ISC, and AllBSD.

As a side effect, I realized that the cs.emich.edu mirror was seriously out of date. For some reason the cronjob has been failing to rsync. I'm doing it manually now and will look at that when I get more free time. The amd64 release and snaps are now on that site as well as distfiles that have been added on the other servers.

This means that using Mirports, users can access "firesomething" 1.5.x on i386 based hosts. Firesomething is the clever name for a popular web browser which has strict limitations on use of the name with ports to other operating systems.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.miros.cvs/18466

I added the pcc compiler to ports. As some of you know, I made an attempt to get it working in src awhile back and hit some issues with the way GCC is setup on MidnightBSD. (funny isn't it) I need to revisit that issue when I get some free time.

Some changes were made on CURRENT to facilitate compiling using pcc with some of our system headers. I can now compile cp in src with pcc. The binary is a bit smaller than GCC's version. It seems to run. I'm not ready to give it a glaring endorsement.

Both cdefs.h and stdarg.h required changes. I decided to put the changes in i386, amd64 and sparc64 on the rare hope that we'll see ports to other platforms working in the future. Currently, pcc is working on i386.

I would love some feedback on things that work and don't work in src.

One warning, some of the POSIX visability stuff was circumvented while using pcc.

I added a VMware appliance to the MidnightBSD website. It includes MidnightBSD 0.1.1-RELEASE, Perl 5.8.8, X.org 6.9 (no configuration file), and mports.

The image virtual hard drive is 10GB and no root password is set.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/download/vmware.html

The MidnightBSD build cluster went down over the weekend. We had a power outage. ctriv@ got the cluster back up and running yesterday. We were told that it was using too much juice :)

The build cluster is currently running with fixes to test our java ports for the first time.

Chris has added a lot of fixes and functionality to libmport. Developers are now testing it. The frontends are not complete yet