Fri, 9 Mar 2007

1:27 AM - more ports

GWorkspace and GNUmail were added to mports along with several windowmaker compatible dockapps. 

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Tue, 6 Mar 2007

5:01 PM - MidnightBSD and the upcoming DST issues

Here's a simple test you can perform:
zdump -v EST5EDT | grep 2007

(replace EST5EDT with your time zone)

EST5EDT  Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
EST5EDT  Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT  Sun Nov  4 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT  Sun Nov  4 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000


Since Mar 11 and Nov 4 have entries then this box is ok.  It was run on a recent MBSD install.  I imported timezones near the end of last year.  There maybe a few countries I missed with changes.  I will do another timezone update soon. 

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Fri, 23 Feb 2007

3:32 PM - java problems

I've noticed the FreeBSD java package is exhibiting some strange behavior. I'm researching the problem. The forums are not currently allowing new users for instance. It appears to be an x11 problem.

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3:31 PM - Missing php-extensions

php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/misc/php5-calendar" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/ftp/php5-curl" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/ftp/php5-ftp" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/databases/php5-interbase" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/graphics/php5-ming" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/devel/php5-readline" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/converters/php5-recode" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/devel/php5-shmop" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/databases/php5-sybase_ct" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/devel/php5-sysvmsg" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/devel/php5-sysvsem" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/devel/php5-sysvshm" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/textproc/php5-wddx" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
php5-extensions-1.0: "/usr/mports/net/pecl-yaz" non-existent -- dependency list incomplete

This needs to be fixed pronto.

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Mon, 19 Feb 2007

10:16 PM - Source Code

MidnightBSD source is not available on the FTP and HTTP servers. The code is automatically checked out from HEAD everyday in the morning.

http://www.midnightbsd.org/ftp/MidnightBSD/mbsdsrc.tar.gz

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4:01 PM - Just a little update

First, let me point everyone to this MSNBC article with Richard Stallman in Cuba....

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17190349/

The article includes a quote from Bill Gates referring to open source people as communists. I'm going to need to disagree with Bill on this one. Many open source companies profit from open source software. Redhat, Novell and Sun come to mind. Other companies also profit including Apple and indirectly Microsoft. Lets not forget that Microsoft is giving linux vouchers away now. I guess Microsoft likes communists after all.

On topic, we've got several new mports this week. Archite has commited a new version of ispell which should fix the problems many have had with various ports including pine4 which depend on it.

I just commited emulators/mtools to mports.

We've also been commiting various mail server ports recently. While MidnightBSD is a desktop system, we still use it for our own servers. We may release a server version at some point as well. Integration of desktop and server environments can offer some exciting administration possibilities. It also allows IT users to test software on their desktop systems.

The astro category was added today. We'll start bring over a few ports for that purpose.

Archite has been adding ports related to various wireless chipsets and video cards.

Finally, I've recently purchased a used IBM Thinkpad T30. So far MidnightBSD is working flawlessly on it. Intel Enhanced Speedstep is bring the cpu down to 450Mhz when idle, the sound card, video card, and intel fxp based network card are working great. I've even managed to get a linksys wireless adapter working with an ndis wrapper. I'd strongly discourage buying linksys pccards though. Many of them use broadcom chipsets which are not natively supported. I won't rant on this issue since the OpenBSD folks take care of that already. That said, the card occasionally has watchdog timeouts if the system is under load. Playing a DVD is enough with xine. With the card enabled, I see a constant 5% interrupt load.

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Thu, 15 Feb 2007

4:11 PM - More on wireless

Setting up an airport express based network is a pain with BSD or Windows.   My configuration is with WPA2 personal and non broadcasted SSID.  Most everything in google is about WEP.  WPA2 only does not play nice with my setup on the airport end. 

Here's my working config for reference:

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
ap_scan=2

network={
    ssid="The name of my lovely network"
    scan_ssid=1
    proto=WPA2
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    psk=myhexkey
}

if you don't use a hex value... use quotes for psk=
/etc/rc.conf ...
ifconfig_ndis0="WPA DHCP"

(this could be the problem with WPA vs WPA2 above)

This does seem to work.  I have two airport express wireless routers with the latest firmware (6.3 i think) 

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2:48 PM - Wireless

I just got a refurbished thinkpad and I'm working on getting wireless up.  Here are some helpful references:

http://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/05/freebsd-howto-ndisulate-windows-drivers/
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-wireless.html
http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2006/02/linksys-wpc54g-with-freebsd-yesterday.html

The linksys WPC54GS version 2 is a Broadcom chipset so avoid it if possible.  I believe you must use an ndis wrapper with this card.  I've managed to get that working,, but using a native driver is certainly better. 

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Wed, 14 Feb 2007

4:12 PM - GNUstep ports

guile and gnustep-guile are now in mports.

deskutils/preferencepanes
x11-toolkits/gtookit (gtk/gnustep interface)
devel/wizardkit
devel/objcunit
devel/highlighterkit
devel/performance

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3:13 PM - Python port updated to 2.4.4

I just commited changes to the Python port to bring us to 2.4.4. Let me know if there are any issues.

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Tue, 13 Feb 2007

5:59 PM - An update

src now includes sudo. It has a rather conservative default config file.

I've updated Samba to 3.0.24 to deal with several security issues listed in the commit. I'd recommend updating to the new port when possible.

mports/devel/dmalloc was added today as well as mports/net/zillion. dmalloc is a memory debug library and zillion is a gnustep based job control system...

I've got guile working now, but gnustep-guile is failing to compile. I'll look at that when I get more time.

I've put off the remaining KDE issues as I'd like to get some higher priority issues resolved. The PowerPC stuff is still not working with errors mounting the mfsroot. I'd like to get more gnustep apps in and possibly do something similar to the newer FreeBSD gnustep-app port.

I noticed FreeBSD is starting to work on priority queues. That might be something we'll need to look at. I personally would love that feature and Windows offers support for it.

I'm hoping to compile a list (with help) of outstanding security issues wiht MidnightBSD. I'm sure there are several ports which need updating.

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Fri, 9 Feb 2007

3:41 PM - PowerPC

I was asked to build a PowerPC iso just to see it if was working for G4 Macs. I test booted the iso on my iBook G4 800Mhz. The kernel seems to work as long as a usb keyboard is plugged in. There is a freeze around drive detection without it. The mfsroot does not mount correctly. Out of curiosity, I mounted it on /dev/md0 on my i386 box and many files were all listed as 2.1M in size. Very strange. There could be an endian-ness issue present or something might be wrong with the isofs. For some reason, my initial import of FreeBSD did not include src/sys/powerpc/conf/* files either. I added them today.

Even the FreeBSD PowerPC port isn't that far along and I don't want people to think we're going to support this officially. We simply don't have the people to maintain a PPC port. It would be rather interesting though.

Based on personal experience, I'd recommend OpenBSD to anyone wanting to run a BSD on PowerPC hardware.

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Sat, 3 Feb 2007

8:05 PM - Snapshots

A stupid commit to sysinstall caused some serious problems with installing MidnightBSD in the last few snaps.  October or earlier are safe.  The newest i386 snap seems to fix it and also correctly enables encrypted swap.   The last amd64 snap is not good.  I'll do new snaps for other architectures soon.  I noticed a few other issues with sysinstall I need to look into.

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Fri, 2 Feb 2007

2:12 PM - Bind 9.3.4, Sendmail, Archite, and Status

I've been working on importing Bind 9.3.4 into the tree. Its imported and compiling on three different ia32 machines. It still requires further testing. I'm going to upgrade my secondary dns server tonight and see how well it runs.

Bind 9.3.4 was also updated/added to mports.

I noticed sendmail did a new release. I'll start looking at that when I get some more time.

Also, lets welcome back our security officer. Adam has been busy and PCless for the last month or so.

Finally, my work on mports has paid off. The index is in much better shape. We have most of KDE available. joe was added to editors last night. I'm attempting a snap build of amd64 right now with mports included. It also includes the bind update.

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2:06 PM - Bill Gates on Windows Vista

I typically only post MidnightBSD related entries to this blog. I saw this link on a mailing list today.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16934083/site/newsweek/page/2/

Bill Gates actually said "Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."

Wow. I feel a renewed spirt toward this project after reading that sentence. In the end, it does not matter what operating system I prefer. All systems have security issues from time to time. Making a blanket statement like that is just amazing. What's next? Windows crack of the month?

I haven't read the whole article yet, but from what I've read so far he attacks Apple for their ad campaign in all the wrong ways. I've blogged about Apple's ads and inconsistencies before. I agree some of them are misleading. And I thought his Daily Show performance was bad...

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Sun, 28 Jan 2007

1:46 PM - DVD playback

I've got DVD playback working on my system with xine and that last patch.

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1:26 PM - New PATA support

The Marvell 6101/6145 PATA used on the Intel DP965LT and other boards was added today. A JMicron chip was added also.

This actually fixed my personal desktop. The sata controllers were renumbered so be prepared to fix fstab if you update to this.

This was done after the snapshot since it had not been tested yet.

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1:25 PM - New snapshot for i386

I've added a new snapshot to the ftp server for i386. It does not include mports as we're working out some index issues during the KDE import.

This snap includes the recent jail fix.

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Tue, 23 Jan 2007

8:02 PM - jail security issue

I patched the jail security issue tonight. The /etc/rc.d/jail startup script did not check various paths for symbolic links which made them prone to attack. This patch corrects the issue and also changes the default output from /var/console.log.

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Sat, 20 Jan 2007

2:25 PM - mports & kde

I've been focusing on getting KDE working in mports. While we still plan to focus on GNUstep solutions, KDE is very popular among BSD users. It also gives us access to koffice and konquerer so that we have native office and web browsing. Opera is also working which is somewhat native although it requires compatibility libraries for freebsd 4 and 5.

index building is still most likely broken, but i've got kdebase, kdelibs and several other parts of kde in already.

Once these commits are completed, ports should be fairly stable to use for a snap or release.

Phil has been importing several other ports today. In the last day and a half we've done 255 commits so far alone.

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