MidnightBSD Developer Journal

Today I managed to get some much needed work on src done.  While nothing essential was commited, there were several fixes to sound done.  I also cleaned up a few other things.  I'm in the process of testing buildworld/buildkernel at the moment.  if things prove stable, I'll try to sneak in the openssh update and then build new snaps.  We could use some with the timezone changes in. 

With mports, I updated the linux-sun-jdk ports as well as the freebsd java ports (freebsd binary versions).  I also added dilion, gnustep-tracker (rss feed scroller), and i've begun importing etoile! 

I'm as shocked as anyone, but I've got part of etoile working.  I synced our bsd.gnustep.mk with FreeBSD's and did a few other changes and then Dirk's ports are working on mbsd.  I can't take much credit for these ports, but I'm happy to have them.  With some ports, even starting with a FreeBSD port still involves a lot of additional porting time.  These are going smooth so far. 

ctriv hit some snags with the msk driver.  He's made some progress with  packages.  We're hoping Wintellect will be available soon to discuss the changes with ctriv.   Most people are very busy in their personal lives right now.

I've just added the live journal command line client to mports.

My systems seem to have faired DST ok.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/11/time.change.reut/index.html

According to this CNN article, DST was changed for the environment. This is false. It was proposed for trick or treaters by Fred Upton. More time was put into y2k testing. I don't think Microsoft charged $4000 to update Windows (2000) back then.

We've hit 980 mports today. Considering darwinports has less than 4000 if their website count is correct, I think we're making good progress. Compared to the 16,000 ports FreeBSD has this isn't that significant. Many FreeBSD ports are useless crap though.

I'm debating what bug tracking software to use for the project. Tonights work was done to get Bugzilla into mports. I want to test it for a time. GNATS appears to be a big hassle to setup. Request Tracker has more dependancies than Bugzilla.

OpenSSH 4.6 was released yesterday.  Its already in mports and we'll be updating the version in userland soon.

Yesterday, I added vMac, pearpc and basiliskII to mports.  Anyone with a fondness for Macs should love it.

While the tzdata update last year should have fixed any changes in the US, I was not so sure about other countries.  I updated to tzdata2007c today.  Anyone concerned about DST can download the source and update their systems. 

The following ports were added recently:
devel/libical, misc/xtail, misc/cpuid, gworkspace, gnumail, math/R, math/blas

sysintall now "knows" about several additional ethernet and disk devices.

Archite is looking into bring BSD licensed more and less into our tree. ctriv, a new developer with MBSD is working on several projects including a possible new package management system.

Most of us have been rather busy lately, but we did get a few things commited.

mfi was added today.  Its a driver for LSI MegaRAID SAS RAID controllers.  It supports some of the Dell perc5i's and various other newer controllers from LSI. 

A few minor changes to improve timeout behavior in nfsclient were commited. 

Kernel PPP was corrected to use GIANT. 

added mports:
x11/xlockmore
x11/xscreensaver
x11/xscreensaver.app
x11/wterm

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

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. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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) 

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. 

guile and gnustep-guile are now in mports.

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

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

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.

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.