MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I've been unable to recreate the problem with the em driver on the dell gx260.  Using a managed switch, I was able to set the port speed at various settings up to gigabit without causing a panic at startup.

The next step will be to get the user to compile a kernel with debug options.  There could be a specific issue with certain intel NIC revisions or just with that card.  Since the user said it works in other operating systems and with freebsd 6.0, it is most likely an issue with certain revisions and this driver. 

It appears my Ultra 10 3d creator died. I am no longer able to test Sparc64 versions of MidnightBSD. I'm still attempting to fix this, but it doesn't look good.

A few people have been curious as to the number of ports we have in mports.  We currently have over 260 ports in mports known to work on x86. 

Archite has been working on pkg_add and building packages for our ftp server.  Soon you'll be able to add mbsd packages instead of compiling all ports by hand.

analog, links1, html tidy, imlib,  x11/slim, x11/wdm, gtkmm (in various versions), gnustep based easydiff, timemon, renaissance, grouch, net/netclasses,  gnustep-examples and stepulator have been added recently to ports.

linux-thunderbird and linux-firefox-devel were updated.  This should resolve some security concerns. 

We've been mostly focusing on adding ports requested by users and ports needed for our upcomming beta release.  We are hoping to have a beta release built this weekend.  0.1-beta1 or something along those lines will be used for the release.  We hope to ship a 0.1 release this year and possible a .2 release around Christmas.  This first release has had quite a few changes in some areas.  We had hoped to do more with userland and the kernel but getting ports going has been quite time consuming.  We need a reasonable snapshot of our development to continue.  Creating a release will also allow users to do ftp installs and make it easier for developers to try out the system on a known stable version. 

While we still don't have a clear roadmap posted yet, here's a rough idea of what we hope to include in 0.2-release.

1. additional changes to ports based on feedback from 0.1 release
2. documentation.  Installation directions and directions for common tasks like grabbing ports, etc.
3. imports of newer binutils and gcc  (3.4.6 most likely) 
4. Consider updating software from the OpenBSD project after their 4.0 release including OpenSSH, OpenNTPD and so forth. 
5. Better integration with GNUstep. 
6 ... TBD

Peding issues for 0.1 beta include
1. installer fixes
2. adjusting make release procedure to handle mports and doc builds. 
3. snapshot builds.  We'd like to do one more snapshot and test installation before doing the first beta build.

known bugs:
The em driver issue has not yet been resolved.  Further testing is required to diagnose the problem, although its possibly access to certain datastructures outside a lock when trying to create a link.

The installer only works using the "minimal" install option.  We hope to fix this before the beta is released.

It just occured to me there are no email or text editor programs in ports.  I'm in the process of commiting some.  vim, pico and emacs are in ports.  Xaw3d is having a bit of trouble which is required for X11 emacs support. 

I've added linux-mozilla to mports tonight.  Like always, it needs testing.  I've commited so many ports today.  Its possible I forgot one.

mports/www/linux-mozilla and mports/www/linux-seamonkey were added in addition to opera, links and lynx.  We now have four web browsers to choose from.  Native firefox and thunderbird are still a must. 

Today we've got most of gnustep working. Terminal.app was added and is working. linux_base-fc4 was added a few minutes ago. Linux compatiblity seems to be working. We added linux compatibility in an attempt to get linux-mozilla working. We've had a few problems with the mozilla and firefox ports (native). I'll work on this more later.

The opera port was fixed. You can now install opera along with compat4x and compat5x (freebsd).

Our ports are starting to get useful. A few categories only have one port in them, but the total number of ports is growing by 5-10 a day right now.

In order to use mports, remember you still need to edit one mk file after you checkout mports from cvs. Any time you installworld that fille could be overwritten. We will commit that change soon.

pkg_add -r was changed to our server. Anyone building a new world from this point forward will hit our ftp and our packages. We have not setup the latest symlinks yet so it will fail as of today. Almost every port can be built as a package.

There have been a few kernel and userland changes in the last 24 hours. df had some POSIX conformance corrections. Our nfs client and syscons have been patched for various issues.

The em issues have not been resolved yet.

Broken Ports: opera (needs install.sh fix, compat4x port added/depends) I did manage to get it running locally.

I've commited a few src patches today. df and the nfsclient need testing. syscons had a patch that may effect usb keyboard attachment. It may also fix a problem on newer Sun machines with usb keyboards. I'm going to test the syscons patch locally and then commit it tomorrow if its ok.

On my local system, I've managed to install xorg + windowmaker tonight. With the above hacks, opera is running.

I'm too tired to test GNUstep right now. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll also try to fix the opera port as we need a gui browser until firefox is working well. Besides, some people prefer opera.

well ghostscript-gnu is a dependency that is not compiling properly on my box. After fiddling with the makefile I got it to a point its having trouble finding the jpeg libarry which is installed. I'll look at this later. Archite or wintellect could always commit a working version :)

Either way, we are much closer to gnustep support. I technically commited the gnustep port but its not guaranteed to work yet. Certainly, it will not work with gnustep-xdps right now.

I know there is great anticipation for a GNUstep package or at least a working port. I've been working on dependancies tonight.

textproc/aspell, german/aspell, audio/libaudiofile, security/gnutls, print/cups-base, x11-tookits/gnustep-art, and x11-toolkits/cairo have been added.

I've received mixed feedback on the new site design. It may change again. I've had someone approach me with 3 logo designs that I am curently considering. If I chose the, the existing site would not fit entirely.

As for the 404 issues, I'm aware of them. A problem with em was found the same night I was working on the website. I decided em and GNUstep are more important right now. I will try to fix the site when I get more free time.

If someone would like to volunteer to work on the website I'd be quite interested.

Some progress was made on GNUstep yesterdeay. gnustep-make, gnustep-base and gnustep-objc are working. I've got gnustep-back compiling but there are a few optional dependancies i'd like to get fixed and more testing needs to be done. Its possible that we may have a working GNUstep environment by Monday. I've done my testing on a system with a wiped /usr/local and /usr/X11R6. I'd like to do a fresh install and test the ports soon to verify they are 100% ok.

I looked at apache 2.2 and determined we need to get Python working for the port. There are more serious issues with python so it may be awhile. While we are a desktop project, many people do test web apps on their own machines, etc. I also want to be able to run on MidnightBSD.

Several window managers are available now. I added windowmaker yesterday.

Finally, we hope to test etoile after the GNUstep issues are sorted out.

Our security officer patched the gzip vulnerability. mports work continues. New ports are added all the time. gcc 3.2, 4.1, 4.2 were added today. WindowMaker and various other ports have been added.

Yesterday, several ports were added to our new mports. I added a number of shells. I started working on adding gcc ports with gcc 4.0 already building. Another commiter started working on firefox.

gcc is the first step toward GNUstep support.

We still have a problem with ld's behavior that needs sorting. We are also investigating problems with the em driver after the recent updates.

Also, please send any issues related to tput to luke@midnightbsd.org.

There are some programming errors with gzip. We hope to have a patch by the end of the day in src.

In order to use mports, you must do the following:

checkout the mports from cvs. The CVSROOT is anoncvs@stargazer.midnightbsd.org:/home/cvs
password is anoncvs. Updated checkout information is always available on the midnightbsd website.

Next, you must edit /usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk and change the PORTSDIR variable to /usr/mports

Finally, go into the directory and build whichever ports you need.

Progress is not as fast as I'd like, but we've had more commits in the last 24 hours than the whole week prior.

zip, unzip and unrar added to new archivers category.

We made the decision to start over with ports a bit. mports are a fork off a newer set of freebsd ports. Aside from newer software, we will not be importing broken ports. Anything you see should compile and build unless we are working on it specifically. It drastically lowers the number of ports, but should make it easier to know what will and will not work.

There is still discussion if we will keep it as mports or replace the existing ports module in cvs.

For now, we've included some packages on our ftp server for people who need xorg or a few other ports.

em, the Intel gigabit ethernet driver, has been updated from 6.0.5 to 6.1.4. There were reports of problems with connections at 100baseTX on the Dell gx260. We hope this may resolve the problem.

The bce driver supports two Broadcom gigabit cards. It has been included in GENERIC for i386 and amd64. The module and manpage require further work. This driver has not been tested. We need feedback on this.

Serveral ports have been updated. gcc 3.3, 3.4, 4.0 and 4.1 should build in i386 now. dri was fixed to correct problems for some with the xorg port.

The Mozilla suite and Firefox still do not build. We are working on that problem. Several other browsers do work including links, lynx, dillo, etc.

There are still issues with the GNUstep port we are actively working on. Getting gcc ports to build was the first step.

There are a few cases where the plist files are not just right yet. We still need to resolve those problems so ports uninstall properly and packages can be made. A few test packages were placed on our ftp server and some distfiles were mirrored there as well.

The GNUstep and Etoile developers have been very helpful so far. Thanks!