Lists all of the journal entries for the day.

Wed, 14 Mar 2007

11:22 AM - Étoilé

Now that Étoilé is in mports, I thought I'd start looking into using it properly. :) 

http://www.etoile-project.org/etoile/blog/2006/12/minimal-toil.html

What you can't see from my first screenshot is that I was manually starting the various processes.  What can I say, it was early and I was just happy it compiled.  Presuming we can get everything working well, I could see using Étoilé.  The UI has potential and I was shocked how fast it was.  I suppose the similarities with Mac OS X made me expect Tiger speed.  My desktop is beating my wife's new Mac Pro hands down while running MBSD + Étoilé  + various GNUstep apps.  I've only got a Pentium D 805. 

Honestly, I was beginning to have doubts about this project's choices.  This has really shown me that we're doing the right thing. 

On a side note, I guess I'll find out if Just Journal can handle the accents in Étoilé.  I don't know :)

(1 comment | )

11:29 AM - libarchive, not a release yet, ...

I'm in the middle of updating libarchive + bsdtar in src.  I seemed to get it to get through buildworld + installworld on one system and manually compiling libarchive + tar on another.  I am still a little suspect of it though.  Be sure to test tar thoroughly if you update source and any compilation issues should be reported to luke@midnightbsd.org.   I suppose you could comment on this blog if you have a JJ account as well. 

I've been meaning to setup bugzilla, and I think this might be a good case for why I should have done it sooner. 

As for a RELEASE, I know I promised one several times in the past.  We just don't feel its a good idea to release until we have a simple desktop working.  Perhaps if archite is successful with his mozilla patches and ctriv gets his prototyping done for our new package management system we'll be ready to work on a release.  We don't need the new package system done, but I certainly want to have it planned out before the release.  I do hope wintellect gets some free time to help us prototype it.  He's just getting enough time for bsdnexus.com I think. 

I received an e-mail yesterday from an upset individual who just realized we exist.  He was quite upset about our fork and asked why we forked.  He also assumed that I must have been involved in a fight with the core team of FreeBSD to work as DF and OpenBSD started.   Some of his concerns were understandable, but I don't feel like my actions are similar to the Linux distro scene.  In my view, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are distros of FreeBSD.  Granted, DesktopBSD flatly states they are not a distro but rather a project writing tools.  I don't see the difference between that and say Gentoo writing portage (tools) for an existing kernel + userland.  Regardless, my point is not to define DesktopBSD's place in the world.  I did not follow the Freesbie, DesktopBSD, PC-BSD path of making a livecd or distro* because I feel that certain changes will need to be made to make MidnightBSD more friendly as a desktop environment.  FreeBSD is "the power to serve" after all.  They also have made close deals with Intel and binary blobs.  I'd rather have an open desktop.  I've said before that I am not against binary blobs in the way that OpenBSD is but I do prefer to avoid them.  FreeBSD has probably hurt the rest of the BSD community by agreeing to binary blobs in base from Intel.  There is an example of a problem with FreeBSD.  I've previously ranted about extreme SMP, treatment of commiters, and other problems with their project.  Some of those issues are being addressed.  I was never a commiter to any other BSD project.  I did submit patches to FreeBSD commiters and I did try to get involved with an HFS+ port to FreeBSD 6.  The former resulted in my code used without credit and the latter was a wasted three months when my hard drive failed and I didn't make a backup like an idiot.  (There are backups of the MBSD cvs, although I could use a tape drive or something...)  I don't feel like defending myself yet again.  People still bring up OpenBSD and DragonFly so I know this won't end regardless of what I do.  I got news for FreeBSD fans... they based theirs on 386BSD!  

I do want to address one concern he had.  "The community is stagnating".  Well, yes it is to some degree.  More likely people are joining younger BSD projects who can't get into FreeBSD or don't have the years of ass kissing to get commit bits.  From my experiences, OpenBSD seems to be much better on this front.  There is still a power structure which is inevitable in all open source projects, but people listen and discuss things.  Its not a flame war.  If I were to go back in time and not start MidnightBSD, I would probably try to join OpenBSD or DragonFly.  They are great projects with some interesting goals.  There is also nothing stopping someone from working on more than one BSD project.  In fact, there are developers doing that with DF, FBSD, etc. 

So why did I fork?  Things weren't getting done on the desktop.  At the end of the day, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD and Freesbie are just going to be ports.  Besides some people don't like KDE. 

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