MidnightBSD Developer Journal

devel/cvsps
devel/cvsps-devel
x11/fast-user-switch-applet
x11-themes/gnome-backgrounds
textproc/rarian
misc/getopt
accessibility/at-poke

I've been upgrading our server "stargazer" which hosts the website, cvs and other services for MidnightBSD. I recently purchased two seagate drives for a RAID 1 on /home where I store the CVS repository and other files. The motherboard has an onboard intel raid controller (ATA).

That process was fairly painless.

The other issue is the failing video card. The fan on the current card is wobbling and occasionally stopping which has caused problems. I'm not in a position to run headless with the system, so I purchased a new evga nvidia 6100 LE AGP fanless video card from NewEgg. However, the package was stolen at my front door (or never delivered). After spending half my morning on the phone with Fedex and contacting NewEgg, I have a replacement coming in 5-7 days. Both companies have provided courteous customer service, but I'm left wondering what happened to my video card. Was it stolen on my doorstep? Did a driver forget it on the truck? Including shipping, the card was only $43 dollars. I guess at this rate, I could have gone to a local store and bought a card. Of course, then it wouldn't be fanless.

I'm left with a whining video card for another week. In case anyone is curious about the server specs, I'll list them now.

Dell Precision 650 Workstation
Dual Xeon 2.0Ghz
1.5GB PC2700 ECC RAM
1 Seagate 80GB IDE disk (2MB cache 7200RPM) (primary boot disk)
2 Seagate 160GB IDE 8MB Cache 7200RPM
1 IDE CD burner
integrated intel gigabit nic
ATI AIW 9600 XT (soon to be replaced?)
integrated LSI scsi controller (used to have a backup volume (72GB) until the raid...)

Originally, the system was my desktop which explains the ATI AIW card. I used to dual boot BSD and Windows XP on the system. I'm in the process of setting up a backup "server" for data which should be live in the next week. I'm waiting for a new heatsync/fan for the CPU.

The CVS repository is backed up weekly to a system offsite.

I've been quite lazy about maintaining this developer blog. I'd like to catch people up on happenings in the project.

First, smultron has been working on a new website design for us. It includes a new logo design similar to the logo we're using on the blog and cia.vc. MidnightBSD was named after my cat and this new logo includes a cat as well as the obvious other usage of Midnight. I'm very impressed with his progress on the site. It will be published when it's complete. Originally, we had hoped to publish a new site with the 0.1.1 Release, but well things happen. The new design improves navigation quite a bit.

Chris (ctriv@) is working on libmport. This is the library that will be used with the command line and GUI replacements for pkg_add and friends. He has made great progress with most of the new code in his local subversion repository. He's promised a checkin of that code soon. raven@ has been looking at the libmport code in preperations for the new GUI tools to manage ports. I believe she is planning on using GNUstep. Chris will write the mport command line tool.

I've been working on several things. The build cluster found many ports that are broken and we've been trying to get many ports current or at least patched for critical security holes. KDE was updated over the weekend to 3.5.8. We're behind on many other ports including php, seamonkey (well this one isn't really done anyway), gnome related ports, etc. I committed an update for php5 today, but many of the "extras" are not updated yet. With the build cluster down, I can't test many ports at the moment. Please submit bug reports or email us if you find bad ports. (math/R is known to be broken as well as devel/ncurses)

The build cluster has not been run since mid December. We had to shut it down for the holidays at EMU and ctriv@ has been working on a new version of the software to allow us to test multiple OS versions and architectures. However, his work was stalled on that so that he could finish up libmport during the holidays. I suspect we'll have the build cluster hardware setup by next week and some of the machines upgraded to CURRENT. Our new plan is to run 5 machines on CURRENT and 5 on 0.1.1 for i386. We also want to test CURRENT on amd64 and sparc64. ctriv has a sparc machine for that and I'm hoping to get my netra working as well.

I have been working on the Live CD and installer as well. I'll post an update on that next week.

archite created a wifi network script that looks interesting. He's posted it for the OpenBSD community on undeadly as well. He's also been doing some scripting for things on stargazer.

We did an interview for the NetBSD pkgsrc 10 years celebration, however it hasn't been posted yet. It was a fun interview.