MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I read a recent post on osnews.com about their recent traffic and wondered what type of users are visiting the MidnightBSD website.  We don't get a lot of traffic, but still it was an interesting question who visits the site.  Here is a breakdown by OS:

 1 3677372 485071 OS unknown

2 1519710 228260 Known robots

3 767452 108338 Windows

  437089 78553  Windows XP

  306080 24350  Unknown Windows

  13331 2691  Windows Server 2003

  8845 1763  Windows 2000

  1149 403  Windows 98

  471 282  Windows NT

  143 126  Windows ME

  140 79  Windows 95

  183 72  Windows CE

  21 19  Windows 3.1

4 488384 35717 Unix

  449753 32489  Linux

  29375 2302  FreeBSD

  3039 291  OpenBSD

  2124 172  NetBSD

  903 151  Unknown BSD

  1668 150  SunOS

  964 100  MidnightBSD

  101 25  MirBSD

  330 20  DragonFly

  126 16  Other Unix

  1 1  AIX

5 119959 9461 Macintosh

6 189 21 Symbian OS

7 137 12 Sony PS3

8 31 5 BeOS

9 26 4 OS/2

10 81 4 Amiga

11 9 2 Sony PSP

12 1 0 Nintendo Wii

The current focus of the project is to get the mport tools ready for the 0.4 release.  mport tools are now the default on CURRENT.  They work for basic operations and while we're not actively using it yet, they have a downloadable index with current packages available.  This index is created on the server with data from our Magus package cluster database and sqlite3.  It includes information like package name, license, mirrors to download the file, version, etc.  

I'm currently working on adding additional information to the index about categories mports belong to.  This would be nice for display in the installer as well as for searches.  

Speaking of the installer, I've been working on modifications to use the mport tools instead of the legacy pkg_tools.  sysinstall will eventually be replaced, although I doubt we'll use the pc-sysinstall or bsdinstaller backends from other systems.  Most likely it will not be a shell or lua based environment.  The installer is our next big project after mport tools.  

sysinstall was simplified recently.  Several menu options that are confusing to our userbase were removed.

In addition to this work, we've been updating and adding new features to the base system.  DRM/DRI code was imported from FreeBSD 7.1 as well as cdevpriv wrappers.  nss_mdns was added to the base system; it allows one to find other systems on the network using multicast DNS.  Systems running mDNSResponder or Avahi can now be seen on the network.  I'm now able to ssh between my iMac and MidnightBSD machines by name (.local).  

The time zone update file, tzdata2011c, was imported. An OpenSSL security issue was patched that only affects CURRENT.   

Finally, xz 5.0.1 and liblzma were imported into the base system.  mports was modified to use the system version when possible.