Mon, 19 Feb 2007

4:01 PM - Just a little update

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.

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