MidnightBSD Developer Journal

 I've setup an anonymous cvs mirror (pserver) for MidnightBSD.  This is rsync'd every two hours from stargazer.  It won't help with bandwidth as it's still on the same network, but the system is much faster (sata, pentium d 805, ...) 

For instance, to checkout mports:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@ds9.midnightbsd.org:/home/cvs co mports

When is 0.2 coming?  Very soon.  I'm doing one last magus run for testing.  Run 98 will be tagged upon completion pending any new issues.  That will conclude mports for this release.

Here is a list of remaining task prior to 0.2 release: 

• Placing run 98's binaries (magus) on the FTP server
• Changing the name of the release in the src code (0.2-RELEASE)
• Making last minute adjustments to src/release and sysinstall to handle the packages we generated.
• Fixing the csup/cvsup files and src/Makefile to point to the cvs branch
• Creating a test iso set on x86 to find any last minute problems.
• Tag the src tree
• Build the final isos 

mports are in the best condition in months.  Run 96 on magus had only 11 failures and very few untested ports.  Anyone holding off on updating mports, should consider grabbing a copy.

Please report any ports that are misbehaving as we want this to be very good for the release. 

This weekend, crash@ and I started updating Gnome ports to 2.22.3 (from 2.22.0).  Not all Gnome related ports will be changed.  Several bug fixes are included in this update.   

We hope to have a magus run this week provided the updated cluster software is ready.  ctriv@ has been working on parallel operation for nodes with more than one core.  Some of the new GX270 dell systems the computer science department at Eastern Michigan University donated have hyperthreading.  We also have 3 dual core systems with amd64 MidnightBSD available for runs (potentially).  We may do a test run tomorrow if the software is ready.  In this case, hyperthreading is beneficial.  Often, the nodes are fetching files or in some way waiting on IO operations. 

x11/themes/midnightbsd-backgrounds was added today. It includes several MidnightBSD inspired desktop backgrounds in PNG and JPEG format.

We now have xfce 4.4.2 in mports.  You may install xfce by using the new meta port mports/x11-wm/xfce4  

 We do not have a package at this time.  

ctriv@ updated the version of Midori and webkit in our mports system the other day.  If you have difficulty building it, be sure to update your version of bash 4.  (it requires a very recent version with a fix he just committed recently)  Also be sure to update libsoup.

Midori is now a useful web browser and it runs natively unlike many of the others in our ports tree.  It's recommended that you try the browser which includes history, tabs, plugins, user scripts, "page holder" like in safari, and many other features.  Anyone familiar with safari on the mac (or windows) might find this browser to be quite friendly. 

Yesterday, ctriv and I got the build cluster back up at EMU.  It sounds like we won't be able to keep it much longer, but it's certainly a help to us.  

We would like to find some users willing to donate some computing time to do magus runs in the future as we need to replace the cluster.  Users should be familiar with building the system and able to provide hardware running current. The nodes must have internet access with http, ftp, ssh and mysql port access.

The system can use a virtual machine as well physical hardware.  We need i386, amd64 and sparc64 boxes. 

updated ports:

mports/textproc/libxml++26/ 

mports/lang/p5-F77/

mports/lang/p5-Data-JavaScript/ 

 mports/devel/pear (fixed)

mports/x11-drivers/xf86-input-fpit/ (fixed)

 mports/Mk/extensions/perl5.mk: (fixed with system perl)

mports/misc/wmweather+

mports/misc/p5-Geography-Countries

mports/mbone/xspeakfree 

mports/mbone/wb

mports/mbone/speak_freely

mports/mbone/udpcast

mports/mail/wmymail

mports/mail/razor-agents 

mports/net/samba33 is a new Samba 3.3 port.  It is under the GPLv3.  The previous port will stay for some time. (samba3)  We have no plans to port 3.2.

mports/net/smbldap-tools will aid users wishing to use ldap with the new samba 3.3.

We also updated cups to correct a security vulnerability today. 

I ran magus on my desktop yesterday. Here are the results:

Here's the top blockers list from the last magus run (151)

graphics/libmng: 193

devel/gvfs: 190

lang/gnustep-base: 107

graphics/libGL: 107

graphics/dri: 75

print/teTeX-texmf: 27

x11-toolkits/libgnomeprintui: 14

lang/ruby18: 12

java/diablo-jdk16: 8

devel/libgtop: 6

graphics/graphviz: 5

textproc/docbook: 2

multimedia/xvid: 2

lang/ezm3: 2

databases/db46: 2

x11-toolkits/pangomm: 2

lang/ocaml: 2

misc/gnome-user-docs: 2

devel/gdb6: 1

x11-toolkits/gtkmm12: 1

graphics/libgnomecanvasmm: 1

multimedia/xmms: 1

textproc/redland: 1

mail/courier: 1

astro/libnova: 1

devel/hs-haddock: 1

mail/sendmail: 1

java/diablo-jdk15: 1

net/jags: 1

archivers/p5-IO-Compress-Bzip2: 1

audio/linux-libogg: 1

print/hs-hscolour: 1

multimedia/ffmpeg: 1

java/jakarta-commons-lang: 1

I recently purchased new video cards for my system.  I wanted to get the new cards working in CURRENT with the latest version of X from mports.  After several lockups and other odd behavior, I found that I had to disable the second graphics card (crossfireX in windows) in the X configuration along with removing the keyboard and mouse configuration.  I was then able to start the X server with the radeonhd driver. Don't expect acceleration yet.   

All dns ports have been checked for security updates and updated including BIND 9.5 and 9.6.  I've removed BIND 9.4 from mports as it's included with the base system (current) and it's the oldest version still supported.  It's also three versions back at this point.  

 I've spent the last week getting the mports tree back in order.  We let a number of ports get stale while working on other projects.  It's time to get caught up.  

These results are poor, but roughly 100 ports now work that did not before.  We had some X.org dependancies fail; I checked in the corrections for those ports.  A new run was just started.  We should have the results in about two days.

Ports such as libdvdread, libtool, gtk, and browser 3 all had some tlc this week.  We're also updating PHP, Apache HTTPD, Lighttpd, and a few other web related ports.  Many perl ports have been updated, particularly database related.  Bind 9.5 was removed in favor of 9.6.  Some of these changes are not present in the results below.  

Ports we need to get updated or working:

virtualbox, firefox 3.5 unbranded, p5-DBD-Pg, remaining gnome ports (50% of 2.26 is in), KDE4, GNUstep (updates), Etoile, postgres (updates)

Here are the last results from Magus on AMD64 0.2.1-p10

• untested: 1018 
• pass: 1340 
• fail: 46 
• skip: 42 
• warn: 58 
• ready: 0

I've updated every port in dns today.  I've also added several new ports.

bind97  - version 9.7 of the popular dns server

autotrust - download new dnssec root zones automatically

ldns & unbound: a library containing RFC compliant dns resolver code and a bsd licensed resolver

Users of c-ares or ddclient probably want to update their ports now. 

MidnightBSD mports now includes the latest Apache release.  This fixes a DOS attack using range headers.  Users are encouraged to upgrade.