MidnightBSD Developer Journal

AMD64 MidnightBSD 0.3-CURRENT works using WITHOUT_LIB32=yes in /etc/make.conf.  We're working on the 32bit libs problem.  That means i386 and AMD64 can be built on current again.  I'm hoping to start sparc64 testing soon. 

 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 just spent most of the evening swapping out components into another case + motherboard only to find the heatsink was dead.  I didn't notice until the system powered off with a CPU temp of 86C!  So I had to go back to the Pentium D.  it looks like the plastic clips broke.  I'll have to get one with a backplate when I replace it. 

I was looking forward to a decent database server for home and work... 

• untested: 890 
• pass: 1444 
• skip: 37 
• fail: 68 
• warn: 61 
• ready: 0

 graphics/cairo: 1359

I've been trying to catch up on some ports work I've let slip by during the 0.3 development.  This week I've updated to libtool22 (with some help from smultron), removed autoconf 2.61,  updated some X ports, and about half of the ports in mail.  

I also updated mysql to 5.1.38.   

I've been working on getting some of the ports fixed lately.  We've still got over 100 ports that are currently broken.  I've managed to update part of Gnome, and add MySQL GUI tools (Administrator and query browser) ports.

I've found a number of bugs in the latest version of X on MidnightBSD.  I'm trying to get my new laptop up to snuff so I can perform testing on different hardware. 

Our magus run is almost complete. I've already fixed several ports found to be
broken during the run.

We've had our ipv6 tunnel down since Thursday morning.  Apparently, some users of sixxs have experienced problems with static tunnels from the chicago POP.  I'm hoping that it will be resolved soon.

Over the weekend, I got an opportunity to update some mports wtih fetching errors per the last AMD64 0.2 magus run.  The results are as follows:

• untested: 610 
• pass: 1526 
• fail: 191 
• skip: 63 
• warn: 97 
• ready: 0

I just purchased a Toshiba L305-S5955.  It wasn't my first choice, and I had neglected to do proper research on a few points. This laptop comes with an Intel Celeron 900 2.2Ghz single core cpu, 2GB of RAM,  160GB hdd, Realtek pciE NIC (10/100) and a Realtek USB wifi 802.11b/g card.  That's right, the wifi is on the USB bus inside the laptop.  

Obviously, since we don't have native support for this wifi card and it's usb there is no way to use it.  Our ndis wrapper does not support USB wifi devices.  

Interestingly, the ethernet adapter does not work either.  This is one of Realtek's newer parts and it is not supported by rl or re.  Due to the pciE nature, I'm going to work on getting this integrated into re(4).

The laptop is fully supported in Ubuntu Linux, so we're certainly trailing on hardware support for newer systems.

The sad thing is the realtek card works much better in windows or ubuntu than my previous linksys pccard with a broadcom chipset.  (yeah i really pick em) 

Aside from the hardware support issues, I've been pleasantly surprised by the build quality of this laptop considering it's low cost.  It's not at the same magnitude as my old T30 Thinkpad, but it's good.  

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.  

For the few people using MidnightBSD as a server platform instead of a desktop, there is a security update available for named(8).  A denial of service attack is possible against BIND using dynamic update packets.  It causes named to exit. 

• untested: 443 
• pass: 1801 
• fail: 125 
• internal: 2 
• skip: 41 
• warn: 74 
• ready: 0
•  
•  
•  

mport.create seems to hang on bouml-doc for no apparent reason.  No disk activity is in progress.  It just consumes cpu cycles for hours.  This port works with the old tools.  

I'm going to attempt to rerun the ports with internals.  That appears to be a node problem.  

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.   

If you've had trouble building db45, db46 or db47 on current, try updating your sources.  A fix was included in the world that corrects the problem.  There have also been recent updates to fix crashing bugs with SSL enabled mports on current.   

www/browser3 is now building on some systems.  It's been tested with current in a limited configuration so far.  Please report success/failure with the port so we can improve it.  (It's unbranded F* 3.0.11)

net-im/pidgin has been updated to 2.5.8 which fixes several security vulnerabilities.

net-im/pidgin-twitter has been updated to .84

net-im/libpurple has been updated to 2.5.8 as well.

mail/linux-thunderbird has been updated and fixes a security vulnerability.

multimedia/gstreamer was updated to 0.10.23.  This port hasn't been touched for two years, so it's a big update.  The plugins ports will be updated soon.  This does not include the update for the recently reported png vulnerability, but it does cover several others.

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

MidnightBSD current includes ZFS (version 6).  Over the weekend, I got some time to kick the tires.  A usb based disk was setup with a ZFS pool and some informal benchmarking was done.  We also created a new ZFS kernel config file to help people setting up a simple environment.  Tuning is necessary with ZFS, but it's a good head start.

Results were promising overall.  Since a formal methodology was not used, I won't post results.  One thing to note is that magus will not work with ZFS. 

MidnightBSD 0.3-CURRENT has undergone some changes lately.  We've removed PCC from the base system.  Details can be found in UPDATING; we decided that the system compiler must support C++ and Objective-C to some degree.   That leaves us two options right now, GCC and LLVM + Clang (eventually)  One possibly factor will be what system implements the new blocks extension to the C and Objective-C languages from Apple, Inc.  We're quite interested in there work with Grand Central and components that aided that development.  (see the snow leopard website and developer area at apple)

There's currently a few gotchas in current including problems building world in regards to the mport / libmport stuff.  We're working on it.  Also, we're toying with including libffi in the base system in order to provide a more complete Objective-C environment. 

We ran a magus run for the first time using the libmport and mport package creation tools under development.  There were about 700 ports that were not built either do to error or non built dependancies.  We consider this quite good for a first time out.  A few bugs have already been fixed with regard to this run and we've also fixed some ports that came up with problems.  During the same time, we ran magus on 0.2 amd64 to help us with a baseline.  Results were quite impressive considering the lack of attention we've had with ports in favor of other projects recently.  

Our plan is to get current back in shape for everyday folks, fix as many ports as possible and then provide a snap with mport packges for people to try out.  This isn't going to happen immediately, but it's our next big milestone before a 0.3 release can happen. 

I also want to point out the mport database format can change and there could be some quirks.  Chris is still actively working on it.