MirOS BSD & MirPorts Framework – a wonderful operating system for a world of peace
What is MirOS?
MirOS BSD is a secure operating system from the BSD family for 32-bit i386 and sparc systems. It is based on 4.4BSD-Lite (mostly OpenBSD, some NetBSD®). The MirPorts Framework is a portable ports tree to facilitate the installation of additional software. The project also releases some portable software: mksh, a pdksh-based shell; PaxMirabilis, an archiver for various formats; MirMake, a framework for building software; MirNroff, an AT&T nroff based man page (and text document) formatter; MirCksum, a flexible checksumming and hash generation tool; and some more.
If you want to know more about these programs, visit the About MirOS page or read our advertisement or flyer (deutsch/german, français/french). Please note the BSD-Licence(7), especially the advertising clauses.
News
All announcements from the MirOS team are cryptographically signed using gzsig(1) in order to prevent abuse of our name and provide integrity of distfiles. In case of doubt, ask via IRC.
The MirOS Project will be represented at LinuxTag 2009, Berlin, .de by tg@ mostly at the booth of tarent GmbH who kindly sponsored buttons, some at the joint booth of AllBSD whose Daniel Seuffert kindly sponsored CDs and flyers as usual, and may be seen at the Holarse booth which has history with MirBSD™ on LinuxTag.
We will distribute MirOS BSD CDs (i386 Live, i386 Install, sparc Install, i386 MirGRML 2009.01) as well as grml CDs (containing grml 2009.05 Lackdose-Allergie, which includes MirOS bsd4grml/i386). There will probably not be any MidnightBSD CDs due to lack of an image in time for the deadline. Furthermore, besides the giveaway flyers, there are a couple of buttons for MirBSD, grml, mksh, MidnightBSD and Glenda from Plan 9. We would like to ask for a small donation (the amount does not really matter) in return for these; also, donations for the CDs are welcome to cover printing costs and will go to the respective sponsors (this is especially valid for the grml CDs, as they are not strictly covered by AllBSD).
The next event will be FrOSCon in St. Augustin, with tg@ as well as bsiegert@ and gecko2@ as usual.
The MirBSD Korn Shell R38c has been released. This is one of the everyone-should-upgrade versions because of the fixes for crashes and the likes. Read the online manual page in HTML – mksh(1) – or as PDF for printing.
The MirBSD Korn Shell R38 has been released. Most prominently, our developer wbx@ (Waldemar Brodkorb) has suggested to allow for expansion of “!string” style lines, and several things (string lengths, substring expansion) have been made more aware of UTF-8. Grab it as long as it’s hot!
mksh semantics for evaluating substring expansion ${strvar:pos:len} and string length ${#strvar} expressions has changed today. These operations now work on characters, not on bytes. Characters are octets in non-UTFMODE (which is pretty much the same as bytes, because mksh(1) is a BSD application and, as per style(9), allowed to assume certain things about the environment) and MirOS OPTU-8 multibyte character sequences in utf8-mode.
This means things like typeset -Uui16 -Z7 wc=1#${str::1} now do the right thing (getting you the MirOS OPTU-16 wide character value of the first character in the str).
mksh R38 will thusly be released RSN.
MirOS #10-current: support code for 256 byte inodes has been reverted (backed out) due to regressions wrt. 128 byte inode filesystems.
MirOS #8, #9, #10, #10-current: It is advised to refrain from using the ext2fs filesystem, especially in read-write mode, because symlink code is broken. The filesystem, and all processes accessing it, become unresponsive (hang in D state) upon creation of a symbolic link or access of a filesystem where such a broken symlink(7) is created. MirOS #7 can be used to access filesystems such as these, but the broken symlinks can still not be accessed by penalty of a kernel panic(9).
MirOS #10-current: ext2fs will be mounted read-only by default for now, starting 2009-04-23, until these problems are fixed.
MirOS (recent but unknown versions): the async mount flag ceased to work as it did before, says bsiegert@
MirOS #7quater: Not affected.
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