MirOS #8

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MirOS #8

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Codename: WTF we have a release?

All your build system are belong to us!

The MirOS Project is proud to announce the immediate release of MirOS XP, consisting of MirOS BSD #8 and the MirPorts Framework. This release is the first in the MIRBSD_8 branch and still highly experimental in some parts, especially ports, but has been throughoutly tested and deemed stable.

Table of Contents

Yield

The MirOS BSD #8semel release consists of the ninth edition of the MirOS BSD kernel and the MirOS userland, as well as a snapshot of the current MirPorts Framework. MirOS is delivered on an ISO9660 release CD-ROM image which contains a bootable El Torito compliant file system in "No Emulation" mode including a ramdisk kernel, the release binaries, source code and HTML versions of all documentation in roff format. We also have packed a few contributed files, such as a selected number of distfiles for ports, on the CD.

MirOS as a whole comes under a BSD-style licence but contains much work under different licences. You can find an overview in the directory /usr/share/doc/legal/, especially in the file 1stREAD. Most of the information regarding the base system is available as an HTML document online as well. The remaining documents can be found at the CVSweb for the release as well prior to installation. The required advertising clauses are reprinted below as well. All trademarks belong to their respective owners which are not listed here because they change often and we do not want to mis-represent them.

Requirements

MirOS #8semel runs on the i386 platform only. To use MirOS BSD on a sparc platform (32 bit), please download MirOS #7quater. You can use MirOS #8semel on the amd64 platform in 32-bit mode without any curtailing.

MirOS BSD #8/i386 requires at least an Intel Pentium or compatible processor, although formally an 80486DX or 80487SX will also work (a numeric coprocessor is required). We have not tested working with less than 32 MiB RAM. Installation requires much more memory than normal operation, but the GENERIC kernel takes up 10 MiB RAM plus a minimal buffer cache.

You need some kind of console, either a Hercules/MGA, MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA or compatible graphics card and PC/XT, PC/AT or IBM PS/2 keyboard, or a serial console.

To install MirOS, you need (as told above) lots of main memory, and some means of booting the ramdisk kernel and transferring the sets. This requires a bootable CD-ROM drive or a 3½" High Density floppy drive (for the floppy8.fs set) or network boot (e.g. via PXE).

A minimum installation of MirOS (kernel, BSD base system, configuration files and GNU base system) requires about 150 MiB hard disc space, although running without the development tools installed is discouraged; you need about 325 MiB then. Although the ports8.ngz set is very small it expands to about 80 MiB of hard disc space expanded on standard block size, more if your partition is very large (remember to plan in space for distfiles, packages and temporary compilation which can take several Gibibytes for ports like jdk, firesomething, and openoffice). The X-Window system requires about 111 MiB of additional hard disc space. Remember that these values depend on the block size used by the filesystem which may vary depending on its size; the values given are calculated quite conservatively.

Last-minute information

The release contains a pkgutl8.ngz set which is provided as a helper for people who do not wish to install ports by source, only binary packages, and do not need a compiler. It contains the results of running make setup in /usr/ports after a fresh installation.

We advise to not install this set if you want to use the MirPorts framework.

After the release we have fixed an omission in the MirPorts installer which prevented X-Window applications such as japanese/kterm from working properly because their app-defaults files were not found. Please upgrade /usr/ports (at least Makefile and the infrastructure directory) after installation, then execute make setup yourself.

Please remember that the MirPorts Framework is a moving target. When upgrading you should read the appropriate mailing lists to stay informed about possible backwards-not-so-compatible changes.

Secondly, the ld(1) linker should be updated by an erratum yet to be released to prevent a core dump in shared library dependencies.

The afterboot(8) manual page refers to the errata page for the current release.

Getting MirOS

We sell MirOS CDs on conferences and trade fairs, as well as via postal service. Please contact the developer list for further information if you are interested. Customised release CDs are available on request.

The formal release ISO9660 filesystem image (without the bonus tracks) can be retrieved via our BitTorrent tracker (in some cases, the statistics may be out of date or not working at all, don't worry, just try whether it works).

You can also download the complete ISO from the public download mirrors. There is also an "expanded view" which enables you to only download specific files from the CD or do a network installation.

The location of the downloads is usually /MirOS/ISOs/ or /MirOS/v8/ (equalling /MirOS/v8.1/ for the #8semel release); the links here are adjusted to the main mirror.

OS installation

To install MirOS we suggest booting a ramdisk kernel (bsd.rd), either by booting from the ISO, or cdrom8.iso (the mini-ISO image provided), or using a standard MirOS (or OpenBSD) boot(8/i386) bootloader. The ramdisk kernel takes up about 10 MiB but can be compressed on disc using gzip(1).

If you cannot boot the ramdisk kernel consider taking the target hard disc into a machine which can. There is a floppy ramdisk kernel which has much lower requirements but also lacks device drivers and functionality, and has only undergone the most basic testing. We suggest to only use it to transfer a bsd.rd to the disc and make it bootable, then to continue the installation with the GENERIC ramdisk kernel.

Please read the extensive documentation on the installation process for a walk-through. Further information might also be acquired by reading the documentation on the OpenBSD website.

Ports installation

Please read the Setup.sh(8) manual page of the current MirPorts Framework for a complete documentation of the new installer.

The recommended, mostly backwards-compatible, way to install the porting system on MirOS #8 is to change to /usr/ports then execute make setup (SUDO=sudo is implied). In this case you do not even have to source SetEnv.sh (or SetEnv.csh) for building or using ports. (Remember to update to get the X11 fix though.)

Using a port is straight-forward, for example install your (well, my) favourite editor using:

	$ cd /usr/ports/editors/joe
	$ mmake install clean
	$ print export EDITOR=jupp >>~/.profile

Differences to MirOS #7

There should be a complete change log, but we have about 30 MiB of CVS commit logs to read for writing one, so we're only listing the most important ones here:

We're quite sure this list isn't complete and we might even have forgotten some change of major importance, but this should give you a good idea why to upgrade.

Differences to OpenBSD

We always get asked how we compare to the other BSDs. Since we have originally forked off OpenBSD we'll list a few "main differences" (the list is nowhere complete, but a good start):

Credits

We'd like to thank everyone who helped us directly, that is, the developers and the project, as well as indirectly, for example by supplying code (special thanks to the NetBSD® and OpenBSD® projects, but also the AT&T UNIX® team, the CSRG at UCB, 386BSD, Sendmail, Apache™, the XFree86® Project, FreeBSD, ISDN4BSD, the FSF Europe and the FSF, and many more.

These people and institutions have requested to be listed specially:

None of the individuals, institutions, or projects listed endorse or promote MirOS.

Special thanks to Bastian "waldi" Blank, Ingo "bogus" Dyck, and Andreas "Scotty™" Kupfer for domain and partial content hosting, and Eike Frost for BitTorrent hosting. Special greetings to Wim Vandeputte – thanks for not burning our T-Shirts again.

Do not send any eMail to junk@mirbsd.de, junk@mirbsd.org, or junk@mirsolutions.de – it won’t do any good to you.

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