The current “state of the art” in MirBSD land was just uploaded. This snapshot carries a new patchlevel to show that things happened, such as a bootloader fix for systems with more than one hard disc; but be aware we’re not yet finished with all we think must be done. – The entropyKey software stack has been updated, by the way, and tg@’s shiny new second stick was inaugurated during this build, so it contains Moarrr Entropy™ in addition to e.g. the mksh(1) fix noted on the mailing list.

The MirOS infrastructure servers will be upgraded to patchlevel 10uB0 shortly.

What’s going on in MirOS Project land? Other than all developers being buried in dayjob work, of course… (sorry for that, guys; even tg@ has now succumbed to an ever-growing backlog but will be back, some time)

tg@ uploaded a new MirBSD-current/i386 snapshot (20111228) plus a full set of HTML manpages for all architectures (so they all are in the new amber style), and redid the usual combined i386+sparc cdrom10.iso Midi-ISO as well as the netboot.me kit. Older binary packages may no longer be supported: the old libgcc_s DLL is no longer provided in fixes10.ngz, and it may be time to reduce the amount of packages in MirPorts to concentrate on those worth the effort and receiving enough care.

Thanks to bsiegert@’s amazing work, the pkgsrc® kit of anno 2007 could finally be deleted. The page about pkgsrc® on MirOS describes instructions to use instead. At some point, we may release a binary bootstrap kit along with the snapshots as set ready for pickup by the installer.

No MirGRML based on the latest Grml 2011.12 release will be made. We’ll be investigating a possible solution for a flavour of the popular GNU/Linux OS to accompany full Triforce Live CDs in the future (for now, we’ll keep the old MirGRML 2009.10 on them).

We hope to be able to return to investing more spare (heh…) time into development some time. For now, we apologise for the slowed down development and reaction even in important subprojects such as mksh. Occasionally, they do have updates, e.g. the latest Jupp/Win32 release, or fixes in CVS.

This is a very late announcement. Binary packages for pkgsrc-2011Q3 are now available on ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/MirBSD/i386/10uAE_2011Q3/. The repository contains 5330 packages built on MirOS-current. Any MirOS BSD version from 2011 should work.

The packages are self-contained in /usr/pkg: The VARBASE has been set to /usr/pkg/var, and the package database is in /usr/pkg/db. This matches the MirPorts defaults and facilitates using pkgsrc and MirPorts side by side.

In this quarterly release, the new default for MirBSD is to use “modular” X11, i.e. install Xorg libraries and programs as packages instead of using the system X libs. This improves the compatibility with many newer programs, which expect for example that the X libraries have pkg-config files. This should not change anything for the user, however.

For more information on how to use these packages, consult the pkgsrc page on mirbsd.org or the relevant section of the pkgsrc guide.

This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune’s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness.

I hope I don’t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I’ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf. Ah, we’re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn’t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd…) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front.

I’ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of “those small things” of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work – we’re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code’s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it’s hosted on my current money source’s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples’ code).

Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar® like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, …)

ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)

Our MirBSD online manual pages and other assorted BSD documentation (except of course the merely copied ncurses, lynx etc. documentation and the texinfo generated HTML pages) has just gained a major facelift. They look alike in lynx(1) – best web browser ever – and less(1)/man(1) now, and remind of a DEC VT420 on a CSS capable Buntbrause.

Thanks to our contributor XTaran for aid with the colour scheme!

Since these are generated from catmanpages, heuristics are used for things like where should bold/underline begin/end (since nroff(1) is not always the brightest… but working on that), and hyperlinks can only be generated for other manpage references (whose targets may or may not exist, for example if they aren’t part of MirOS base/XFree86®). But on the other hand, Valid XHTML/1.1 and CSS speaks for itself ☻☺