I thought these might come in handy for poor i386 users:

• COM1:9600,8,N,1
• COM1:57600,8,N,1

The ISOs itself (both El Torito and Live-HD/CF boot) as well as the included 1440 KiB Floppy images have been adjusted to automatically boot from serial console. To accomodate broken BIOSes (like the one from my VIA C7 server, or the Soekris COMBIOS), the bootloader does not wait for input, but instead directly boots into the kernel. This prevents you from using “boot -c”, but you can patch boot.cfg in the top directory of the ISO or floppy to achieve that.

Users of the sparc architecture just setenv input-device ttya and setenv output-device ttya instead; OpenBOOT can handle a serial console just fine out of the box and provides the speed as well.

The Errata page lists a binary update for the Sendmail and Apache security flaws and a shortcoming in the <bsd.lkm.mk> file. We advise to upgrade.

After 1600+ downloads, we think it has settled down a little. Nevertheless, we got a request to use a new form of distribution, the metalinks.

[link deleted 2014-05-13, we stopped using torrents]

There is also a list of errata for MirOS #10; we will issue a binary update within a few days, as at least the Sendmail bug is severe.

We had about 1500 downloads of the full ISO in the last 4 days, which is actually making our primary mirror traffic problems.

Please use BitTorrent to download the full ISO, or use the NetInstall ISO instead.

You can also switch to one of the following mirrors:

• Japan
• Germany 2
• Germany 1

Due to popular request: the SFV (CRC32) of the ISO is 76D0638A, more hashes are here, and for these who still use the insecure MD5, 0afb38491f7557b1f7bc9ec8997ca5b4 should matche. Note: the CKSUM.gz file hyperlinked in this paragraph is, of course, gzsig(1)d.

Note to avoid confusion: the release CD is no Live CD, but we do have Live CDs. However, only development snapshots are distributed as Live CD. It would not fit on a release CD due to the size of the data included, sorry.

We’re really surprised from the number of downloads – seems as MirOS has become popular. We hope that the traffic throtteling/limiting methods our hoster has installed on the Germany 1 mirror do not produce too much inconvenience for you. Thanks for using MirOS!

MirOS BSD #10 for the i386 and sparc architectures is our eleventh formal major release. Grab it while you can, either via the usual BitTorrent tracker, or use the NetInstall ISO (details on the Download page).

MirOS #10 focuses on Unicode support and a lot of improvements all over the place. The sparc platform is now fully supported again, and en par with i386 regarding the base system. MirOS thusly is almost a reference implementation of a 32-bit sparc OS now that Debian killed support, Gentoo wants to go that way too and the other BSDs focus on sparc64; and the reference implementation of XFree86® in modern open source OSes.

Read the release announcement, or the CVS ChangeLog files, for more information on this release.

Note that, while a lot of virtualisation software performs quite well (Parallels, qemu) or works (VMware Server, bochs, MS VirtualPC, Xen+HVM) with MirBSD, sadly, VirtualBox doesn’t. Due to a bug in it, a lot of operating systems do not work.

The MirPorts Framework now also runs on MidnightBSD, in addition to MirOS BSD (native), OpenBSD (legacy), Darwin and Mac OSX, and Interix (in theory). Support of individual ports for certain operating environments may not yet be given, but the infrastructure already works. Sadly, systrace(1) is not part of the MidnightBSD base system. MirPorts work independently of the native mports system, do not depend on it or interfere with it, as usual, and can be installed per user or system-wide.

There is a new RSS feed which does not encode the OS version after which it started. You must subscribe to it manually, as we have no way to embed it in any header; it is implemented as a symbolic link to the latest respective feed:

http://www.mirbsd.org/wlog.rss

Of course, you can instead continue to use the versioned feeds.

There is a new MirMake version, with getopt(3) changes for Darwin again. We do not think that this has any effect on already-built packages, but be careful.

The variables FLAVOR and FLAVORS have been renamed to FLAVOUR and FLAVOURS, respectively, to reflect correct English spelling.

mksh R33 has been released; read the ChangeLog for details. (Happy Birthday to everyone who has on this day.)

The news in short and human-readable:

• Improved build system, once again; better error tracking; better portability with regards to tools in /usr/bin at build and compilers
• Integrate all changes from OpenBSD ksh
• Integrate some changes from Debian: the “dot” command needs an argument; prevent namespace conflict between (built-in) aliases and (POSIX, not Korn) shell functions
• Add \uXXXX and \xXX escapes to the print builtin
• No longer check if we are called as “sh” for special handling
• Implement here strings: you can now replace print -r -- "$foo" | command with command <<<"$foo" – like ksh93, zsh; GNU bash behaves differently if and only if $foo is not quoted
• Implement string replacement ${var/pattern/string}

Especially cool feature: replace x=$(print -r -- "$x" | sed -e 's/foo.*bar/baz/g') with x=${x//foo*bar/baz} ☺

Note: the distfile is not here yet, it’ll take a while to be released. Once it’s uploaded, the mksh homepage will be updated with appropriate information. UPDATE: It’s out now.

mirmake-20080224 and assorted commits in the MirPorts Framework fix all known Mac OSX Leopard issues.

There are two BSD booths at FOSDEM: one with OpenBSD and FreeBSD (with DesktopBSD and PC-BSD CDs) at the usual place in the main building, and one with OpenBSD, NetBSD and MirOS in the AW building, near the shared PostgreSQL/BSD developer room. Meet us at the latter! CDs are out though (MirOS, FreeSBIE, etc. – only some of the other BSDs left).

Despite the crappy WLAN and no LAN availability even for booths, Benny and I managed to hack on stuff (e.g., mksh). We also made plans for a very short-term follow-up #10semel release; mostly, security updates for XFree86® and a lot of ports. (FOSDEM was great as usual, though.)

The <link rel=…> tags for RSS have been fixed. After removing and re-adding, they should work with Opera now, and the pages are XHTML/1.1 compliant again now.

Currently, pcc cannot compile anything with <stdio.h>.

bsiegert@ currently sits at the Early Bird beer event in Bruxelles, tg@ and gecko2@ will follow tomorrow and man the MirOS booth ☻

mirmake-20080218 has been released. Read the release notes here.