Zoltan Arpadffy has let us know that he has set up a MirBSD installation at polarhome in Stockholm, to aid its “purpose [to] serve the healthy part of the already, rather badly MS infected Universe — and MirOS is definetevly on that part”. He wrote that “MirBSD is a very nice easy to use BSD system”, thanking us with “gratitude and respect for developing a such a nice OS”. He also sent a list of things he ran into while installing (although we can guess some of them are related to using VirtualBox, which is not at all supported, as base) so we can fix them, and offered help, e.g. in adding ports of software they use.
Well, Zoltan, you’re definitively welcome ☺

polarhome.com is non commercial, educational effort for popularization of shell enabled operating systems and Internet services, offering shell accounts, mail and other online services on all available systems (currently on Linux, OpenVMS, Solaris, OpenIndiana, AIX, QNX, IRIX, HP-UX, Tru64, SCO OpenUnix, UnixWare, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, MirBSD, Ultrix and OPENSTEP).

Well guys, talk to us — we know we have one to several hundred users world-wide but don’t really get a lot of feedback (so we assume you like it).

Almost ☺ in time for FrOSCon there’s a new binary snapshot of MirBSD-current (10uAF-20110818) compiled, right now waiting for me to do the usual post-compilation work of preparing the cdrom and floppy images for serial console, signing and uploading. Of course, the online manpages will be updated then as well.

The snapshot will, as usual, end up on the mirrors, i.e.

• Germany main (Strato) secure HTTP
• Japan (AllBSD.org) insecure HTTP

We’ll also have it with us at FrOSCon. Maybe on CDs, but on a laptop ready for netboot and netinstall is a promise.

Update 20.08.2011 — we’ve got an ISO:

• MD5 (MIRB0818.ISO) = 805c4a34bae523ef5d838e79ecdcdad8
• RMD160 (MIRB0818.ISO) = 93df98d24b2d877502e7be8af580907311d2d8cc
• SHA1 (MIRB0818.ISO) = 6dacb045675184c06a00401357a0a510dd3e6edb
• SIZE (MIRB0818.ISO) = 727711744
• TIGER (MIRB0818.ISO) = ff0c145b93988c306530963fd881ad7972d5eb2d2e0ce298
• BitTorrent download is [no longer, 2014-05-13] available

This year without our friends from Grml, but The MirOS Project (all two active developers and our Booth Babe gecko2@) will of course attend FrOSCon, nicknamed Froschkon, again.

We’ll have a pre-event meal time at my favourite Jugoslawian Restaurant on Friday (20:00 CEST) — contact me privately for the coördinates if interested. On Saturday and Sunday we’ll staff a booth and answer questions about the many projects we have (more or less) running, including but not limited to paxmirabilis (aka MirCPIO), The MirBSD Korn Shell aka mksh(1), jupp the editor, and developers’ private projects such as slowly undermining Debian or Google-Go. While slow we are still working on World Domination. And teaching people good shell programming by example code.

We might even bring CDs, but I’m still working on the ISO… last night’s build aborted because the OS grew a bit making the floppy image not fit any more. (Solution, drop ping(8) and rtsol(8), but re-add sf(4) and bce(4) now that they fit again.)

jupp 3.1.17 uploaded today, mostly thanks to user input suggesting I improve things, especially the syntax highlighting. (Maybe more to come.) I like users who don’t complain but give helpful comments and send in patches even.

Since the Debian FTP masters complain that the NEW queue is empty for the first time in ages, I also uploaded jupp to Debian proper (got requests, several, from actual users — independent of each other). I originally thought I were the only user, it’s not worth it, maybe too close to joe (which segfaults a lot more and has some ugly things, so I cherry-picked the better features of it instead of rebasing jupp), but it’s had a package in mports (MidnightBSD ports) for ages, users submitted one to FreeBSD® last year and keep it updated, there’s even a WIP package in pkgsrc®, and who knows where else or how many people are using my OpenSuSE Buildservice package or have had installed the previous DEB package I uploaded to my play repo. So now I feel it worth to upload.

I even invested some major packaging rework, such as splitting the build-arch and build-indep parts from each other, and importing the upstream source into the packaging VCS, as I have learned in the “packaging with git” talk here at DebConf. (No guys, I will stick to CVS as git doesn’t give me anything.)

mksh R40b (nowadays with filled in user’s caveats (for R40, too!) and packager’s upgrade hints) has just been released. This is a should-have upgrade, fixing a number of — admittedly some obscure — bugs, changing things begun in R40, improving upon others. Thanks to the PLD Linux guys for spotting all these errors; thanks to them and phpnet.org both for adopting mksh so well.

I have also fixed a bug in nroff(1) which will lead to an even nicer looking HTML manpage mksh(1) (after the next rebuild and upload of a MirBSD snapshot — scheduled RSN).

jupp 3.1.16 took on the task of merging Debian joe changes (aiming at an upload). I also split the jupprc file into three versions (2.8 generic/DOS, 3.1+jupp and 3.7/Unix) because of the differences in the baseline executables making rc files partially mutually incompatible (think Insert key), annoyingly warning (think syntax, hmsg), or less usable (joe’s new menu system).

jupp 2.8.2 is a companion to jupp 3.1.16 — mostly because of the new help window “character map” ☺

Binaries for jupp should be updated RSN too.

Considering Banja Luka is arriving quickly, the “r” in RSN should be taken with a few grains of salt. I’ve also scheduled working on the pcc Debian package for the next future; updating lynx and maybe others like OpenSSH in MirBSD is also due; cvs(1) will receive more of my time, but before the next Upload I’d like to fix LP#12230 once verified.

Builds for Debian/m68k are also still running. I note I did in fact not manage to make a new base image, yet (but 2.6.39 kernels miss a patch, anyway, so waiting for 3.0 is ok). It’s still using gcc-4.4 because nobody tests gcc-4.6 and gcj-4.6 FTBFS due to SIGSEGV, but that’s ok in my books. rsyslog is broken but sysklogd works.

The #ksh|Freenode page finally got a well-deserved link to Planet Commandline. Throw more my way!

Acronyms and translations, too. (Got Norwegian and Rumanian covered in the meantime. No idea whether any RTL languages will work in that beast. But I’m young and need the money)

Since I’m writing a wlog entry anyway… let me thank Gunnar for a nice summary on the current Free Culture discussion; my comments on Nina’s site seem to be eaten, but let me support it fully, although, of course, I normally use a copycenter style licence, which is specifically written for general works of authorship under copyright law, not limited to software. I did in fact have that in mind. Maybe some people will like it (it’s less than one Kibibyte long) either generally or just for their everyday random musings (they can then keep CC-BY-SA for the “big works” if they so desire).

Wouter, grass background makes green headlines illegible. I’ve never liked, and never installed manually, cups either. (Benny tells me that Apple’s new version refuses to talk with a non-Apple cups, kinda defeating the whole idea I think.) Port 9100 is JetDirect (probably with an HP in front and some subset of ©®™ trailing) and just nice. (Being able to talk ESC/P with your printer like print '\033K\x07\0\x3E\x81\x99\xA5\xA5\x81\x3E' >/dev/lpa too rocks though, IMHO. Yes, mine can, and I still can. /dev/lpa is BSD.)

Kai, thanks for your vimrc lines:

	:highlight TrailWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red
	:match TrailWhitespace /\s\+$\| \+\ze\t/

Automatic removal is harmful, though — I just fell into the trap since jupprc contains needed whitespace at EOL… but manual removal (bound to ^K] in jupp) rocks. And I like that your solution uses such strong a colour — vim users are the single most represented offender group for actually leaving the redundant whitespace at EOL there, and it should hurt their eyes. (Sadly there is some vehement disagreement preventing them from inclusion in grml-etc-core — but that’s why I re-post them here.) Ah, and jupp can of course display whitespace visibly (although it uses ‘·’/‘→’, replacing the arrow with ‘¬’ if no UTF-8, not ‘»’), accessible with ^Ov.

Steve, want to put up a checklist for sites? We can “crowdsource” the… testing… to maybe get some interesting results…

Some other people would get more comments if they were idling in IRC (Freenode) or allow comments on their blog, specifically without too high an entrance barrier — OpenID is ok, but many other things, and ECMAscript, are not; but I can’t really say that loud because our wlog is static HTML compiled from a flat plaintext data source so it doesn’t allow such either. I often forget what I wanted to add if I can’t get it out quickly enough (especially at work). Sowwy…

Me like the cat picture postings (Amayita, Tiago, ¡Gracias!).

The MirBSD Korn Shell R40 has finally been released. This is a must-upgrade, a major everything version. See the changelog for now, until caveats are filled in, due to the sheer amount of changes. The diff between the last and the new release is more than half of the last release’s size, after all – it’s been 15½ months.

The plan for the next two releases is:

• mksh R41 will fix all bugs popping up within the next few weeks, as they usually show up shortly after a release only, when things are getting adopted. Furthermore, it removes deprecated code that emits a warning in R40: several Build.sh options, plus set ±o arc4random. Finally, I plan on speed-up for arrays by using hashtables internally.
• mksh R42 is where we tentatively target associative arrays for, now. Multidimensional arrays should be introduced at the same time.

bsiegert@ now has direct commit access to the pkgsrc repository, with a mandate to improve the MirBSD support in pkgsrc. This should lead to pkgsrc becoming a viable alternative and/or complement to MirPorts.

mksh-current has just gained an experimental recursive parser for command substitutions, fixing RedHat BZ#496791 and decades-old complaints about the pdksh codebase, compared to AT&T ksh93. (GNU bash could also do the example, but not some other things mksh(1) parses fine now.)

This means that things like the following work now.

	# POSIX, should “always” work
	echo $(case 1 in (1) echo yes;; (2) echo no;; esac)
	# POSIX optional, works now in mksh, works in GNU bash
	echo $(case 1 in 1) echo yes;; 2) echo no;; esac)
	# GNU bash seems to choke on comments ending with backslash
	# a comment with " ' \
	x=$(
	echo yes
	# a comment with " ' \
	)
	# No non-recursive COMSUB parser can pass all of the above
	# tests and these below at the same time (some extensions)
	echo $(typeset -i10 x=16#20; echo $x)
	echo $(typeset -Uui16 x=16#$(id -u)
	) .
	echo $(c=1; d=1
	typeset -Uui16 a=36#foo; c=2
	typeset -Uui16 b=36 #foo; d=2
	echo $a $b $c $d)
	# the ‘#’ is especially tricky, that’s why the above cases

Next on my TODO is the complete rewrite of the read built-in command, as well as its documentation. I think that the (reduced) goals for mksh R40 will have been met by then, except porting to LynxOS and MPE, but we’re working on it, and re-testing Syllable and Plan 9). Of course, a release implies testing on a lot of the supposedly supported platforms, so it won’t be out “immediately”. Though, associative arrays have been removed from the R40 goals, so that I can at least get a new release out. Note that Debian and OpenSuSE Buildservice users have been provided with somewhat well-tested mksh-current snapshots for a while already, and Gentoo users can use the “live ebuild”; there’s always compiling from source too…

On January 23, an initial set of patches for MirOS support has been committed to pkgsrc by Alistair Crooks. As a part of these is still on hold for the moment, some patches are still necessary for successfully bootstrapping. You can bootstrap pkgsrc as root, installing for example into /usr/pkg, or as an unprivileged user. MirPorts and pkgsrc can be used in parallel.

Even if only a small number of packages has been tested on MirOS so far, the adoption of pkgsrc will give users access to vast, well-maintained archive of third-party software.

The Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) Preview [German news] comes with a much more sensible /system/bin/sh than previous released versions… Android-x86 and AOSP have had it for a while, but this sees the general adoption of mksh(1) as the only POSIX/Korn Shell on the Android OS! Thanks to those who helped to make this reality.

openbittorrent.com has, apparently, bitten the dust as well. Oh the joy. DHT to the rescue, over the last few days, for those who could do it. I’m now running bttrack.py, yes the original, on eurynome and have (again) reannounced this project’s torrents. Please download the *.torrent files again. And don’t bother asking, I’m not running a public tracker. Clarification: The content is unchanged, only the torrent metafile has changed!

The updated CVS and new RNG code seem to behave well; I also fixed old bugs in the process. I will probably update our main server within some foreseeable future (this would be the ideal time to push out a snapshot again as well, even if it’s “just” netinstall).

People have shown interest in my djbdns patches. Consider forking, even putting it into the base system. I need to solve the problem of the remaining non-v4-transport-capable v6-transport binaries though, I think only dnscachet6 is remaining, so we’ll get only one set of binaries again. Also look for SRV RR patches. I wonder whether someone will code DNSSEC support…

The msdosfs LFN code is also still on my TODO, as are some other things. But hey, at least there’s movement; even Benny, despite being offline, unreachable by phone, etc. commits Google-Goo code. (Hi!)

mksh currently is being reviewed by the Android Security team, who like it on a first look. I’ve already addresses the first concerns even. I might release R39d soonish, also because I’d like a stable release before going on to associative, and since it’s easier to do than prohibit, multidimensional arrays — which have been welcomed in #ksh already…

You might want to update src/sys/net/netisr.h if running #10-stable, or upgrade to the latest kernel. I ran dieharder, and the results look good. The latest RNG subsystem pulls from many more sources and mixes better; I’ll summarise it later probably.

mksh was merged into Android (both AOSP and Google’s internal master tree) in the night 24/25th August, and is expected to be the one shell to rule them all, for Gingerbread.

mksh(1) now also has a cat builtin, for here documents mostly. It calls the cat(1) command if it receives any options. The shell is nevertheless smaller than yesterday because of improved string pooling.

There’s another reason to use the MirOS OPTU-16 encoding instead of PEP 383, on which I already wrote: try passing a wide-char filename to a function such as MessageBoxW, or create a filename on a system using wide chars, such as FAT’s LFN or ISO 9660’s Joliet, or one that only allows Unicode (canonically decomposed — ü → ü — out of all things) like HFS+. OPTU-8 at least maps to somewhat reserved codepoints (would, of course, be better to get an official 128 codepoint block, but the chance’s small of getting that in the BMP). Still.

Oh well, the torrents. I’ve remade them all, using one DHT seed node and OpenBitTorrent as tracker and put them on a very rudimentary BT page that will be completely redone soonish. Please re-download them. I currently do not believe f.scarywater.net will return.

Finally, I fell victim to a selling-out and may have just bought a Windows Mobile 6 based phone (Glofiish X650) and an SDHC card and an extra battery with double capacity. Well, at least it’s said to run CacheWolf well. I still would like to have something like Interix, Cygwin, UWIN, coLinux, or maybe some qemu-for-WinCE variant that runs Android, Maemo, Debian/armhf (or armel or arm) at near-native speed (and is usable — the device sadly doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, but it comes with SiRFstar Ⅲ GPSr). It only has 64 MiB RAM, like the Zaurus SL-C3200 and the jesusPhone, though. ☹ Any chance to get MirWorldDomination onto that device as well?

Tomorrow, eight years ago, is the date we now use as birthing point for MirOS. The thing is, we did not really want to create a BSD of our own, fork, or whatnot. We were mostly happy OpenBSD users (really happy before the first eMail exchange with its developers, where Theo de Raadt did indeed stand out but was not the only one — just the one with the authority to deny us), improved it locally and submitted patches and ports. We were flamed for that or, worse, ignored. I begun putting up my “OpenBSD patchkit” on my homepage (back then, at Tripod) and still tried to feed things to upstream and OpenBSD. Then, at some point, Theo de Raadt made it clear he did not want me and the patch kit had grown (from one 4M file into several of them), so I ended up doing a “cvs -d /cvs init” and went from there. Benny’s story is similar — he laughed at me while trying to get ports added to OpenBSD, then discovered his ports were added to the MirPorts Framework and getting commit access there was easier than getting some random developer to commit something of his to OpenBSD. (This trend ended there though… every single person I approached since has become OpenBSD ports committer — I wonder whether they used my invitation letter to blackmail Theo?) It’s often thought that there was a clash of opinions between Theo and me. I think while we might disagree in certain aspects or priorities things should have, in the end we both wanted the same thing, I just was promised to never become a member of the OpenBSD project, so it’s really just “them” being uncooperative. (They (Henning and others) did burn the T-Shirt I gave Theo as a gift some day for making OpenBSD what it was. I won’t comment on that, again, now.)