MirOS News

The second-stage boot(8/i386) loader has gained several interesting new features:

• When called as DOS .com programme, it defaults to DL=80h because no actual drive is passed from the BIOS
• When named boot.com it can be run as SYSLINUX (ISOLINUX, PXELINUX, EXTLINUX) module and boot any OpenBSD/i386 and MirBSD/i386 kernels from local filesystems supported
• In addition to 4.2FFS and ISO 9660, the code to support the FAT12, FAT16, and FAT28 filesystems works and is enabled now, for both booting and the “ls” command
• If a hard disc has no type 27h partition, the disklabel is searched using the superfloppy approach (i.e., LBA sector #1)
• If no disklabel can be found, one is spoofed with a somewhat reasonable ‘c’ slice, the four MBR primary partitions as slices ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’ and ‘g’, and an ‘a’ slice spanning either the partition passed from DS:SI via SYSLINUX, the first non-empty MBR partition, or the entire disc
• The new command “cat” allows you to display files from within the bootloader, lest they be accessible
• The new command “machine label [hd0a]” dumps the disklabel
• You can place more than one command on the same input line, because ‘`’ now acts the same as ‘\n’ in the command parser; this is useful for instance if the serial console is not accessible from the boot loader, but required for the kernel, and using a boot.cfg is no option

The /usr/mdec/mbrldr, /usr/mdec/mbrmgr and the MBR built in fdisk(8/i386) have been upgraded to pass the partition data in DS:SI (or junk if reading from FDD or whole HDD)

*smile* Now we just need to make our bootloader multiboot-compliant…

If you want to track MirOS-current, be aware that /usr/libexec/cpp changed and /usr/bin/cpp is gone; you must compile and install a new cpp first, then stuff like rpcgen(1) and lint(1), then remove the /usr/bin/cpp script.

Furthermore, the gcc-provided shared libraries and items have moved from /usr/lib to /usr/lib/gcc/OStriplet/3.4.6 which you should add to shlib_dirs in /etc/rc.conf.local until you have rebuilt everything (base system and ports). Both mgcc and llvm-gcc add appropriate DT_RPATH to programmes and shared objects compiled with them and use their own crtstuff; mircvs://src/lib/csu/ now provides crtstuff for use with pcc(!) instead.

Expect a new i386 snapshot some time soon; sparc snapshots are planned more for the long term but could be compiled on request (ETA one week).

The C Præprocessor, cpp(1), in MirOS-current has changed.

/usr/bin/cpp is henceforth deprecated in MirOS-current as well as in MirOS-stable; it’s a shell script (overhead!) to call either mcpp(1) or Reiser CCCP. It will be removed in MirOS-current ASAP.

/usr/bin/mcpp calls GNU cpp directly. Its manual page used to be called cpp(1) and is now called mcpp(1). Since we are going towards a multi compiler system, people are expected to use “${CC} -E” as C Præprocessor in the future, instead of relying on an external cpp binary, when compiling. A cpp binary will still be provided for the X(7) Windowing System and similar uses. /usr/bin/mcpp will be removed some time before MirOS #11

/usr/libexec/cpp used to be Reiser CCCP without a manual page. It is now pcc cpp(1) with a manual page.

ahoka@ came up with the idea of using the (much faster) pcc cpp over the (rather slow) GNU cpp for purposes like Xresources, xdm configuration files, etc. Reiser CCCP could be used too, but it’s lacking in terms of standards and features. However, pcc cpp is under the Caldera licence, and thus, the following text must be reproduced in this announcement. (It’s still much more free than GNU cpp.)

This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.

Technical issues: pcc cpp uses getopt(3) and, as such, has a command line syntax which is totally different from the CPP standard. It also pre-defines neither any macros nor include paths. Be warned, and expect some breakage until everything is sorted out.

The MirOS Licence is now, after quite some years, OSI approved, which not only implies an official certification that it conforms to the Open Source Definition, but also allows mksh to be advertised as “OSI Certified Open Source Software”™, and has other benefits, for example qualifying for being hosted by certain projects, or fulfilling certain gouvernment restrictions.

While there has always been cōnsensus that The MirOS Licence is DFSG and OSD and, recently, OKD conformant, only some lists actually included it – the OKFN was quick to do so, but while it qualifies as both Free Software and Free Documentation licence as per the FSF definition, they have yet to respond to my enquiry, and the OSI list has only been updated last night (and could use some UTF-8 fixing, or, in this case certainly better, a downgrade to the ASCII version dubbed the licence template initially).

Still we’re glad that the OSI, although not encouraging people to actually use the licence, given their stance on “licence proliferation”, has done this step. It would be the first approved “copycenter” (as per Marshall Kirk McKusick’s definition) style licence with EU jurisdiction in mind while remaining generally usable.

We are proud to announce the migration of the httpd(8) vhost www.mirbsd.org to eurynome, the VM already mentioned in the Developers’ Weblog. The MirOS website is now accessible via HTTPS (this includes downloads in a secure fashion), using IPv4 or IPv6. Due to no longer being hosted on a foreign operating system, operation should be much more smooth. CVSweb, AnonCVS and AnonRSYNC are now provided from a central place, and you can even retrieve the full website via rsync.

The links in the mirbsd.de Zope kindly hosted by waldi also have been changed to use SSL now.

All links to the 66h.42h.de domain have also been changed to point to mirbsd.de or mirbsd.org, as the latter is now under sort of our control, and the former being phased out to reduce the possible points of failure.

The 2008-11-06 snapshot of MirOS BSD/i386 #10-current has been released as a new-style dualive CD image (BaseLive + Install CD for i386, Install CD for sparc, build logs) on the usual BitTorrent tracker, multi-tracked with a major BT site for these who pick it up there.

It's also available for NetInstall on both architectures. Note that this snapshot is identical to the 2008-30-10 one, but has been built using newer makefs(8) and baselive infrastructure.

This is the first snapshot with working startx(1) because we can now write symlink(7)s using Rock Ridge onto the filesystem image.

Today, a new snapshot of MirOS-current has been uploaded into the NetInstall area. The cdrom10.iso image is, as usually, a manifold-boot ISO 9660 filesystem which starts on i386 via El Torito, on i386 via MBR (if dd(1)’d onto a hard disc, USB stick, CompactFlash card, etc.), and on sparc via OpenBOOT. It also contains floppy images for i386 (one normal and three for serial console at COM1/tty00 at 9600, 38400 and 115200 bps, 8N1) and sparc. There are also CD images for serial console boot with the same parametres.

The MirPorts Framework snapshot, ports10.ngz, has also been updated. Note that we are still seeking port maintainers (our current policy is to update ports we use, which are often used, or we notice, or these someone asks us to, because we are understaffed), as well as people who use the MirPorts Framework on MidnightBSD and OpenBSD (and, to a lesser extend, Mac OSX). Furthermore, the pkgsrc10.ngz snapshot has been untouched since July 2007; if someone would like to improve the situation, for example by talking to the pkgsrc® developers responsible for stalling the integration, talk to ahoka@ (replaced in IRC).

This snapshot does not come as a DuaLive CD due to issues with both J�rg Schilling’s mkisofs(‌8), which has since been removed from the base system source tree, and NetBSD® makefs(8). However, we are trying to solve these and will produce one as soon as possible.

As of now, there are no binary packages compiled specifically for this snapshot; however, binary packages for older snapshots and even MirOS #10 RELEASE generally work.

RMD160 (paxmirabilis-20081030.cpio.gz) = 34c9a5913c9e69c8451d27d6ceeaa07cce6d3fef

Everyone who has been using the portable version of the MirBSD cpio(1), pax(1), tar(1) combined utility should upgrade, as the new version not only allows the executables to be called, for example, mirtar (to avoid breaking tools such as dpkg-source and lintian when they are in the $PATH), but also contains fixes regarding certain types of broken archives, such as these found in the Fedora Core 4 RPMs, which do not store the data content of hard-linked files packed with the first archive member but a later (the last). Furthermore, the ‘-v’ option may now be given multiple times to the cpio and pax, not only tar, frontend.

paxmirabilis is used, among others, in MirOS BSD, the MirPorts Framework, FreeWRT Embedded GNU/Linux ADK.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R36 has been released yesterday; the Changelog contains more details as usual.

Major changes:

• Digital UNIX (DEC OSF/1) V2.0 (MIPS) is now supported using the DEC C and ucode toolchain. (We could not run the testsuite, though.)
• The ‘-Q’ option to Build.sh is gone without replacement.
• A new option can be enabled by adding -DMKSH_BINSHREDUCED to $CPPFLAGS, intended mostly for Debian. This option adds extra code to determine whether mksh(1) is called as sh or -sh and switch to “set -o posix” mode if so, disabling brace expansion and some security features, because legacy scripts, such as debconf, depend on such reduced functionality /bin/shs.
• Input lines beginning with an IFS character of IFS white space are no longer pushed into the history. Some other, less surprising, changes were also made to both Emacs and Vi command line editing modes.
• The arc4random.c contributed file is now stored with the RCS version number appended, and has been updated.

This is a major update with improved stability and compatibility, and as such recommended in general. It has undergone more extensive testing than mksh R35; if there still be bugs, please report to us. Note that some sorts of behaviour are not considered bugs but expected, sometimes due to historical, sometimes compatibility reasons.

Request for Assistance: We are still looking for an OpenBSD committer to import mksh into the ports tree. Furthermore, a Slackware GNU/Linux package is still missing, as well as a PC-BSD PBI, and Macports (former Darwinports) do not carry mksh either. My earlier Minix 3 problem persists, as do the Plan 9 and Syllable Desktop ones.

The following bugs are known in the MirOS #10-current snapshot, dated 2008-07-22:

• The user shell for the default “live” user is /usr/dbin/mksh, which however has been optimised away. This is a bug in the production of this one snapshot and easy to fix in future issues. Workaround: while the rc.netselect script runs, choose ‘9’ to escape to a shell, and change the “live” user’s shell using vipw(8) – chsh -s /bin/mksh live might also work, but has not been tested.
• Running “startx” does not work because /usr/X11R6/bin/X is no symbolic link but a copy of the XFree86® server itself (on other baselive CDs it was a hard link instead of a copy; the change is due to production differences, but both break startx(1) and xinit(1)). Workaround is to use xdm(1) instead or try: startx -- /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 :0
• The X11 server may not switch to graphics mode on the ALIX.1c board.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused, and will try to solve these issues in the next development snapshot.

The MirOS Project will show up with both developers to run a booth at FrOSCon; we will be giving away Live CDs (either #10-stable or #10-current) and flyers. You will be able to meet us and a few helpers (known from IRC and mailing lists) there, chat about mksh, have a beer, fun, whatever.

This year, one of the two XFree86® developers will also attend; you can probably meet him at our booth.

The 2008-07-22 snapshot of MirOS BSD/i386 #10-current has been released as a new-style dualive CD image (BaseLive + Install CD for i386, Install CD for sparc, build logs, a selected few binary packages and their distfiles, but nothing fancy) on the usual BitTorrent tracker, multi-tracked with a major BT site for these who pick it up there.

It's also available for NetInstall on both architectures. Note that /MirOS/ has been cleaned up a little: some old NetInstall or upgrade packages are removed.

The #10/i386 binary packages should all be installable on this snapshot, although it does come with more recent MirPorts Framework and a couple of current binary packages as well.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R35 has just been released; as per the Changelog this is a major update with some bugfixes, a lot of new features, and licence simplification (the advertising clause is gone). This version was not tested on AIX, BSD/OS, Interix, IRIX, GNU/kFreeBSD, UWIN, the Intel compiler, but we expect no regressions on these platforms either. New supported platforms include dietlibc, LLVM. Platforms already working continue to be MirOS BSD, DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, MidnightBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DEC ULTRIX, Mac OSX, HP Tru64, HP-UX, Solaris, Debian GNU/HURD, Cygwin, and various GNU/Linux systems; using gcc, pcc, SUNWcc, llvm-gcc, Compaq C, HP aCC, TenDRA; on a variety of hardware architectures.

Online manual: HTML, PDF (ISO A4 paper, we don’t support Imperial units, as even the USA has converted to Metric)

Update 18.07.2008 – mksh R35b is out, with major bug fixes, read the changelog.

As mentioned on the Downloads page, the naming scheme of the anoncvs mirrors changed. We now have:

• master system, restricted access, ssh, rsync + cvs:
  • offering: /MirOS /Pkgs /cvs /ncvs /ocvs
  • _anoncvs@herc.mirbsd.org (private, IPv4 + IPv6)
  • _anoncvs@herc.mirbsd.org (private, IPv4 + IPv6)
• primary mirror, ssh, rsync + cvs, currently the same as 2.anoncvs:
  • _anoncvs@anoncvs.mirbsd.org (public, IPv4 + IPv6)
  • _anoncvs@anoncvs4.mirbsd.org (public, IPv4 only)
  • _anoncvs@anoncvs6.mirbsd.org (public, IPv6 only)
• hephaistos (unixforge.de), Germany, ssh, rsync + cvs:
  • ‣ sshd(8) host keys
  • offering: /MirOS /Pkgs /cvs
  • anoncvs@1.anoncvs.mirbsd.org (public, IPv4 + IPv6)
  • anoncvs@1.anoncvs4.mirbsd.org (public, IPv4 only)
  • anoncvs@1.anoncvs6.mirbsd.org (public, IPv6 only)
• eurynome (VMware instance), Germany, ssh, rsync + cvs:
  • ‣ sshd(8) host key
  • offering: /MirOS /Pkgs /cvs (/Distfiles /www not yet)
  • _anoncvs@2.anoncvs.mirbsd.org (public, IPv4 + IPv6)
  • _anoncvs@2.anoncvs4.mirbsd.org (public, IPv4 only)
  • _anoncvs@2.anoncvs6.mirbsd.org (public, IPv6 only)
• allbsd.org, Japan, IPv4 + IPv6, rsync only:
  • offering: /MirOS /cvs
  • rsync://rsync.allbsd.org/miros-cvs/ = /cvs
  • rsync://rsync.allbsd.org/miros-ftp/ = /MirOS

We are in the process of setting up eurynome (see above) to take over most functions from www.mirbsd.org and mirror everything, but, as this is a new system and VMware has issues, this will probably take a while. However, all data should be available from some place anytime.

Update 20.07.2008: moved SSH host keys from this page, to keep width inside some reasonable bounds, 10x gecko2@ for noticing in MobileSafari

The CVE-2008-1447 does not, according to various sources, affect systems that randomise their source port. MirOS libc’s integrated resolver, according to some OpenBSD developers, does this, as does DJBDNS. The net/bind mirport is affected, but by using pf(4) to NAT yourself (thanks to Vutral for the suggestion), you can randomise these ports too. According to RUS-CERT, only using DNSSEC is a fix… I wonder if this is truth or advertising for a technique without wide-spread use.

The fixes10.ngz set, of course gzsig(1)d, contains an updated mksh binary and dot.mkshrc as well as /.profile (root) and /etc/profile (user) files, which speed up logins, as well as an updated /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts file. It can be directly applied from the installer, or untarred in / (do not forget the 'h' and 'p' options to tar(1)). Note that this will overwrite any existing changes to these files:

• /.profile
• /etc/profile
• /etc/skel/.mkshrc
• /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts

Use this for integrity checking:
RMD160 (fixes10.ngz) = 6c85c3e8eb4a5046b5b45373a0996cee2a3208b7

Our anoncvs mirror has changed its ssh host keys due to a Debian-specific problem (it's hosted on a machine running Debian GNU/Linux courtesy of gecko2@). The new keys are: [Update: moved]

Please copy these into /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts or ~/.etc/ssh/known_hosts, overriding the existing keys for the same IPs or host names.

The current version of the /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts file can be retrieved via anonymous CVS (from the server affected), anonymous rsync (also from rsync.allbsd.org), CVSweb (from both servers) or by an eMail request.

Yesterday's snapshot does not yet include the new public host keys, as they were generated only today.

The 2008-05-14 snapshot of MirOS BSD/i386 #10-current has been released as a simple baselive CD image (Live + Install CD, build logs, but nothing fancy) on the usual BitTorrent tracker, multi-tracked with a major BT site for these who pick it up there.

It's also available for NetInstall, although you shouldn't pick up the perl CVS fix in that directory, as it applies to a much older #10-beta snapshot.

The #10/i386 binary packages should all be installable on this snapshot, although it does come with more recent MirPorts Framework.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R33d has been released, mostly containing a security fix for the -T option, see the Changelog for details.

A new MirMake version has been issued, to fix problems compiling C++ code with strange file extensions (.cpp as on Microsoft® Windows®, and .C as BOINC uses). MirMake is a sort-of-portable version of the MirOS make(1) utility, a few header files and a libmirmake.a containing helper functions, and some supporting utilities: install(1) lndir(1) lorder(1) mkdep(1) readlink(1) tsort(1)

The MirPorts Package Tools have been updated as well, as Lucas “laffer1” Holt, the MidnightBSD founder, has implemented ldconfig(8) -U too, and the use of this option by pkg_create(1) is now required for a lot of packages (since GNU libiconv, expat and libpng use their own fake-pkgview subdirectories.

Hashes of our current distfiles:

• RMD160 (gzsigkey.cer) = 0a24e416b26e4753eee4cbfe8f1dc74f2486eb6e gzsig(1) distribution sign key
• RMD160 (fwcf-1.05b.tar.gz) = 355e1a46ef384b4ca26cccb7892a2f60eff2ffe2 for FreeWRT
• RMD160 (libnointl-20070726.tar.gz) = 3b97197a9bd8f693bebd8b528dd0d5c942e83e64
• RMD160 (arc4random.c) = ad0ef189b7ffe80b9224b1f3886377847341bac5
• RMD160 (joe-3.1jupp8.cpio.gz) = bbcc42ff82fd7a47feb51579864a487f31ca3a91
• RMD160 (cksum-20080314.cgz) = 7566313c6db3182a99437eb6543b0da6abbed5bd
• RMD160 (paxmirabilis-20080314.cpio.gz) = 3966925c2d87838b0b55e2a0c715f027df3d965b
• RMD160 (ed-20060924.tar.gz) = 7d41e76e169caa73c8bbd043ad40b2b84339761a
• RMD160 (mirmake-20080411.cpio.gz) = e18bd36bc6c260332ab5df008f30b57a9849bc50
• RMD160 (mksh-R33d.cpio.gz) = d810a705b01e146f9addd184c168798a22a36d38
• RMD160 (mpczar-20061119.cgz) = cccf88ae27225c808f327ae7d56dbd9f2c053249
• RMD160 (mirmtree-20050912.cpio.gz) = b4de12ddfd022538732b2c14dad60c2351b3011c
• RMD160 (mirnroff-20050912.cpio.gz) = 5063466a267a64b3f088c86a29e011b5ad712c4a for Interix ONLY
• RMD160 (sitetmac-20071023.tar.gz) = 107e5b64ecbf1214e19681f6fc0add6599fef25d temporary
• RMD160 (tmacmbsd-20071003.tar.gz) = 223c38916e489469703627b189f6fc16b9a36e27 temporary
• RMD160 (patch-20051110.cpio.gz) = ac32b2b0a1e7203256ec4bd255c7525053afb3ed for Interix
• RMD160 (pkgtools-20080411.cgz) = edf320a3798aa40c015e57c579310df754f28820
• RMD160 (rdate-20070817.tar.gz) = 3501ae05c05d7c4f39ccb1c76dd51663c2b91e34
• RMD160 (mirsort-20050912.cpio.gz) = 69a1a632c7343c09ca7bab39f6359667bb461c1c

The MirBSD Korn Shell R33b has just been released; as per the Changelog this is a minor update: portability fixes, support for dæmonising scripts, and manual page improvements.

Online manual: HTML, PDF (ISO A4 paper, we don’t support Imperial units, as even the USA has converted to Metric)

UPDATE 02.04.2008: mksh R33c is out, with a bugfix and a new fully supported OS (ULTRIX 4.5).

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.

MirOS #10 Metalink

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:

https://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.

The MirOS project will be present at FOSDEM 2008 in Bruxelles, Belgium. We will have a booth and distribute the usual CDs and flyers. The BSD projects share a developer room with PostgreSQL. I will hold a talk about "Build systems with autoconf, automake, and libtool" at Sunday, Feb 24, from 2pm to 3pm.

Update: the schedule for the developer room is available on the FOSDEM web site.

RSS feeds (in RSS 2.0 format) are now available (again). The available feeds are news and wlog-9. link tags have also been placed, so your browser should be able to auto-detect them. If you have any problem, do not hesitate to contact me.

As you surely see, this page sports a brand-new design based on the old /newsite CSS and the old one for www.mirbsd.org. The colors have been inverted (i.e. dark text on light background) and the header has changed. If you happen to notice any problems, contact us.

The design was tested on Camino (Mozilla), Firefox, Safari, IE6, Opera, and lynx. I hope that covers the ususal suspects.

The project will be present (albeit without tg@) at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress at Berlin, Germany. We will have (maybe) a table in the hackcenter. There will be many interesting talks about hacking, society and similar topics.

A security update for perl in the base system has been committed. To install it, update src/gnu/usr.bin/perl via cvs and rebuild perl. A binary upgrade for newer MirOS #10-beta versions (Linuxtag 2007 and newer) is also available. To install the latter, use

cd / ; sudo tar xvfz /path/to/perl-CVE-2007-5116.cpio.gz

The following ports also had security updates: print/cups (fixed in 1.2.11-1), devel/pcre (fixed in 7.4-0). Please upgrade those if you have them installed.

Update 20071221: cups-1.2.11-3 is out with more fixes.

Due to a technical problem, mail service for mirbsd.org is not available. tg@ is also absent but you can reach a MirOS developer at bsiegert at gmail.com (replace " at " by @).

Most notably, this means that the mailing lists, miros-discuss and miros-cvs, are not working. To keep up with recent commits, look at the Changelog. anoncvs and cvsweb do work.

mksh R32 has been released; read the ChangeLog for details. In short, an internal error when using pipelines as co-processes was fixed, array index bounds expanded, the build system improved, and everything cleaned up.

mksh R33 will address the namespace conflict between aliases and shell functions in a way Debian patched their pdksh package to go. This implies that FSH invocations will be able to define all common aliases again.

The first-stage bootblocks (bootxx) of both the i386 and sparc architecture are now self-installing shell scripts that take an extent list (block spans) on standard input. This now allows to create, for example, bootable ISO9660 images for MirBSD/i386 and MirBSD/sparc (or even both at the same time) on a MirBSD/i386 (or even GNU/Linux/i386) box. This is another milestone in the progress of making sparc a full-blown, supported, architecture.

The HTML manual pages have now been split into a machine-independent and a machine-dependent part (or rather, two of them) as well. This allows a much faster release generation on sparc. Furthermore, related manual pages, such as uuencode(1), uudecode(1), b64encode(1) and b64decode(1), now list all of their aliases in the title and are hard linked to save space and generation time (and hopefully search engine traffic, who knows).

mksh R31d has been released; read the ChangeLog for details. Basically, another busy loop spinning bug was fixed and everyone should upgrade. This release features PCC support.

mksh R31b has been released; read the ChangeLog for details. This quick follow-up release is because it fixes several important bugs etc.

OSF/1 support thanks to the IceWM coffee pot maintainer, Josef “Jupp” Schugt.

Update: On 09/11, mksh R31c was released, thanks to Josef “Jupp” Söntgen (aka cnuke@)’s very late bug report, which was done IRL instead of via IRC or eMail, which are the usual channels. This release fixes arc4random.c on SunOS due to them bad OpenBSD guys using non-standard types in an API.

Update 2: Everyone should upgrade to mksh R31b or later, due to the bug fixes and their relevance.

mksh R31 has been released; read the ChangeLog for details.

This release is dedicated to Bob “maradong” Hentges, Symlink Lëtzebuerg.

XTaran of symlink.ch fame has finally helped us to test the latest, greatest and ultimately vt100, grey-on-blue / grey-on-black snapshot – as you can see, it boots up quite nicely. First, the text is still all black on white, but as soon as the framebuffer is initialised, that is switched to lightgrey on black, and further kernel messages are in our well-known, famous lightgrey on blue colour composition. WARNING: The linked image is more than 1 MiB in size.

Furthermore, this very snapshot has been uploaded (for both the sparc and i386 architectures, with a readme for the former) to /MirOS/current and waits for your test results. We would be glad if someone could help us to fix the remaining bugs especially in the sparc port (nroff, issue with the bootloader and bsd.rd, etc).

The aforementioned XFree86 font issues have been solved provisionally by putting back the cropped and charset-reduced font sets; we will look into this issue after the release sometime.

This weekend, the project will be present at the FrOSCon 2007 at the FH Bonn-Rhein-Sieg near Bonn, Germany. There is going to be a booth where you can meet the developers, and bsiegert@ will hold a talk about autoconf, automake, and libtool—an introduction to the GNU build system on Sunday at 16:30, room 5.

Note the wlog entry about FrOSCon – more entries will follow, stay tuned.

The CDs to distribute are still not done, sorry… it’ll be an adjusted LinuxTag edition, no more, not even more recent dist sets, due to all the trouble we had.

tg@ and bsiegert@ are appearing at the FH site later this evening and are open for food’n’beer suggestions from donators ☻

MirOS BSD #10 is coming near. The fourth release candidate for i386 has been released. Grab it via HTTP for the i386 or sparc platform, or do a network installation.

Caveat: There is a bug in some of the fonts.alias files from the xbase set. If X fails to start, enter the following commands to fix the problem:

$ sudo ed /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias
%s/iso8859-1$/iso10646-1/
wq

Note: this affects both the i386 and sparc snapshots!

Our main cvs and mailing list server, herc.mirbsd.org, has some hardware problems at the moment. This means that the mailing lists are down until further notice. Anonymous CVS access (not from allbsd.org), this website, and BitTorrent are working fine though.

Read/write CVS access to CVS for developers will be restored in one or two days, making tg@’s SPARCstation the temporary CVS master.

Waldemar Brodkorb (wbx@) has donated hardware to act as a supplemental AnonCVS/AnonRSYNC server, which is being initialised and tested right now, as the hosting site only accepts boxen that have passed a typical stress test. Eventually, this box will act as a secondary mail server as well.

For now, please use IRC for bug reports, feature requests, feedback, etc.

Update (2007-08-24): We’re almost back to normal, the server hardware has changed a little until proper replacement can be used (with proper, I mean replacing the IDE crap with SCSI, etc. while we’re at replacing anyway, and actually investing some – well, a lot of – money and effort). Mailing lists work again, and commits will be enabled for developers during short timeframes a few times per day, with immediate rsync actions being taken afterwards just to be on the safe side. This however means: FrOSCon CDs will contain older versions of MirOS, big financial loss for us, and MirOS #10 will be delayed for a yet unknown amount of time (but sparc is finally ready since 23rd).

After FreeWRT, MidnightBSD, a FreeBSD-based operating system, has adopted mksh as its default Korn shell, that is, /bin/mksh and /bin/ksh (but not as /bin/sh). While the current state of integration uses mksh R30, the upcoming R31 release with features requested by MidnightBSD developers will be integrated soon.

We would like to thank the developers of MidnightBSD for considering this and congratulate their users to gain a usable-by-default shell. We would also like to encourage other operating system developers to follow this example and integrate mksh (or, like OpenSolaris, AT&T ksh93).

The BitTorrent tracker now has a torrent for the MirOS #10 RC3 Live+Install CD; of course, the netinstall location has been upgraded with the new dist sets as well. You can now select a keyboard layout during livecd boot, and it's been made more user friendly; many small bugs have been plugged; everyone's favourite shell is at R30-current with support for TenDRA and maybe tcc, and several ports, most notably GNOME, are in good shape.

Please report errors back to us; we don't plan on making any further changes to the codebase save bugfixes and maybe some more changes to ports.

mksh R30 has been released; read the ChangeLog for details. FreeWRT, Debian, FreeBSD Ports, MidnightBSD mports, MirPorts, RedHat/Fedora, the OpenSuSE Buildservice all have it already; we expect others to follow.

This release is dedicated to everyone who helped with portability.

On boot, if the kernel were to drop into ddb(4), it would panic again, rebooting over and over, due to an uninitialised timeout(9) in random(9); this was fixed today.

With apologies to every Debian user who is still on sparc32, XTaran of Symlink fame has provided us with the idea: We aim to produce an operating system for 32-bit sparc boxen that is small, fast, stable, reliable and secure. MirOS/sparc is its name, and while it's currently being dormant, I promise it will be polished and shining in a short while. (I hope to get the issues I had some weeks ago solved, even at the cost of Ada support should that be necessary.)

I could use some parts for my SPARCstation 20 though: it only has a 75 MHz supersparc CPU and 128 MiB RAM; if someone has a 233 MHz hypersparc CPU (I think Ross built these) I'd be delighted to upgrade, and more RAM never is bad. I've got some SCSI discs from tyler, so that's not urgent.

mksh now builds with IBM XL C/C++ on AIX – Linux/POWER and Mac OSX shall follow once I'm able to test. Thanks to the person who wishes to remain anonymous for providing us the ability to do this porting work.

FreeWRT, an embedded applicance development kit, has adopted mksh as its default shell and /bin/sh for the upcoming 1.1 release.

We would like to thank everyone for their support and feedback, hope that the upcoming mksh R30 will please even more, and suggest other projects, such as NetBSD®, to switch at least their native ksh to mksh.

mksh R29g has been released mostly to fix large file support in some operating systems (mostly GNU), which was tested for correctly, but the test result was not used during the actual compilation. Found by hondza, thanks! This stable version update also contains some other minor changes from mksh-current that don't affect existing behaviour (so none of the nice features shown earlier) which aren't that noteworthy though. There's still an issue in that -D_LARGE_FILES=1 is defined even if it's not required sometimes, which is fixed in mksh-current, but it doesn't hurt.

German penal and crime code, Article 202c, forbids us from “retrieving, making available” (and some other things) tools that can be used to gain illegal access to data or access codes. While we do not approve of this law at all, we will be forced to abide by it in a few weeks (once it's been published in the print version of the parliament's papers), so tcpdump(8) was removed from the base system. We do not believe providing MirPorts makes us liable for the actions of the end user, and hope no other tool in the base system is affected by this law. We will try to make politicians realise how bad that is, as they are effectively preventing sysadmins as well as researchers, teachers and students from securing systems. (Maybe they just want to make us affected by the Federal Trojan?)

We've finally implemented another bash-compatible feature in mksh, namely variable substitution with substrings. Try print ${var:2:3}. The first character after the (first) colon must be numeric, an opening parenthesis, a dollar sign or a space right now; use ${var: n: m} for the bash ${var:n:m} (or ${var:$n:m} or even ${var:(n):m}). All of these are bash-compatible. This doesn't nest in either mksh or bash.

More features are to follow ☺

To install MirOS BSD, please use a direct download (or even netinstall from the same place) at the moment. We will provide MirOS #10RC2 as a Live+Install ISO image again at some time in the future (give us 1-2 weeks); MirOS #10RC1 contained a bug regarding the live CD part which went for a few days undetected; the creation of the ISO fell into that timeframe.

On a side note, the series of GNOME port updates is continuing.

Countless users have requested we do the same as AT&T ksh93 and bow to the “be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept” approach. Regarding to shell programming, this means we should support some of the most widely used extensions from other shells (ksh93, bash, zsh, csh, make(1)) as well.

Some hours of continuous cursing later, it's done. The current development version of mksh R30β now supports GNU bash style array initialisations – and better than they, I might add:

• OpenBSD ksh (from OpenBSD 4.1-current, 17 May 2007):

  	$ x=(a b c)
  	/bin/ksh: syntax error: `(' unexpected

• GNU bash (from MirPorts Framework, 2.05b-1):

  	$ v="d e"; x=('$a' "$v" c "(d)"); echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"
  	4/$a/d e/c/(d)/
  	$ v="d e"; x=('$a' "$v" c (d)); echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"
  	bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('
  	Segmentation fault
  	$ v="d e"; x=('$a' "$v" c "(d)"; echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"
  	bash: syntax error near unexpected token `;'
  	Segmentation fault
  	$ bash -c 'v="d e"; x=('\''$a'\'' "$v" c "(d)"'
  	bash: -c: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `)'
  	Segmentation fault
  	$ bash -c 'v="d e"; x=('\''$a'\'' "$v" c "(d)"; echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"'
  	bash: -c: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `;'
  	bash: -c: line 1: `v="d e"; x=('$a' "$v" c "(d)"; echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"'
  	Segmentation fault

• mksh (-current as of tonight):

  	$ v="d e"; x=('$a' "$v" c "(d)"); echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"
  	4/$a/d e/c/(d)/
  	$ v="d e"; x=('$a' "$v" c (d)); echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"
  	mksh: syntax error: '(' unexpected
  	$ mksh -c 'v="d e"; x=('\''$a'\'' "$v" c "(d)"'
  	mksh: syntax error: ')' missing
  	$ mksh -c 'v="d e"; x=('\''$a'\'' "$v" c "(d)"; echo "${#x[*]}/${x[0]}/${x[1]}/${x[2]}/${x[3]}/"'
  	mksh: syntax error: ')' missing

As you can see, we're continuing our not only tradition but also mission to provide working, reliable software. (If you try interactively typing one of the last two examples, mksh just waits for the closing parenthesis.)

Furthermore, our portability promise is kept – mksh now also compiles fine with the vendor tools on HP-UX, which even have found a little shortcoming in the code I only can shake my head about… no idea who coded that ugly thing…

On unrelated news, bsiegert@ has continued his work on bringing the GNOME ports into shape for the impending release of MirOS #10.

Thanks to a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, mksh is now officially shipped for Red Hat's GNU/Linux variants:

• Fedora 7 (i386, amd64, ppc, ppc64 using gcc 4.1.2 and glibc 2.6 at Linux 2.6.21)
• Fedora Core 6 (i386, amd64, ppc using gcc 4.1.1 and glibc 2.5 at Linux 2.6.20)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (i386, amd64, ppc using gcc 4.1.1 and glibc 2.5 at Linux 2.6.18)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386, amd64, ppc using gcc 3.4.3 and glibc 2.3.4 at Linux 2.6.9)

We were informed that the all of these pass the testsuite. Fedora 7 quality assurance is being run on it until approximately this weekend; to install mksh, simply type yum install mksh (for RHEL, you'll have to enable the EPEL repository first).

The Fink package manager for Mac OSX now also contains mksh R29f.

bsiegert@ will hold a talk about GNU autotools, libtool, and how to use it right at the second FrOSCon in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

Of course, there will be a BSD booth with all the usual suspects and goodies, so feel free to come over and talk to your favourite BSD's developers in person.

The MirOS Project is proud to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the upcoming eleventh release of MirBSD, together with a stable release of the MirPorts Framework. This snapshot already advertises itself as MirOS #10 except for the OS patchlevel number and is available for download for the i386 architecture only.

Download, as usual, on the BitTorrent tracker (Live CD), or via a networked installation from various mirrors (DE JP).

On unrelated news, work on the 32-bit sparc port has started again – mostly due to request from users (quite reassuring). Thanks, guys!

The MirBSD Korn Shell (mksh) now can not only be built by the GNU Compiler Collection, egcs/gcc 2.95, the GNU C Compiler 2.7.2.3, and the (quite gcc-compatible) Sun Studio 12 C Compiler, but also by the Sun Studio 5.8 C Compiler on a Solaris 10 installation. Adding support for other vendor compilers will be much easier now.

These changes can be tested in the -current branch of mksh (and MirOS BSD) and will be released with the next major version, mksh R30. Furthermore, a few minor bugs were fixed and mirtoconfiguration is a little faster and more reliable now. Some of these changes may be MFC'd to mksh R29g, whose release date has not yet been decided upon (reads: when do you need it?).

Update: Intel's C Compiler (Version 9.1.042 and 10.0.023) work as well and have unveiled a few minor issues. The code is now smaller due to removal of orphaned code and variables GCC didn't spot. (I don't like icc though.) And in unrelated news: while we do now support OpenBSD's new CVS keyword $Mdocdate$, we will not use it, so that the mksh(1) manual page remains usable on other operating systems.

Some of you might have noticed the new look & feel creeping onto a few of these pages. Well, after LinuxTag (it was a success, but not like they say in their press announcements, I'm rather laughing at these) and FreeX, whose latest issue has an interesting article about MirOS BSD, and with mksh(1) getting more and more popular, I decided to skip on sleep and fun today and continue hacking on what I had already done for the website. Mostly content today. The MirBSD Korn Shell page got completely rewritten. If you find something, tell me. The theme will probably stay similar like the current one, not like Benny's, but the index on the left will look totally different in some days. I'm only migrating (very) few of the old content. At the moment, “main”, “news”, “mksh” and “wlog-9” are converted, and the old CMS has been hacked for transparent migration to the new CMS (“mws”) using HTTP 301 redirects. Same goes for manual pages (/manN/ -> /cman/manN/) to save space on search engines' hard disc drives. Finally, news and wlog now have permalinks (beta).

UPDATE (02.10.2007): Manpages now have better md redirects, and you can use various syntaxes, including /man/foo.1 or /man{i386,sparc}/bar.8

惣流・アスカ・ラングレー (well, just call him Soryu) and NetBSD®'s Stefan Schumacher have taken photographs of the MirOS team (the Duo Benny and me, Przemysław who run the booth as a mere user, and Much, whose new notebook got freshly set up, but who already knows how to like MirOS with evilwm); I'll put them up here once I get access to all of them.

Because we ran out of CDs, we put the ISO 9660 image on the BitTorrent tracker; please only redistribute it on CDs, DVDs or USB Sticks in order to comply with the licence of the Opera© browser included. You can, of course, also simply do a netinstall.

Update: the pictures are here!

	Benny bei der Arbeit (benz at work)
	Dæmonische Bilder: Benny (benz, Developer) – bsiegert@
	Dæmonische Bilder: Thorsten (mira, Developer) – tg@
	Dæmonische Bilder: Przemysław (zeno, User & Booth Staff) – przemek@
	Benny, Przemek, mira and much, whose laptop just got freshly installed…

The last picture was made by Stefan Schumacher, thanks!

We are present in a joint booth with AllBSD.de on Linuxtag 2007 in Berlin, Germany. The booth is located right at the entrance. Live CDs are out, alas.

mksh R29f is a bugfix release. It fixes some horizontal scrolling bugs discovered by David Ramsey. Thanks a lot!

The BitTorrent Tracker offers a Live and Install CD ISO image of the current development branch for download. This snapshot contains security fixes for at least OpenSSL, OpenSSH, httpd, the kernel, as well as bugfixes for ftp, lynx, and many others.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R28 has been released. An upgrade is highly recommended.

Due to the introduction of a new ld wrapper, you will have to re-do "make setup" (or a similar command line) after updating the infrastructure from CVS.

We changed our web server. The former mirsolutions server is no longer. gecko2 hosts the box behind www.mirbsd.org now. waldi's Zope is still operational and helps a lot.

MirOS #9 is available via our BitTorrent tracker. There is also an HTTP(S) download/netinstall option.

Please read the errata.

In case you have acquired a MirOS CD-ROM "FOSDEM 2006" edition please verify the checksums of the data on the CD. Some of the CDs we distributed at FOSDEM were burned from a bad ISO.

Read even older news.