I just need to work more on bilocality. While I did find two geocaches, one at the South/Noon Train Station (taalverwarringen…), one in the buurt of the University, I did manage to miss the AW building completely and utterly. Wow. Except, that Haiku guy came over to talk for a bit (nice). And I drew. An Atari logo with swirl, for that weird stuff I recently have been found doing.

More mksh-current news coming soon, stay tuned. In the meanwhile, I met bonsaikitten IRL (at FOSDEM, yes, too) who kindly made a “live ebuild”, i.e. a source package building -current.

Finally let’s say a big thank you to the person mostly manning our booth, gecko2, and to Benny for talking to people, getting That Other Packaging Thingy working, and pimping the website a bit.

I’ve just prepared an ISO for FOSDEM Ⅺ which we might export on BitTorrent soon. Benny has provided an upgraded desktop background image, thanks.

The next mksh release… well I’ll bite the sour apple and will release it without associative arrays but hope I get around to hack a few things (especially the read and sleep builtins) before releasing. One lession learned, don’t brag with oh-so-big plans when you haven’t got a deliverable yet. Real Life will interfere. Oh, and Murphy, of course. (mksh R41 might have the associative arrays then. But mksh-current has ${foo@#} which is hash($foo).

❧ Who’s not? ☺ Same procedure as every year.

(okay, lolando prefers skiïng but…)

Anyway. A cow‐orker told me that Belgium again/still has no gouvernment, and they have been asked to grow out their beards until they do. I found “evidence” on the ’net but won’t link it here, also it’s on German… anyway. Let’s all join in. (Besides, I now have an excuse to not shave, maybe even my grandmother will accept this one…)

RT said on IRC that mksh will probably work on MSYS.

My Debian/m68k stuff is coming around nicely, but I still haven’t gotten around to do everything planned, plus I need to grow a new kernel and eglibc, after the latest uploads, and the 2.6.37 based one panics. Also I’ve got to take care to not overwork myself. (And make a MirBSD ISO for FOSDEM.) But hey, it’s been not working for some time and better now. And slow anyway ☺ yet we’re progressing. Does anyone know how to debug that a C programme only calling res_init(3) segfaults?

Benny is apparently not just working on making NetBSD® pkgsrc® available on MirOS BSD (picking up my work from 4+ years ago) but also replacing The MirPorts Framework with it. Sad, as I got a request for a gajim MirPort over a cocktail just this evening…

I’m almost finished with “sort of re-bootstrapping” Debian/m68k (I can use etch-m68k as well as what was in unstable at the moment as dependencies, so it was not that much, still, 305 binary packages build from 84 source packages, most for unstable (very few for unreleased, with very responsive maintainers, thanks all, who will include the patches in their next uploads) is a bit… including rebuilds with newer versions, more patches, more testing or newer dependencies installed. I’ll probably upload on Sunday evening, as I’ll be off for 2-4 days at least from then (see below). Ingo tried to test on real hardware, but as Murphy wants a hard disc failed… we’ll still try to get something done over the weekend. If you want to have a look, see my repository index (sources.txt contains a sample sources.list file, 0-NOTE.txt some hints, including the right debootstrap/cowbuilder magic and speed tricks). I’ll need to learn how to use LVM and set up a buildd now…

I’ve not been in much of a hacking mood recently – all these visits to the dentist leave me in unrest and disturb my equilibrium. Hence, not much activity even in mksh even if there was need, almost none in MirBSD. This is only temporary, but I won’t attend OpenRheinRuhr, or, if I come at all, it’ll be for socialising only and probably only one day. Benny’s done with his Doctor (in France, no idea whether it’s one in Germany as well) of Chemistry and has returned to hacking some (World of) Google-Go(o) code. I expect MirBSD activity to slowly raise once we can come back. Please accept our apologies.

FrOSCon was a blast. I had two booths of my own – MirBSD and FreeWRT – as well as shares of Debian and Grml. Well, MirBSD was run by Benny and gecko2 because I just didn’t have any time for it, despite XTaran’s help with the FreeWRT booth. All I did was the initial setup of both booths, while at the same time answering about three questions regarding FreeWRT in parallel. Wow. What a little small, open hardware can do to you. XTaran and I had fun and we’ll do FreeWRT booths again; I managed to flash my two FON2100 devices (“La Fonera” – the FON2200 can use the same image, says nbd of OpenWrt) and will fix the port’s remaining few bugs I found; XTaran will try to push the WL-500gPv2 development. The social part was nice as well, although I think the greek restaurant in the city will not be visited by me again. Anyway, if you didn’t attend FrOSCon, your own fault…

Since the BitTorrent tracker used by MirOS is down, here’s the link to the [updated 2010-08-28] current (FrOSCon 2010 Edition) snapshot’s torrent, Triforce as usual. We’ll probably rewrite torrent files for all our ISOs and publish them on the MirBSD website. I’m currently considering OpenBitTorrent plus one or two DHT seed nodes with no statistics. Maybe with webseed. (Need to update the libtorrent/rtorrent MirPorts first, though…) Other options would be different trackers or running one of our own. I will announce the outcome as news entry, once done.

On the plus side, the review process of mksh(1) in Android continues, and I fixed the realpath builtin to behave even more POSIX-ish.

The FrOSCon Edition “Federrosé” ISO is now available for download using BitTorrent. Because our usual tracker Scarywater is down, the file is now hosted here and tracked using OpenBitTorrent primarily.

• MD5 (MIRA0819.ISO) = 3ecab5f91e042580cf38571119b01fff
• RMD160 (MIRA0819.ISO) = c78ca3d2b1414c869ae15fd285cd2544b6eab6b1
• SHA1 (MIRA0819.ISO) = a9f343b019a238456ae6152191e06bdeff8ecca3
• SIZE (MIRA0819.ISO) = 713031680
• TIGER (MIRA0819.ISO) = 56dc76dbd112fe70eee5f393b5d90c097f60fb6211c31ced

Enjoy!

The FrOSCon 5 - 21./22. August 2010 booth plans have finalised, I am rather content:

	┌──┐              I ❦ STANDPLAN FROSCON 2010
	│ F│reeWRT
	├──┤
	│ M│irBSD
	│  │
	├──┤
	│ D│ebian
	│  │                 C = Collectd
	├──┼────┐
	│C │   G│rml
	└──┴────┘
 

This is especially good, as XTaran will be shared among (at least) Debian, Grml, FreeWRT; same for me plus of course MirBSD; kimnotyze is FreeWRT but may help with MirBSD; benz and gecko2 probably are MirBSD but gecko2 could help with FreeWRT, tokkee was interested in FreeWRT too… anyway.

Some days, you just love software.

	Aug  6 13:55:01 blau firesomething-bin: stack overflow
	    in function VFY_EndWithSignature
	Aug  6 13:55:01 blau /bsd: signal 6 received by
	    (firesomething-bi:1146) UID(2999) EUID(2999),
	    parent (sh:9059) UID(2999) EUID(2999)
 

Thus, let me reïterate it for all of you:

Well, now that the Debian Release Managers have sent their freezing bits around… *shudder*… Squeeze is frozen. Well, at least everything I have my hands in has migrated. I’m still… not persuaded. I also can’t decide which looks worse (KDE 4 or Win 7), tending towards KDE 4…

Why does all the horrid software (Solaris, Java™, OpenSSO, MySQL, etc.) tend to end up at Oracle at the moment? Let me quote from some Debian mailing list:
>>What happened to the Unix philosophy?
>Modern Solaris engineers
Is that similar to high-speed horse carriages?

My RPM repository has been pimped a bit – I ported some stuff from my DEB repository and updated them in both (rdate(8) and ntpd(8), specifically). Still ought to work more on them, but currently MirBSD base is most important, although I’m dying for mksh associative and multi-dimensional arrays, as well as more sh(1) conformance assorted bug fixes.

Well, there’s a life besides the computer. I’ve taken today off, wanting to hack on MirBSD’s most urgent problems (but probably end up doing that tomorrow), slept long, and will meet with cnuke@ and gecko2@ for Greek style dinner. The latter will almost certainly end up with a long-time work contract at the same place where I run a lot of things already, so congratulations. In the meanwhile, bsiegert@ has almost become a Doctor of Chemistry, and my brother’s finished his Maths and Economics diploma.

Also, I’ve put up the logo of the company where my new dedicated server is hosted; they reduce the monthly fee in exchange for this, so humour me and pay them a visit. They’re IPv6 pioneers, actually. (The server is now installed but not completely set up yet, and I have yet to begin moving services; it’ll be better than the VM eurynome is, but the clock could use the new timekeeping subsystem in the kernel as well as socket send (ÆrieBSD) and receive timestamps as it’s off by 0-1000 ms.)

Speaking of kernel stuff, yesterday I considered moving wscons(4) to UTF-8 again (since everything is CESU-8, we need to take raw octets into account also). I’ve seen OpenBSD begun importing Citrus… *shudder* Anyway, that’s my part, but I’d like volunteers for backporting things like the timekeeping stuff (and possibly more hardware support), and writing a pivot_root like thing (explained on some mailing list already) so we can use ramdisc root to do loopback root.

FrOSCon 5 - 21./22. August 2010 is approaching rapidly. I’m a bit envious at some of the tracks (I mean, really, geocaching (ok, I did the surrounging caches over the last years but still), learning python by means of game programming, etc. really sounds interesting – and I know people who could benefit from a non-kids version of that as well) but this year’s FrOSCon is nothing for me to curse about either: I managed to get both a booth for The MirOS Project (MirBSD, mksh and other subprojects) as well as one for Waldemar’s FreeWRT (although wbx@ – if he comes – won’t join there since he forked his own fork since its conception). Booth staff are, currently: tg@ and bsiegert@ (Developer), gecko2@ (Staff) for MirOS, tg@ and “XTaran” abe@ (Developer), kimnotyze (Hacker) for FreeWRT. (XTaran will probably be helping Debian/Grml too.) This year, it’ll be my job (after 2 years of aptituz) to keep the Altbier-Fraktion watered, I’m thinking one crate of Schlösser Alt and one crate of Hannen Alt?

Have a look at the Program and don’t tell me you won’t come! It will rock! (Except there won’t be Formorer’s Chilli, but that’s no reason, there’s enough other stuff in manageable distance.)

Besides interesting booths and talks, FrOSCon is still looking for helpers who will not only get free entrance but also catering during operation.

Bordeaux was very nice (and towards the end much cooler… it’s actually hotter here at more than 50½° north – too warm to think, or do anything) but the LSM/RMLL was very french. They’ll be in Straßburg and Lüttich the next two years so we can probably be expected to attend. I don’t think I can eat duck (which, in south-west france, is a vegetable) or like all that classic french multi-course food so much, but I had enough Couscous Merguez and Thé à la menthe fraîche… and similar good stuff. Many people spoke English and actually asked me whether I do (probably they couldn’t bear me trying to spea^W^W^Wbutchering the language of the Grande Nation) and in general were a friendly bunch. I did see some people with machine guns in the city on the last day, though. No idea what/why… didn’t dare asking ☻

Just another reason to boycott flying: Mario Lang (one of the speakers) was apparently held on the airport and treated as a terrorist due to his Braille line… they thought it was a bomb or somesuch thing.

Read on for more…

Travelling with the Thalys and TGV was nice (but I loathe the Métro parisienne… they should build a ring train like the Berlin S-Bahn and just put another stop before Paris Nord and Montparnasse for people who just want to switch trains to take the ring train to the other line). And I want air conditioned trams in Germany too!

I met Uriel (invited him for some food and talked lengthy with him and some 9grid guy), XTaran (who was rather busy organising things), and a number of other people. Did some PGP keysigning as well. There’s now an experimental MirOS presence at Launchpad, not sure what exactly we’re going to do with it but, as Canonical does not care (as Jonathan said in his talk – great slides, by the way, really impressive), there’s no harm in having it. Some Perl guy from America (USA… just to make sure ☺) wanted a photograph of me with a sign “I love CVS” just so people back at home would believe him he’s met such a person *grins* of course I plugged in a little advertising but cvs(GNU) is honestly good. The forge hacking session was a little under-visited (but still a success in terms of getting more communication and maybe collaboration underways, especially thinking of common interfaces, DC, semantic web, OSLC-CM) and since the room was (in contrast to my hotel room and the trams!) not air conditioned we didn’t get much hacking done. The Debian booth was about 40% of one FOSDEM style table wide… and subsequently crowded. There were more people (of course, I was trying to get mksh into Haikuports, Mandriva, and other things; talked about KDE 3.5.11 (Trinity), Qt 3 vs Qt 4, and kwalletcli, and in general to a not-so-usual bunch of suspects – like I said, LSM/RMLL really is pretty french-only).

It is too hot, but I still committed src/etc/rc,v version 1.110 which you want to upgrade your /etc/rc to before upgrading mksh(1) in MirBSD. (All in the name of better performance on platforms such as Debian/m68k and not raiding Linux’ inferior RNG… but it does simplify things.)

I could probably write more but at the moment just want to lie down and die until it gets cooler… even the rain didn’t help. My feet hurt (Montparnasse-Bienvenue didn’t help) too.

The current version of mksh had use of arc4random(3) removed, including “set -o arc4random”, to speed it up (on some architectures, a lot) – this will break some existing scripts (such as /etc/rc *cough* on MirBSD…). Hence I decided to publish the next version of mksh(1) as R40 based upon current development, and defer plans for associative arrays (and multidimensional arrays) for mksh R41. There’s also already the change to Build.sh arguments, so this suits me quite fine.

(Read: if running MirBSD, don’t upgrade mksh at the moment.) There will be a new MirBSD snapshot once this is fixed, maybe a few more changes to the shell for better POSuX compliance, and the recently mentioned patent on LFNs (long filename) in FAT will be taken into account with a patch to msdosfs.

I’ll travel to LSM/RMLL 2010, the Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) tomorrow until the weekend, to hack some on FusionForge (this is worktime for me), visit XTaran, Uriel, and maybe a couple of other “usual people”.

Thundersday, between 10:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC, eurynome will be shut down by gecko2@ due to power supply maintenance on the host system data centre.

We have a new mirror in the Americas, thanks a lot to Mike 'Fuzzy' Partin! Benny will mention it on the webpages once it’s working.

Quite surprisingly, I’ll attend the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010 in Eastern Germany. This is a happenstance, I managed to get fast transportation (via my boss) and accomodation (in a hotel). I will try to help staffing the booth of Debian this time (so I cannot be called Traitor any longer). Schedule, due to the spontaneousness of this, no, though. I may not even be there on Sunday, dunno…

No RCBD (or night) though, some real life and a new release (with fix of an FTBFS-on-hurd-i386 bug) though:
RMD160 (/MirOS/dist/mir/makefs/makefs-20100306.tar.gz) = f65bd8ef5cf3306a9112587dd4915b6255e479fe
This version pulls in NetBSD® changes (Acorn Archimedes support, for one), but I’ve also coded support for boot-info-table (J�rg compatible), as well as setting the PVD dates (used by GNU GRUB 2 for “UUID”s).

On MirBSD, cdio(1) can now be used to burn (TAO) and blank (quick) CD-RW media (I backported some OpenBSD changes) too.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R39b has been released. This upgrade is strongly recommended for everyone. While being a stable series release there are, due to standards compliance and bug fixes, a number of caveats users should be aware of when upgrading. Also new, the list of full terms and conditions applying to it. Users (and distributors intending to support mksh for their own customers) should definitively read the caveats, although only corner cases are incompatible (ask for details).

The arc4random.c page now at least has some content, and a lot of links, too.

The kwalletcli page has been completely written by now. I'm proud to announce the availability of the CLI for the KDE Wallet, as distfile, as Debian squeeze/sid package (it's already in testing, yes), and as Debian lenny package, soon to be in backports (currently only in my own play repo, as I'm waiting for bpo upload rights – apparently, my PGP key wrecked the software).

I would like to apologise for the delay; I've been more-than-busy at first (preparing MirBSD for FOSDEM), then in foreign countries where people talk in weird tongues, then ill. I'm still not totally recovered, and there is also much catching-up work to do.