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.

FOSDEM was a great success. Once more, thanks to Daniel Seuffert, Marius Nünnerich and the others from the AllBSD project. We distributed 400 CDs with the latest snapshots, of which about 350 were distributed on Saturday alone. There was a stronger demand for French flyers compared to the last years; I think that more locals (i.e. Belgians) attended the conference. Many of these people were only there on one of the two days.

Kudos also to the people from the Debian booth (especially Axel “XTaran” Beckert) for lending us a screen for the showcase computer. Due to communication problems, the others had not brought a spare screen as usual, and I could not bring one on the plane.

I held my talk about Build Systems with autoconf, automake and libtool on Sunday at noon, with a very interested public who posed some very concrete question. I conclude that there is a real need for this kind of “HOWTO”. I will write a bit more on the subject of autotools, in the meantime the slides are available at SlideShare, where you can view the presentation online (Flash required) or download a PDF.

Oh, and contrary to “popular” belief, the food at the Pakistani (!) restaurant on Saturday was excellent :).

Bauch wieder OK, dafür nen recht wehtuënden Frosch im Hals, Hammerkopfschmerzen, Rückenschmerzen und bißchen Gliederschmerzen. Grml. Ich mach' im Moment erst mal nix.

Ich glaube, das Essen gestern (war eh’ scheiße, heh… anyway, der Couscous-Laden hatte zu, und Benny und gecko2@ und Anhäne haben mich zum Inder geschleppt) ist schuld, daß es mitr im Moment scheiße (heh…) geht. Mist.

Ich freue mich schon auf das Essen gleich, hoffe, daß es frischen Minztee in großen Mengen geben wird. Und daß ich die Reise nach Hause unbeschadet überstehen werde. Immerhin haben wir gut, aber zu wenig ☺ wie immer… geschlafen.

XTaran hält gerade seinen Vortrag. Dem Benz seiner war gut.

Yesterday, I arrived in Bruxelles, coming from the Issy/Paris FusionForge meeting which will be described more later by Roland on Plänet Forge. Please tell Ohlol if you use it, for more visibility. My employer will also provide hosting for FOSS projects, but we'll need to formalise the hosting conditions first, plus Evolvis currently runs FusionForge 4.5 (aka "Debian GForge") but we're in the process of upgrading to a 4.8-plus-backports-and-patches, then 5.0 soon.

There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or end-users (hosted project developers/users) though).

At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh – the MirBSD Korn Shell etc.

There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.)

Don't you people dare miss the two talks: from Benny about how to package with autotools and libtool correctly and from XTaran explaining Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Benny's also famous for his talk about Painless Perl Ports with cpan2port; XTaran's famous for a whole bunch of other things.

I still have some catching up (wlog entries, keysigning, webpages, etc.) to do, please bear with me. I don't really have a proper work environment with me.

There's a chance I will not be attending the Beer Event in the Delirium Tremens café (last year's still remembered). Benny will certainly be there, though.

Could someone please order nice weather? I still need to eat some lunch and find a supermarket to shop for the weekend!

The MirOS Project will have a booth at FOSDEM 2010, business as usual. If you thought otherwise, you’re crazy ☺

I know I should write a wlog entry about the BSP, write more, release mksh R40, fix the TaC of it and the kwalletcli webpage (thanks again, it’s now in Debian sid!) etc.pp but I also need to prepare an ISO for FOSDEM, etc. Heck, I should prepare a talk for FOSDEM, but I’m not going to. If I need to stand there and talk, I’ll talk, not hold a presentation. I’ll just see what people are interested in, talk about The MirOS Project, and improvise.

I’m busy, and there’s only so much computing you can do in a day. This does include the dayjob. At least, my NMUs are in Debian now and probably can help people (and I submitted info about other bugs too).

Anyway, watch the news in the months to follow… can’t talk about everything now.

Marc Fleury, JBoss founder joins the ranks of Tonnerre, me, and other people requesting that MySQL (and MariaDB!) please finally die. Everyone, don't even fork it. Use a real database instead. Or, at least, SQLite. Really.

We're going to FOSDEM 2010 (of course – I've been at every FOSDEM that was not just an OSDEM, Benny and gecko2 are regular attendees as well, as are other projects of mine such as FreeWRT and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, by proxy). There will be a recent MirBSD snapshot I've yet got to build, with the new floppy format ustarfs (idea, but no single line of their stinking ridiculously huge code, stolen from NetBSD®) and other improvements (albeit less than I wanted to get done by then). The days before, I'll attend the first FusionForge meeting to break up the French Cabal, with my work hat on. That is also my first time in France (outside of the Elsaß). People, make a good impression on me to overcome the classic prejudices ;-)

This weekend I'm going to meet my Debian Application Manager zack, have some good beer (ugh... first this, then Paris, then good belgian beer...) and fix some bugs, all while learning even more. Sounds like fun, but I almost feel overwhelmed, in contrast to the years of much less travelling from my past. I've also started sort-of mentoring Simon, one of our apprentices at work, into the Debian processes. (On an unrelated side note, formorer recently said bpo will become bp.d.o soon. Great!)

Please don't laugh at this excuse for a webpage, as I've yet to fill it in, but my CLI for the KDE Wallet is hereby deemed ready for public consumption, with a bug-fix release 2.01 (bugs actually found during preparation of a port to Debian sid and KDE 4, which is much much worse than KDE 3, plus it looks so absolutely disgusting I'm not even sure Windows® Mistda is worse). I hope the package will end up in NEW soon (and once progressed to testing I may be able to make the KDE 3 variant official via lenny backports; my WTF *.deb repo will hold them until then.

There are more webpages I need to fill in... mksh's TaC, arc4random (which needs some major redesign as well) and BSD::arc4random, the RANDEX protocol (entropy exchange over IRC) and its plugins and patches, ...

Not just Mac OSX (and, I hope, iPhoneOS) will soon come with mksh(1), but also Android (I prepared patches to make it /bin/sh, which works quite well – although I need to find out how to make a hardlink so that #!/bin/mksh scripts will run) and Maemo, for which I wrote an mksh package in a garage project, which also needs some love w.r.t. testing on actual devices, menu integration, etc. (Please contact me if you can help with either of the three.) We also have «lewellyn:#ksh» making a package for the new OpenSolaris system (thanks again). People persuading Apple to put it on the jesusPhone are also welcome. (This does not mean I endorse any of these – right now, I'd probably get the most of a WinCE PDA with built-in GPSr, WLAN and maybe GSM/GPRS.)

English and French native speakers, please review, and Dutch native speakers may contribute a translation of, our flyers. (Source code for these is not available, sorry. Benny makes them in Quark on System 7 in Basilisk II, used to be Classic until Apple yanked it. But still, they use only free fonts, free imagery or such the MirOS Project is allowed to use, and beat every single other FOSS project flyer I've ever seen by far!)

There's probably more I could write, I bet I forgot half of it anyway, but I'll leave it at that for now. Get yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate, pour an Espresso into it, and enjoy the mix with a piece of cake (I'd say strawberry or mousse-pear but all they had was cassis-créme) and pity me for not knowing any French next month.

I finally have a wristband for 26C3. The wristband is what is controlled on the entrance. I had preordered the ticket and paid by bank transfer, and the receipt with the barcode only arrived on december 25. In earlier years, you came on the 26th, crashed in the hackcenter, and at some point, when there were only ten people in the queue at the cash desk, you got your ticket easily.

Well, this year, things were a little different. First, there was a semi-public ticket presale. What's more, rumors about a very limited number of tickets were floating around. And finally, while the cash desk was said to open at 2000, the software was not ready by then (!) and the opening was deferred to 2130. The "fast line" cash desk for people with presale tickets was only opened around midnight, when I had already given up hope and joined the huge queue of several hundred desperate hackers. (Thanks, btw, to ScottyTM for pointing out that the "fast line" had been opened.) Finally, I was told that my ticket "did not exist in the system", that I was an evil cracker for trying to enter with a fake ticket, and that I should check back on the 27th. Great.

The end was happy and somewhat anticlimactic: I checked back this morning, there was no queue, and my presale ticket was accepted without any problem. Most of the talks I saw today were about network neutrality, censorship and related topics. I found the talk by Jérémy Zimmermann from La Quadrature du Net especially interesting. Part of the talk was an introduction to lobbying: calling your EuroParl representative, sending e-mails and insisting on your point "raises the political cost of certain decisions".

The snapshot has another bug I discovered after converting my laptop to a showcase: lynx(1) charset defaults, after disabling auto-detection, to the wrong one (the news item has been updated, again).

I came back from OpenRheinRuhr, and (apparently in contrast to many others) liked it, save for the (a)social event, which some organisers admit hasn't been what was promised to them. My hotel was actually some kind of Vereinshaus and Billard club, so I had to eat supper (after fleeing the Casino, I had wanted to eat with some others deciding to split/fork, but formorer couldn't decide, so I walked the 3km, but didn't find anything appealing on the way, since I walked towards the outside of the city) in a smokey bar. So 2007, that. But I watched some kind of Billard competition during that, the meal was good and much, and the beer good and rather affordable. (I even took a Krug to my room with me to flee smoke.) Breakfast was included, the quality much more than I had expected at that price (I paid almost twice that in Basel, where I didn't even have a private loo adjourning the room, much less a proper bathroom with douche). The city, despite confusing it with other Ruhrpott cities beginning with BO, was nice and quiet (although the visitor count suggests that it was too remote, I rather prefer this to the usual rush and street mob, and it was still lively).

I think you'll find more coverage, photographies (hopefully not of me, as I wore a pullover forbidding it) and opinions on the 'net soonish, even dissing if I may harbour a guess (not without reason, from what I've been told privately), and, as I still have a headache (as usual...) I refrain from writing more. The MirBSD^H^H^HGRML CDs will be distributed at 26C3 by formorer from the Grml team *grins and I wonder if the celebrities equipeed with a MirCD or MirUSB stick, like Werner Koch, will make good use of it ;-)

OpenRheinRuhr will see our latest snapshot on CDs (although we seem to be short of flyers ☹). Complete, with MirOS BSD (i386, sparc; i386 Live) and MirGRML (i386).

The next snapshot’s codename has been decided upon angrily today: “wtf is with all these bugs?”
Expect a fix for the latter sometime soon, it does in fact have more effect than most sites say, to avoid Panikmache (unlike that Schweinegrippe stuff); I’m lucky my online banking stuff keeps SIDs in the URI ipv Cookie, but still… very bad. Switching renegotiation off as a quick würgaround also is evil, for example, my SMTP setup (using X.509v3 SSL certificate auth for relaying) might break. But we are said to expect an amended SSL/TLS protocol soon, hopefully with OpenSSL patch.

ekeyrng is a very rough draft (shell prototype) currently driving, together with a small USB backport, a Simtec EntropyKey in herc into wrandom(4) (for now). Really, the Lua tools should be used, but this is good for the installer, although the TPM, eKey and truerand – cprng(8) – functionality should be combined into one small, efficient, C dæmon doing so (but without the hacks to keep cprng(8) within one memory page to cease swapping). Still, it’s great!

bsiegert@ will be offline for a week.

Gee...  I don’t know what “hallowe’en” means…

Does this match what you’re thinking? Well, there is a new MirOS snapshot, with several components, (as usual) out on BitTorrent. It was also distributed on CDs at OpenRheinRuhr 2009, and will be (by formorer) at 26C3 in Berlin.

This is the combination of an ISO 9660 filesystem image with the “Samhain” edition of MirBSD and the “Hello, Wien!” edition of grml GNU/Linux, Triforce (as usual), and the „Allerheiligen“ CVS snapshot. And a tribute to UF.

Update 01.11. – This is tagged 「event」 because I intend on distributing this snapshot on CDs at OpenRheinRuhr next weekend, and maybe Benny on bootable tapes at 26C3…

MirGRML 2009.10 is based on grml-small 2009.10-rc3 and contains a couple more programmes, and, as usual, is fitted to match the rest of The MirOS Project’s offers, for instance by not using a framebuffer by default, having mksh as login shell, etc.
This time, all (required) source code is available either from our CVS or from sources.grml.org.

The Squash-and-Steffl background comes from Christoph Prokop, and was used in our desktop wallpaper with permission from Mika.

Update 01.11. – The GRUB2 「memtest86+」 bootmenu option does not work because nobody told the Grml team that it must now be booted with 「linux16」 ipv 「linux」 – fix is to type ‘e’ to edit the entry, move right, type the “16” and hit ^X to boot.

Note: This is “MirGRML”, a mini-Grml coming with MirBSD. There is also “MirOS bsd4grml”, a mini-MirBSD coming with Grml. This should clear up any possible confusion. (This snapshot contains a full MirOS BSD, i386 and sparc, no MirOS bsd4grml, plus MirGRML, but no Grml. The Grml 2009.10 release contains a full/medium/small Grml, no MirGRML, plus MirOS bsd4grml (the small one).

MirOS BSD, both i486 and sparc architectures. Most recent snapshot, compiled 2009-10-30, with an updated kernel for a security fix from 2009-10-31 we urge people to upgrade to, even if running older versions. Hence, MirOS-current snapshots are now recommended over MirOS #10-RELEASE, updates for which we have been unable to provide regularily due to lack of time. (Sorry.) This snapshot could have been released as MirOS #11 if it were not for our release plans (so please consider it a new stable release, albeit one without intentions to release binary incremental security updates, but then, we can’t do so for #10 either, so you still win).

MirBSD/i386 is called MirOS BSD/i486 above. We might produce a MirOS BSD/i386 platform with user-space soft-float (like ARM), for a SoC device, if we want and have the time to play with such platforms. What is currently MirBSD/i386 requires an Intel 80486DX or compatible, such as a Cyrix 80486DLC (the one in nwt, see my wlog entries for details). Neither 80386 compatibles nor FPU-less systems will work with this release.
MirBSD/sparc is still compiled for v8 CPUs, with optimisation for HyperSPARC turned on. It is possible to compile your own variant for a v7 CPU (sun4 or sun4c system), though.

This Live CD comes with IceWM, Dillo 2 and a couple of other tools installed and partially preconfigured (you can even run MirBSD inside MirBSD, as qemu is shipped). Enjoy!

Update 02.11. – The /etc/rc shipped breaks pflogd(8) and hence spamlogd(8) – part of the spamd(8) suite – please update this file from the etc10.ngz set manually to cvs(1) revision 1.107 if you are running a spamfilter scenario. Our apologies.

Update 08.11. – Append the following line: CHARACTER_SET:utf-8 to /etc/lynx.cfg or re-enable locale-based charset setting.

Once this release is done, I will create a cpio-with-crc-ball of the CVS repository again, for initial extraction purposes, to speed up an rsync mirror process. It will be available from our usual web mirrors. (Link)

You can also pull /cvs directly, and /MirOS and /Pkgs. We plan to make all distfiles used to build MirPorts packages available as well, but currently lack disc space on some of the boxen involved (they are still usually available from the original mirrors, as well as on request directly from bsiegert@/tg@, plus we fully intend on making binary packages the viable option).

Due to heavy load at work, as well as some minor things, I'm either taking back interest altogether, involvement altogether, time spent on projects, or any of these on aspects/particulars of projects.

Sometimes, when you're burnt out, it's best to concentrate on living and on core projects. mksh is one of these for me, as is keeping MirBSD userland and MirPorts infrastructure working well, with small, evolving improvements (no big jumps). Other things, no matter how nice, interesting or useful (to me as well as to others) they are, need to stay back. I poured most of the last seven years of my life into MirBSD.

Sometimes, you want to give back, but it's too much effort, or you cannot afford to spend more time on it. I'll close one of my Debian ITP bugs for this reason. (I also rarely send in patches from ports for this reason, but sometimes point upstream to our CVSweb.)

Sometimes, people like Ulrich Drepper, Marco d'Itri, Gerrit Pape let you realise that every project has its Theo de Raadt-alikes. I've still not ported jupp's latest release to Debian (but an OpenSuSE Buildservice SRPM exists), nor uploaded the current mksh(1) version even to my own wtf repo. I will do so, when I feel like spending private time with Debian again, at least for the etch and lenny (and hardy – for work) branches, as dash and mksh in sid have... issues I predicted ages ago. (For one, I'm still waiting for Gerrit to contact me. Maybe our eMail systems don't like each other? Waldi or formorer will probably pass on any messages, as will the trusty BTS.) I'll probably not open any ITP bugs again and send in much less of the bugs I notice, simply because I don't like being ignored (or flamed, but sometimes, being ignored is worse – which is why Benny works on MirPorts, btw). Maybe, if I feel the need to, my wtf repo will grow instead; DDs or DMs are free to take from there if they like.

Sometimes, one realises that he just doesn't fit in. While Cachewolf is a useful project, working together with Java™ developers that communicate over web fora only and don't even see the need for compatibility with Unix or proper processes most of the time (svn:eol-style comes to mind, and switching the source code to UTF-8 is something I've given up to dream of – I would even have fixed bugs where Ewe wouldn't do UTF-8 right, but I run into a wall of bliss ignorance there) proved impossible for me. I won't budge either: web fora are simply not for me to use. Period. This is my fault (for not fitting in) as well as the fault of some of the rest of the team (for ignoring years of experience, or for simply nicht über den eigenen Tellerrand schauen (however one says this in English, I don't know) and not caring of these who do; for supporting the commercial gc.com site over the three alternatives too). I will continue to use it, maybe the iPAQ H3600 a colleague gave me proves useful, otherwise, MirBSD will do just fine.

So, when I leave or pull back a little, no prejudices. Sometimes with reason, but mostly due to lack of available resources on my part. I hope nobody who has been or will be noticing me ceasing to contribute as much as usual thinks ill that's why.

You all know that the sparc (demo) freezed on me. Well, the VT420 only emitted “Keyboard Error 4”, I tried the other sparc (ss20/marc). Also equipped with one of these 36G LVD/SE U160 SCA HDDs, it exploded. Literally. Something – I still don’t know what (smells in the area of the tvtwo(4/sparc) and le(4/sparc) but…) as this happened during the installation, which continued as if nothing had happened, except that, a minute after the explosive sound, it begun to smell. *sigh*

Me then go back to demo, even put in the tvtwo(4/sparc) for monitor/keyboard console (sucky German keyboard, but after installing kbd(8) works), use the Stop-N trick (hold it down and power on) to erase the PROM (thanks NetBSD® FAQ, no thanks to the people in #sparc in IRC who suggested Stop-A) to switch from serial to k/m console, then it installed… and froze.

To add insult to injury (luckily not mine), the VT420 works again.

I tried hard to get you at least a minimal set of binary packages – gmake (so it’s self-hosted), lzma (for *.clz binary package support), screen (because people need it), jupp (vi(1) is in base, but no editor other than ed(1)…), rsync (even though it’s now GPLv3, we depend on it heavily) – but just could not, no matter how hard.

On the other front, after re-doing the installer a few times due to some fuckup in install.sub (don’t ask, but I really extracted the image from the symbol-less kernel and put it back afterwards…), a number of core packages for i386 were built, and bsiegert@ is supplying another few hundred. Yay!

I’ll still follow the plan to create the FrOSCon ISO tomorrow, will add a minimal set of i386 packages plus their distfiles where licences require it, and refer people to the online repository. I cannot add any “real” sparc packages, so there will be none. I’m tempted to modify the sparc installer by image extraction too, since the mount_mfs(8) fails when the box has too much RAM (more than about 300 MiB), but don’t want to power on one of these boxen and lose even more time (if not body or possession).

qemu is getting better at emulating a sparc, but we still cannot go to user space. ☹

If someone is really interested in getting MirOS working on boxen compatible to the SheevaPlug (ARM 1.2 GHz), despite our rather old gcc and binutils, please contact us. I’d drop sparc support over it once working.

See you all kissing the blue frog, but remember, don’t kiss a porc. You can read the advertisement or the flyers (German, English or French) meanwhile.

Hell yeah. I promised a wlog entry about the Linuxtag 2009 visit. I planned on making it somewhat detailed, enumerating a couple of things I did other than catching a few geocaches with a company's EeePC and MirBSD and CacheWolf on a USB stick, and getting ill.

Alas, things often are not as desired, and I had to work last week, while still slightly ill, and I just never came around doing it. I arguably could write up something now, but I forgot most(!) of it already, don't want to publish incomplete things out of fear from (accidental) omissions, sit on nwt (my dear 80486DLC laptop) and... well, procrastinated too much. And I had a long work day and am very much enjoying my AfriCola+SchlösserAlt beer, thank you very much.

So, without further ado (why the fuck do Amis tend to have trouble with homophones, by the way?), comrad's pictures:

It definitively wasn't as technical an event as FOSDEM, and much less people asked about mksh, but at least now I got my OpenPGP signed by two more Debian Developers who do not intend on switching keys in the next couple of months... *sigh* Anyway, world domination coming, this is required for I am still a DM, but wouldn't say no to DD status either. Why, à propos, do I have <tg@d.o> and only realise that because of spam mails sent there? Anyway, met formorer from grml in real life, quite nice too. We got some donations for the buttons and grml CDs, but the money got distributed among many people.

Hah! These CentOS guys! They made me promise to say CentOS rocks if it included mksh; they were going to file a bug at RHEL for its inclusion. I looked today, they didn't. So I won't say it rocks. It rather annoys, truth be told. Especially since it comes without a decent shell, and I had to make an RPM of OpenNTPD myself! Imagine that!

The MirOS Project will be represented at LinuxTag 2009, Berlin, .de by tg@ mostly at the booth of tarent GmbH who kindly sponsored buttons, some at the joint booth of AllBSD whose Daniel Seuffert kindly sponsored CDs and flyers as usual, and may be seen at the Holarse booth which has history with MirBSD™ on LinuxTag.

We will distribute MirOS BSD CDs (i386 Live, i386 Install, sparc Install, i386 MirGRML 2009.01) as well as grml CDs (containing grml 2009.05 Lackdose-Allergie, which includes MirOS bsd4grml/i386). There will probably not be any MidnightBSD CDs due to lack of an image in time for the deadline. Furthermore, besides the giveaway flyers, there are a couple of buttons for MirBSD, grml, mksh, MidnightBSD and Glenda from Plan 9. We would like to ask for a small donation (the amount does not really matter) in return for these; also, donations for the CDs are welcome to cover printing costs and will go to the respective sponsors (this is especially valid for the grml CDs, as they are not strictly covered by AllBSD).

The next event will be FrOSCon in St. Augustin, with tg@ as well as bsiegert@ and gecko2@ as usual.

Es ging also zum GUUG Frühjahrsfachgespräch nach Karlsruhe. Nun, die Stadt kannte ich ja schon vom LinuxTag (meines Erachtens auch der beste Austragungsort für jene), aber diesmal eine neue Ecke. Hotel, Einzelzimmer, bezahlt vom Arbeitgeber; Event auch. Tutorium okay, lehrreich (auch was man nicht will), die Vorträge wechselnd gut aber in der Regel es auch wert. Aber wie auf jedem Event lernt man viele neue Leute kennen, oder auch Gesichter zu den (Nick)namen. Das fand ich gut. Das „social event“ entsprach dem auch, wir waren im lokalen Brauhaus, und das Buffet… nunja, ich bin kein Freund von Buffets und „kompliziertem“ Essen, aber bin gut sattgeworden, nur die „Mousse“ war eher… interessant im Biolekschen Sinne.

Natürlich war ich auch zwischendurch Couscous Merguez essen, frischen Minztee trinken, und beim Geocachen meinen Laptop schrotten. Hmpf. Immerhin laufen die Flüssigkristalle nicht aus. Drückt mir die Daumen, daß der Händler meinen X40 auf Kulanz repariert, da innerhalb der Garantiezeit (1 Jahr; ist knapp unter 6 Monate her, daß ich das Teil brauchte). Immerhin 3 gefunden, einige nicht gefunden (dafür aber ne hiesige Cacherin) oder nicht angegangen (zB da nicht so lebensmüde, auf ein >4m hohes Verkehrsschild zu klettern, oder da die Koords zu weit weg vom Startpunkt waren).

Dummerweise werde ich also jetzt eher an nocd (win2k) und nwt (80486er Kiste) hängen und nicht weiter entwickeln.

Ich denke, ich sollte mal selber meine Founds durchnumerieren und in eine Liste packen, da die meisten eben nicht in allen Datenbanken gelistet sind.

Hier dann die aktuellen „Statistiken“:

Drei mehr dabei, aber leider kaum auf OC

Unterstützt JamesDoe nicht, boykottiert seine Caches, schreibt die Logeinträge bei ihm ausschließlich auf OC.de hin, sodaß er die Listings dort wieder pflegen möge, oder schreibt ihm, was ihr von seiner Aktion haltet, die Listings auf OC.de zu orphanen!

“CPAN is the host for hundreds of Perl modules. Creating ports for these modules is often trivial but may still take some time. cpan2port is a new utility available in MirPorts, the MirOS ports framework, designed to facilitate this task. It should be easily adaptable for other platforms, e.g. pkgsrc®.

“The aim of this talk is to present the implementation and practical usage of the utility. Interested developers from other BSD projects are very welcome, some hints for porting the tool will be given.”

The slides for bsiegert@'s talk at FOSDEM 2009 are now available on slideshare. Please note they require a Macrobe Flash player.

(picture courtesy of Christian “taleon” Ruesch from #pcc)

FOSDEM 2009 is over, we are all sober again (I hope), any spotted bugs are getting fixed. I tended to the disklabel sector size issue, although that has yet to be tested, and we might want to see what upstream does about it. mksh changes will be coded when I get to it, and we’re looking forward towards the next event(s).

Is there anyone interested in making a Virtual Appliance (for qemu, VMware, Parallels, you name it) out of MirOS? I could, of course, do a standard install one, maybe add some packages, like with the live CDs, but I’m not good for desktop style ones. Maybe we want a server and a desktop appliance. Benny could bake a GNOME version, just to show off (note that I still quite dislike it… and expressed it with one of these yellow stickers at the “GNOME HATE” side at FOSDEM ☺).

MirOS/sparc users, show yourselves, if you want snapshots to be built and provided more often. Talk to us, so we see the effort to support a second platform is not in vain.

Due to bug-hiding circumstances, this problem was only identified during FOSDEM Sunday afternoon. The first stage boot loader would overwrite itself trying to load the second stage boot loader, due to them sharing the same 16-bit (64 KiB) segment after the workaround for the Parallels bug. installboot(8/i386) would pass the sectors covered by filesystem blocks, which amounts up to multiples of 8 or 16 KiB, even though the last block was not entirely filled. Fix is to do bounds checking in the assembly code at boot time.

An updated fixes dist set is available for people doing a network installation anyway, or to extract later with
$ cd /
$ sudo tar xzphvvf /path/to/fixes10.ngz

If you do a CD installation, you have to do the following steps:

Location of sets? (cd disk ftp http shttp nfs or 'done') [done] shttp
HTTP/FTP proxy URL? (e.g. 'http://proxy:8080', or 'none') [none] «Enter»
Server? (IP address, hostname or 'done') www.mirbsd.org
Server directory? [v10/i386] MirOS/current/older/i386

…

Set name? (or 'done') […] *

        [X] bsd
        [X] fixes10.ngz
Set name? (or 'done') […] done
Ready to install sets? [yes] «Enter»
 

This sequence will add the fixes set from network after finishing a disc installation, before the installboot(8/i386) part is run. Of course, you can substitute shttp with http too or specify a proxy to use.

If you have already installed, follow the above mentioned tar command to unpack the fixes set (in /mnt if you are still in the installer), then use the command:
$ sudo /usr/mdec/installboot -v /boot /usr/mdec/bootxx wd0
# /mnt/usr/mdec/installboot -v /mnt/boot /mnt/usr/mdec/bootxx sd0
(wd0 or sd0 depending on which is your root disc; the second line is for within the installer)

My (tg@) sincerest apologies for this bug, which was introduced during the Parallels Desktop BIOS bug workaround’s creation. Remember, if you already have an (unbootable) installation, you can do all this by booting from the CD again (into the installer/rescue kernel).

Update 11.04: changed link to fixes10.ngz to new location, now that a new snapshot is up.

Alle englischen Flyer weg, alle CDs heute Vormittag weg. Die (alten) deutschen sowie die französischen Flyer gehen okay, aber die Mengen und Verhältnisse sind echt nicht planbar. Die Flyer von der tarent (Jalimo und Freedroidz) gehen auch okay weg, aber die Baumwolltaschen waren schneller weg. Die Roboter haben aber das ein oder andere "Oooh!" oder reinen Wiedererkennungswert gehabt.

Die Vorträge sind okay, aber leider für mich nichts dabei zum rausziehen. Pläne schmieden geht aber.

mksh hingegen ist mehr als nur ein Erfolg, auch wenn mir gruselt, wenn Leute eine ohne den emacs-Modus haben wollen.

Hm, irgendwie läßt sich das Event nicht gut in Worte fassen. Es hat sich auf jeden Fall für uns alle gelohnt. Das Hotel war spaßig (insbesondere der Versuch, eine Rechnung zu erhalten); gestern Abend gabs Couscous Merguez + Lamm in einer verdammt kleinen aber gemütlichen Bude (mit Couch!), wo wir frischen Minztee getrunken haben (fünf Kannen; ich alleine zwei oder so).

Das Aufbauen verpaßt, aber wir haben ein „m“ (Bild wird später nachgereicht, sollte smultron freuen), viele Kontakte, und die englischen Flyer sind jetzt schon alle, die CDs runter auf ¼ oder so.

Der Unicode-syscons-Vortrag war für mich leider nicht so ertragreich; dadurch, daß wir vt100 wscons(4) haben, und durch meinen script(1) -lns Hack, haben wir schon mehr Probleme gelöst und Wissen angebaut als er. Ed Schouten ist aber anscheinend ein vielversprechender talentierter Jungentwickler.

Cool, ich habe ein bißchen WLAN! Mal schnell ein bißchen wlog Einträge verfassen, Benny und gecko2 wollen ja nicht.

Jetzt nur noch den NetBSD®-Kollegen neben uns zum Installieren des RANDEX-Plugins verlassen…

Wer setzt uns eigentlich direkt neben OpenBSD? Zum Glück gibts eine große Barriere, daher ist bislang, außer Laserpointerattacken (sogar direkt in Bennys Auge) noch nichts passiert…

Gestern, Freitag Abend, war der Tag 0 der FOSDEM. Natürlich waren wir – die anderen beiden tarentler Fabian Köster und der Vortragende Robert Schuster, gecko2@ und ich – beim Beer Event, später auch mit bsiegert@. Das Bier war lecker, allerdings habe ich zwar nicht zu viel aber wohl zu varietätenreich getrunken, sodaß es mir in der Nacht nicht so wirklich gut ging und ich noch Bauchschmerzen habe. Also keinen mit dem Debian Projektleiter trinken.

Benny hat lustige Sympathiën von Leuten aus anderen Projekten bekommen, aber ich darf leider nicht drüber schreiben.

Uh-oh, 03.02. already. I think, after the switch to GRUB 2 and another couple of bootlooter fixes, that we’re there yet. Funnily I only noticed how BSD cannot access labelled disks when the device’s sector size mismatches the one in the label. There is also an embarassing (for upstream) local DoS exploit possibility, by setting a sector size of 0, the kernel traps division by zero. Thanks for all the blowfish, yeah.

The checksum file for MirGRML 2009.01 (experimental, but probably, by now, complete). You’ll probably figure out the ISO link.

The full MirOS CD should be done soonish as well. Just have to test it, then I can go to bed. Wish me luck.

GNU grub-legacy cannot access ISO 9660 on devices with sector sizes other than 2048 bytes… and, according to mika, has other quirks, with recent mke2fs’ inode defaults making it hiccup. Heh.

Again. I almost have a MirGRML+bsd4grml ISO ready (exactly 72 MiB), just for the fun of it, and so that people can toy with it – and test the integration. But nooo, I even hacked a disklabel, yet it wouldn’t access the filesystem. The “machine label” command shows what’s wrong (and hints how to fix it), and I missed a corner case in disc I/O due to adding two not-so-independent-from-each-other scenarios during the El Torito merge.

mksh has funny behaviour with ${foo/@(%)/x} failing – only in Unicode mode though.

To counter the bug in Parallels Desktop, I rewrote all of our Master Boot Record (mbrldr, mbrmgr), Partition Boot Record (bootxx), and BIOS disc detection code in boot(8/i386). I've also changed the magics, API etc. a little between these, rewriting or removing quite some parts of both installboot(8/i386) and bootxx.sh a.k.a. self-installing bootblocks. Oh, and MBR and PBR are smaller, or rather, have more room for informatory texts and data block storage now.

Lucas “laffer1” Holt from that cat's BSD helped me testing, qemu and bare metal IBM X40 works, so I suppose it's good. Can't test on VMware Server 2 right now.

On the other front, I'm writing this wlog entry on MirGRML, which is finally sort-of finished (which is why it has much less Unicode than a regular posting from my laptop). lynx-cur in sid is broken though, due to it using GnuTLS. Gah! Anyway, I see a sid “wtf” repo coming, and it was workarounded; next time I'll just do things differently.

Lukas “smultron” , the graphician of our partner project mnbsd, helped a little with the label (while I'm not versed in that field, if I had gotten the right material to work with I could've managed it all alone this time), and all that's left now is the Live-CD part and baking (and testing! even on sparc...) the ISO 9660 image.

There will be 297 MirBSD Triforce™ DuaLive™-CDs (two will go to Kiwi land to swishy, one is already reserved for XTaran) and 50 MidnightBSD Live DVDs at FOSDEM.

gecko2@ and bsiegert@ were not too helpful today, although I have to admit that real life often has precedence. I merely read some and went to sleep early yesterday too (and disabled both POTS and cell phone so that I couldn't be waked, haha!) instead of hacking late. Luckily, the deadline is not that dead, and I'll almost certainly make it tomorrow, in time. Thanks again, Daniel Seuffert from AllBSD.de, for all support you and others give to the smaller BSDs. Heh, and laffer1 is not quite done yet with his ISO (or UDF?) either.

My employer, tarent Gesellschaft für Software-Entwicklung und IT-Beratung mbH, is sponsoring the entirety of the attending MirOS Project representatives – which are bsiegert@ and gecko2@ as well as me – for FOSDEM, covering the Bonn to Bruxelles travel of gecko2@ and me (and two colleagues, where one of them had already been mentioned before I entered the company ☺) and hotel costs of all three of us. Thank you!

tarent GmbH develops IT solutions and supports open source and evolvis hosts almost three dozen OSS projects, mostly written in Java™, for various fields of endeavour. The Freedroidz robots are well known on the “house” events. Jalimo is a Java™ 2 SE platform targetting mobile devices. And this is just the beginning. We are also internally using a lot of open source projects’ work; I already mentioned the FreeWRT, MirBSD and OpenBSD boxen…

Sponsors make it possible for us to attend popular events, paying for travel and accomodation (we do not necessarily require a hotel, though, but it should be a clean place to sleep) cost. We are still looking for more sponsors making it possible to travel to even more events (Linuxtage Chemnitz, Essen, Graz, Luxembourg, for example) – flyers and CDs are already covered by AllBSD.de or ourselves, so it would just be that and, if you have money to spare, food and drink. Come and talk if you’re interested (in return, like here, we will publicly thank you or provide custom MirOS editions, possibly Live DVDs with binary packages, etc).

Who’s not? ☺

My boss approached me just this morning… looks as if gecko2@ and I can use the bigger company car from here, expense paid, and take the other two employees who are going to Bruxelles with us. I’m in the process of organising them a hotel now though – maybe bsiegert@ the francophile can help with that. gecko2@ is going for a youth hostel though, as usual, as he has a membership anyway. Benny and I are already hotel’d.

Now if I were on Plänet Debilian…

Heute hat mein Rückschlag, wenn man von den leichten Kopfschmerzen und der arbeitsinduzierten Müdigkeit absieht, einen Namen: SCSI. Ich wollte, damit wir mit dem neuen Snapshot endlich mal weiterkommen, tear aufsetzen (hey, ich schreib ja immer noch im Blocksatz im HTML-Quelltext ohne Mühe oder es zu wollen oder zu schummeln, wow) und dann kompilieren (quasi als Abnahmemessung). Dummerweise habe ich, auch dank gecko2@, nun eine Idee, woher die SCSI-Fehler kommen könnten, denn die Plattenprüfung im BIOS zeigt keine Fehler an. Ich fürchte, daß das LVD-Kabel kaputt ist (i386-Hardware ist eh doof, ein Kabel, ein Terminator und fünf Konverter von SCA auf UW-SCSI sind nötig, wo meine SPARCstation 20 das bereits als Backplane hat).

Es läuft vermutlich darauf hinaus, daß ich odems 2.5″ 80G IDE Platte nehme. Bonus: ältere cvs und Distfiles sind schon drauf, sodaß es mit einem schnellen rsync sowie einem erneuten Checkout (da ich / ja eh’ plattmache mit dem letzten Zwischensnapshot) gehen sollte, und ich sogar ein paar Pakete (zumindest IceWM) für den LiveCD-Teil backen könnte.

Toll. Ich habe sogar schon ein vorläufiges ISO zum MirGRML testen, bin aber irgendwie platt und auch von Technik mal wieder angenervt. So komme ich nie zu was… ich glaube, ich fang morgen mal so früh wie geht an, und bin dann ausnahmsweise schon wo’s hell ist zu Hause.

Also: Am Snapshot wird gearbeitet; mbsd4grml kommt direkt im Anschluß; grml-mir muß noch getuned (Konfigs), aktualisiert (lynx-cur UTF-8 Bug wo ich vorgestern drüber schrieb) und getestet werden; den sparc-Teil nehme ich vom letzten Snapshot; für DuaLive™ haben wir somit alles, Extrazeugs mache ich nur wenig und nur für i386, und für Triforce™ siehts gut aus – eine offizielle Ankündigung kommt auch irgendwann, wenn für beide Seiten alles funktioniert und integriert ist. Die tear-Migration ist – leider – hingegen auf unbestimmte Zeit verschoben. (Damn!)

Bißchen malen müßte ich noch, damit die FOSDEM Edition CDs auch sowohl das grml-Logo (habe ein OK von mika), den Shilouetten-Dæmon (altbekannt, mit OK von rcollette und mckusick), und ein Triforce haben. Es paßt mir, ausnahmsweise, auf Arbeit einen KDE-Desktop mit gimp und Inkscape nutzen zu „dürfen“ (peu à peu krieg ich den weniger nervig konfiguriert, und ㈠ kenn ich KDE 1 schon auf ecce!GNU/Linux 1.0 und ㈡ mag ich kmahjongg eh’ und konqueror besser als M*zilla Schrott, also ruhe da!, auch wenn ciruZ mir GNOME verkaufen will). Mal sehen, was ich da so hinbekomme. Wobei, à propos Bildchen: wann lernen die Leute eigentlich, daß man keine Formate wie JPEG ob ihrer verlustbehafteten Kompressionsverfahren herumschickt – zumindest zum Bearbeiten? *seufz*… Zumindest denke ich, daß ich das ganz gut hinkriegen werde, hab da was im Kopf, sogar ohne smultron, lediglich die Schrift könnte knapp werden, kA ob der schwarze Hintergrund in dünne Linien reinläuft. Mal Daniel fragen…

Ha! Laufend mehr Leute krieg ich vom RANDEX-Protokoll und den Vorzügen des Entropieaustauschs, Zufall allgemein, usw. überzeugt. Way to go! Nun bin ich gespannt, ob Vutral mal was zu APS findet und was man mit Mumble und randomness so machen kann.

Did you all read my comment on the MD5 CA thing?

25C3 is over, gecko2@ arrived today, and both he and bogus are just too verpeilt – they forgot to distribute the MirOS flyers and CDs at first, then bogus (who had them) got really ill.

We all somehow are, at the moment. Get better, everyone. (replaced couldn’t get to the BSD@Wien pre-christmas party either…)

cnuke@ pointed me to a nice IRC quote:

17:57 < jtsn> Der 25C3 ist lustig. Deutsche Vortragende brechen sich vor deutschen Zuhörern auf Englisch einen ab. ;-)
18:01 < jtsn> Adolfs Werk war sehr nachhaltig. ;-)
18:01 < jtsn> Das gab's nichtmal in der DDR, das[sic!] Deutsche mit Deutschen auf Russisch reden. ;-)

This’ll be my ~/.etc/sig for a while… it does hold some truth. *looks at this wlog*

Benny is still alive, yet a little offline, hacking on perl stuff for MirPorts. Good riddance.

By the way: does anyone know of a way to use a web browser or engine, for instance Webkit, from a shell script to produce a rendered version of a HTML source file (preferably to PostScript® or PDF)?

Word has reached me that Benny and Przemek are both suffering from illness (nothing bad, just a cold, don't worry) and thusly will not be attending the congress either.

As gecko2@ is currently preparing his machines, we believe he will uphold our representation at the event. Please join the IRC channel or the mailing list if you have any questions.

To these who do: happy celebrating!

I have just placed a couple of MirOS CDs and flyers (English and French only though ☺) in the hands of a friend while helping him to move to Berlin. Either him or Benny (bsiegert@) or Andreas (gecko2@) will distribute them at 25C3, or we’ll place them somewhere. I (tg@) will not attend, replaced (ahoka@) probably neither. You might be able to track down Benny in between some of the talks if you have any questions regarding MirPorts and MirOS, though.

To these who do, happy celebrating!

Zaterdag 13 September, Baarn, Nederland. Iedereen wacht op me. Spijtig dat ik niet kan komen. Ik wilde met een vriend die een auto heeft naar Baarn gaan, maar die komt op 10:30 ipv 09:00 CEST, en dan ben ik ook nog niet klaar met wakker worden, koffie drinken, zaken samenzoeken, voor’t weekend inkopen, enzo. Op 12:00 zitten wij in zijn auto… maar dat zijn nog 2½ uren (of meer) tot dat wij aankomen kunnen, dus wordt besloten, er niet meer te gaan. SFD was vanaf 12:00 tot 17:00… voor 2 or 2½ uren moeten wij 5+ uren in’t auto zitten, en dan is nog niet zeker of wij het Brandpunt vinden. Slechte planing. In het duits is er een expressie voor dat: “Verpeilungsfaktor” – Wij zijn dan in’t zwembad geweest.

Groeten an iedereen die daar was… volgende keer dan. Echt jammer dat het niks wordt. Ik geloof ik had te weinig geslapen verleden week, door mijn nieuwe baan in zwitserland.

Wij zatten dan gisteren nog in mijn favoriet kroaats restaurant, er wordt besloten dat ik de volgende tijd minder aan mirbsd zelfs werk, maar het nieuwe server klaar maak en de VM zo installeer dat ze een takeover van de oude www.mirbsd.org vhost kan maken. Ik doe mss eerst nog een snapshot, maar die komt dan zonder Live CD (die moet ik opnieuw maken doordat wij geen mkisofs met al zijn fouten meer gebruiken). Benny doet in de tussentijd meer met ports, bv. fixes voor ccache en distcc (zodat mijn SPARCstation cluster packages kan bouwen ☺) en enige Qt4 ports. Nadat de twee server’s klaar zijn kunnen wij dan verder met mksh, mirmake en zo doen, wanneer het werk nog arbeidsvermogen overig laat (da’s soms moeilijk). gecko2@ doet goeie werk met het opzetten van VMware voor eurynome, ter gebruik stellen van een IPv4, enzo.

Wir haben jetzt ein Blumenkohl-Icon fürs iPhone, Dank an die RUBIs.

Google ist definitiv evil. Ich vermeide sie auch so wie es eben geht, aber bei zwei Sachen habe ich keine Alternative, da sie entweder einfach nicht existieren oder saugen: Suchmaschine (ja ich hab sie alle durch) und Karten (bin halt Geocacher).

Während ich die 2⁶ Caches locker voll habe, siehe die diversen… …Statistiken, fängt Benny erst an, immerhin 2³ hat er schon: Kimnotyze macht nicht wirklich weiter… … gecko2 kommt selten zum Cachen, aber hatte letztens sein Vélo mit, sodaß er sich mit Kabelaffe und mir auf Tour begeben konnte: Und der Dr. Pfeffer findet in Bremen nichts mehr… wär er bloß mal nicht umgezogen, jaja… gibt halt nur in Bonn schön viele Dinger:
Aber Benny hat echt fieses Anfängerglück, und ich bin fachblind.

Bruscetta sind superlecker, aber füllen, zusammen mit der warmen Mahlzeit, den Bauch sehr an… und wenn man dann vorher noch einen Mojito hatte, hat man gar keine Lust zu hacken, ist ziemlich platt… erst bsiegert@ dann auch mir aufgefallen. Wir sitzen gerade bei N 47° 31.936′ E 007° 38.043′ im Chaostreff Bāsel… und sind ziemlich platt. Aber irgendwas kommt trotzdem bei rum.

Kommt wer mit nach Baarn und ggf. trifft sich mit uns $sonstwo?

Hum. This year’s FrOSCon… sucks. At least the catering, which was so much better last year (remembering the Chili con Carne, as well as the Chili non (sin) Carne, fondly… these were produced by wbx@’s family members, which haven’t been included in this year’s planning so some other persons did the catering). And being waked up at 04:00 in the morning due to a call on the mobile phone, for taking care of some drunken booth slave *grml…*, didn’t help either.

The evening’s social event also sucked totally. Since it had been raining until shortly before, they decided to have it inside, except the barbecue of course, but didn’t adjust the volume of the music played to the environment, which caused me to leave the MirOS/XF86 booth in favour of the Debian/grml booth, talking to Mika and Joey… who, like me, didn’t quite like being LITERALLY punched into our stomach by the basses. I left relatively early then, especially as the cocktails (Vutral brought me one, since I couldn’t go near the counter due to the volume of the… whatever they call music) tasted pretty bad and had a (too?) high percentage of alcohol. But talking to the various people, not just Mika and Joey, was good, even though just being at the FH (university) during the social event was really unbearable and physically endangering one’s health.

Other than that, we had quite a lot of fun at the conference, as usual. I still think it has chances to close up to FOSDEM, but they will have to make sure the catering does not get even worse. While FOSDEM does not have any catering, FrOSCon 2006 and 2007 had good food, and regressions count as malus.
Once I found Marc Aurele La France at the train station (which was quite a task), things went well – he even fixed a bug in our xdm configuration at the conference. The bug was inherited from OpenBSD, as usual ☺
Marc also said he enjoyed himself.

I hacked an Asus EeePC… MirOS mostly works (no NIC though), and the graphics card runs at 640x480 VESA… with the new 915resolution port of today, it might do the 800x480, but I can’t test now.

I took the chance to discover a geocache in St. Augustin yesterday, but, while Benny suggested we (him, me and gecko2) go caching in Bonn today, they seem to prefer hacking on the laptops (considering the weather, this is not the worst idea though), so I got time to write a wlog entry (too). I still have some things on my TODO, like fixing the ports with unfetchable distfiles, but hey.
Taking the day before and the day after the conference off is A Good Thing™.
Next one will be the Software Freedom Day in Baarn, Nederland – where not even Wim will go ☺ But I need a car… parents don’t help even if you ask them once a year, but maybe Jonathan from (near) Aachen will join me, he has a car.

My Thinkpad X40 will probably arrive today or tomorrow. Sadly, I didn’t invest any time in evaluating the products before… I learned that the ‘T’ series has 2.5" HDDs instead of the sucky 1.6" HDDs, and a much more solid lid chassis, at FrOSCon. My decision to buy an X40 was based solely on the observation that it was “in” at most OpenBSD developers some years ago (and thusly would most certainly work well with MirOS). Don’t do that then…

Once it’s there, I got to set it up and continue working. It’s bad odem broke so badly, especially as my current contractor (employer, except not quite so) would rather have me working full-time on the project, which is not entirely possible since I still have a life here. But upon setting it up, I might upgrade and/or fix some of the ports, since I’m at it anyway. Plus I get /home encryption.

Marc agreed to merging as much of our X11 changes (both these inherited from OpenBSD’s XF4 module and our own patches) into the XFree86® main tree, some ifdef’d, and helping us migrate to the new 4.7 or upcoming 4.8 release (or probably, 4.8.99.01, since I don’t think the merge will be there in time for 4.8 proper). He was a fun guy and well understanding our issues. The most funny part however was Thomas from Sourcemage (SMGL), who also maintains the mksh spell in their grimoire, considering to retain supporting XFree86® (and modular X.org, but not the buggy monolithic X.org) iff it’s still actively developed, which Marc assured me it is.

Benny agrees that the “Kaiser’s BIO-Kaffee” is decent, despite its pricing of only 3.99 €/£ (may be my high quality milk too, though).

Update: looks like I’ve got a package to fetch from the post station.

In my recent entry, I already talked a bit about pkg-config and its framework support. It turns out that there is another problem. The --libs parameter can be "split" into its parts by using --libs-only-L, --libs-only-l, and --libs-only-other. The LyX configure script, however, did not care about the latter, only the first two. Which brings me to the mail I wrote to the pkg-config mailing list:

"Hi,

"while compiling LyX/Mac the other day, I came across a problem in the way frameworks are handled. On Mac OS, frameworks are a different way to pack a library together with its headers. Framework-related options are put in --libs-only-other, while the configure script was only checking for --libs-only-l and --libs-only-L. While I agree that this is broken behavior, it brings me to my question:

"The way I see it, -Fpath (framework search path) is equivalent to -Lpath for libraries. Thus, -F should maybe be included in the output of "pkg-config --libs-only-L". The same thing goes for the "-framework name" linker option, which is more or less the same thing as "-lname", namely linking against a certain library/framework. Thus, the -framework option (with argument) should be added to the output of --libs-only-l.

"Opinions?"

In other news, FrOSCon has it second and last day today. I am currently in the train on the way. The party ("social event") yesterday was quite good, even though the weather was not as good as last year—it was cold and humid.

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.

This year's LinuxTag will not go by without the BSD projects exhibiting their fine software. Of course, we will attend – the usual gang (Benny and me, gecko2 and Przemek will help out). New is that we'll also be distributing a couple of MidnightBSD CDs and flyers I had a helping hand in creating, as they are US based and won't be able to make it to Germany for this event. This all would not be possible without the help of allbsd.de, again. Thanks, Daniel!

The MirBSD CDs distributed contain a Live + Install CD, as usual, of an unnamed #10-stable snapshot, plus a couple of packages, including Benny's new firesomething port instead of opera-linux. The MidnightBSD CDs aren't as big and miss the install part, but are a relatively new and especially stable 0.2-CURRENT snapshot (including mksh of course).

We'll attend Tuesday (probably late) till Saturday.

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 ☻

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.

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.