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.