The MirBSD Korn Shell R45 has been released today, and R44 has been named the new stable/bugfix-only series. (That’s version 45.1, not 0.45, dear Homebrew/MacOSX packagers.)

Packagers rejoice: the -DMKSH_GCC55009 dance is no longer needed, and even the run-time check for integer division is gone. Why? Because I realised one cannot use signed integers in C, at all, and rewrote the mksh(1) arithmetics code to use unsigned integers only. Special thanks to the people from musl libc and, to some lesser amount, Natureshadow for providing me with ideas what algorithms to replace some functionality with (signed shell arithmetic is, of course, still usable, it is just emulated using unsigned C integers now).

The following entertainment…

	tg@blau:~ $ echo foo >/bar\ baz
	/bin/mksh: can't create /bar baz: Permission denied
	1|tg@blau:~ $ doch
	tg@blau:~ $ cat /bar\ baz
	foo

… was provided by Tonnerre Lombard; like Swedish, German has got a number of words that cannot be expressed in English so I feel not up to the task of explaining this to people who don’t know the German word “doch”, just rest assured it calls the last input line (be careful, this is literally a line, so don’t use backslash-newline sequences) using sudo(8).

I uploaded a full bulk build of binary packages for MirBSD/i386 corresponding to the pkgsrc-2013Q1 release. About 7,000 binary packages are available in this build, including the pkgin package manager that makes installing binary packages as easy as apt.

See the pkgsrc page for instructions on how to install pkgsrc for MirBSD. Build logs are available on S3.

The MirBSD Korn Shell must-have bugfix releases R42b (for the current formal release series) and R41c (for the last bugfix-only stable series) have been issued. Debian testing/unstable users get the fixes through their package management, versioned 40.9.20120630-7 targetting wheezy (hopefully). Debian experimental users will receive a 42b-1 upload, closer to what other distro packages provide, soonish, targetting jessie.

Since we lack anything better (that, unless Freshmeat, is actually usable), by request of our packagers, new mksh(1) releases will be announced on our miros-mksh@ mailing list starting now.

There is one week left to submit your talk proposals for the BSD devroom at FOSDEM 2013. We still have quite a few slots open, so do not be shy! See the original announcement below:

FOSDEM 2013 will take place on February 2-3, 2013, in Brussels, Belgium. Just like in the last years, there will be both a BSD booth and a developer's room (on Sunday).

The topics of the devroom include all BSD operating systems. Every talk is welcome, from internal hacker discussion to real-world examples and presentations about new and shiny features. The talks will be 45 minutes including discussion. Feel free to ask if you want to have a longer or shorter slot.

If you want to do a talk, please submit your proposal to

bsiegert at google.com

and include the following information:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with ~400 from other projects)
• A short abstract of one to two paragraphs
• A short biography introducing yourself
• Links to related websites/blogs etc.

The deadline for submissions is December 17, 2012. The talk committee, consisting of Daniel Seuffert, Marius Nünnerich and Benny Siegert, will consider the proposals. If yours has been accepted, you will be informed by e-mail within one week of the submission deadline.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R41 has finally been released. This is a major “everything” version with important fixes as well as new features and behavioural changes. Sorry for the delay.

See also the:

• detailed changelog
• packagers’ info
• users’ caveats
• Preformatted manual page (HTML, PDF, plaintext)
• Download NEW as gzip(1)’d ustar(1) distfile!
• OpenSuSE Buildservice SRPM (and more, including binaries; just browse that directory tree)
• mailing list

Packages for pkgsrc-2012Q2 are now available on ftp.NetBSD.org. They have been built for MirBSD-current on i386. This time, there is notably a much larger selection of software for X11, due to a successful build of gtk+2. All in all, there are about 6300 packages available.

I (bsiegert@) have been interviewed by OSWorld, a Polish news site about open source software. The interview took place at FOSDEM 2012. I talk about the project, about the community and about some of the great things when using open source. Check out the video.

Read the original article (in Polish) over at OSWorld. Thanks guys!

(Update: Corrected the HTML. Again.

While wtf(1) always has been a bit central to MirBSD, and the acronym database has been accessible by CVSweb, what we never had was a DAU compatible (and shellsnippets compatible) lookup. This has now changed: the above link to the acronyms file is a persistent link to its latest version (well, latest when the website was last recompiled), tooltips may very well follow soon, and we’ve got an online WTF lookup service.
Contributions to the acronym database are welcome, of course; just eMail them to tg＠mirbsd．org.

Not to stop there, our online HTML manpage search is also new, shiny, and should replace the “!mbsdman” DuckDuckGo hash-bang shortly. (Both of these services offer a DDG search as fallback. Note that DDG is an external service included herein by linking, under their request to spread it, and not affiliated with The MirOS Project. They do, however, donate some advertising money to Debian.)
For all those who didn’t know: only manpages for software in the MirOS BSD base system and for the MirPorts Framework package tools are listed, not for third-party applications installable using ports or, recently, pkgsrc®. Still, if you want to have a peek at a modern classic BSD’s documentation, you’re welcome. (Not to mention content like re_format(7) and style(9) and that some of our documentation is much more legible than others.)

And because writing all that perl(1) made me ill, not to mention I don’t even know that language, I’ve hacked a bit more in the mirmake(1) and mksh(1) parts of the MirWebsite, finally implementing pointing out where in the navigation sidebar the visitor currently is.

We also have exciting mksh porting news involving RT trying a larger number of ancient platforms than I dare count, me fixing bugs in Linux klibc and diving into other things, learning more about why I consider me lucky for hacking a BSD operating system… sorry, I want to keep this short as it’s mostly an announcement.

The MirWebsite source code is, of course, also available. Improvements welcome. Except for these three CGIs, our website is fully statically precompiled, and that’s a good thing. Please help in making the CGIs secure.

The current “state of the art” in MirBSD land was just uploaded. This snapshot carries a new patchlevel to show that things happened, such as a bootloader fix for systems with more than one hard disc; but be aware we’re not yet finished with all we think must be done. – The entropyKey software stack has been updated, by the way, and tg@’s shiny new second stick was inaugurated during this build, so it contains Moarrr Entropy™ in addition to e.g. the mksh(1) fix noted on the mailing list.

The MirOS infrastructure servers will be upgraded to patchlevel 10uB0 shortly.

What’s going on in MirOS Project land? Other than all developers being buried in dayjob work, of course… (sorry for that, guys; even tg@ has now succumbed to an ever-growing backlog but will be back, some time)

tg@ uploaded a new MirBSD-current/i386 snapshot (20111228) plus a full set of HTML manpages for all architectures (so they all are in the new amber style), and redid the usual combined i386+sparc cdrom10.iso Midi-ISO as well as the netboot.me kit. Older binary packages may no longer be supported: the old libgcc_s DLL is no longer provided in fixes10.ngz, and it may be time to reduce the amount of packages in MirPorts to concentrate on those worth the effort and receiving enough care.

Thanks to bsiegert@’s amazing work, the pkgsrc® kit of anno 2007 could finally be deleted. The page about pkgsrc® on MirOS describes instructions to use instead. At some point, we may release a binary bootstrap kit along with the snapshots as set ready for pickup by the installer.

No MirGRML based on the latest Grml 2011.12 release will be made. We’ll be investigating a possible solution for a flavour of the popular GNU/Linux OS to accompany full Triforce Live CDs in the future (for now, we’ll keep the old MirGRML 2009.10 on them).

We hope to be able to return to investing more spare (heh…) time into development some time. For now, we apologise for the slowed down development and reaction even in important subprojects such as mksh. Occasionally, they do have updates, e.g. the latest Jupp/Win32 release, or fixes in CVS.

This is a very late announcement. Binary packages for pkgsrc-2011Q3 are now available on ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/MirBSD/i386/10uAE_2011Q3/. The repository contains 5330 packages built on MirOS-current. Any MirOS BSD version from 2011 should work.

The packages are self-contained in /usr/pkg: The VARBASE has been set to /usr/pkg/var, and the package database is in /usr/pkg/db. This matches the MirPorts defaults and facilitates using pkgsrc and MirPorts side by side.

In this quarterly release, the new default for MirBSD is to use “modular” X11, i.e. install Xorg libraries and programs as packages instead of using the system X libs. This improves the compatibility with many newer programs, which expect for example that the X libraries have pkg-config files. This should not change anything for the user, however.

For more information on how to use these packages, consult the pkgsrc page on mirbsd.org or the relevant section of the pkgsrc guide.

This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune’s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness.

I hope I don’t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I’ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf). Ah, we’re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn’t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd…) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front.

I’ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of “those small things” of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work — we’re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code’s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it’s hosted on my current money source’s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples’ code).

Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar® like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, …)

ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)