There have been some interesting recent developments in MirBSD. As always, there has been development on mksh but tg@ is more qualified to write about this.

The kernel has also seen some improvements: bge(4) is now again included in the GENERIC kernel, and it supports some newer chips — for example the BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet. This chip is the one in the machine graciously donated by Marc Balmer. The umsm(4) driver has been added, supporting certain 3G “surf sticks”.

There has been a new release of jupp, joe-3_1jupp21, containing several critical fixes regarding the use of uninitialized memory. It also contains a bugfix for syntax highlighting.

In pkgsrc, have been attacking the list of broken packages breaking the highest number others. The three versions of Ruby in the tree (1.8.x, 1.9.2 and 1.9.3) now build fine, as do ilmbase, blas and a few others. Fixing blas meant introducing a weird special case in libtool: Usually, MirBSD has no Fortran compiler; however, pkgsrc has f2c, which it uses as f77, confusing libtool. It actually needed a special-case entry to treat it like gcc (which it uses internally). There is also a weird failure in policykit, where an XSLT processor segfaults during the creation of one of the manpages. Maybe it hits an ulimit, I am not sure. Anyway, these fixes are now in pkgsrc-current.