mksh made quite some waves (machine translation of the third article) recently. Let’s state it’s not just Amigas — ara5 is a buildd running the Atari kernel, an emulated though. On the other hand, the bare-metal Ataris used to be the fastest buildds, so I expect we get them back online soonish. I’m currently fighting with some buildd software bugfixes, but once they’re in, we will make more of them. Oh, and porterboxen! Does anyone want to host a VM with a porterbox? Requirements: wheezy host system (can be emulated), 1 GiB RAM, one CPU core with about 6500 BogoMIPS or more (so the emulated system has decent speed; an AMD Phenom II X4 3.2 GHz does just fine). Oh, and mksh is ported to more and more platforms, like 386BSD 0.0 with GCC 1.39, and QNX 4 with Watcom… and more bugfixes are also being worked on. And let’s not forget features!

jupp got refreshed: it’s got a bracketed paste mode, which is even auto-enabled on xterm-xfree86 (though the xterm(1) in MirBSD’s a tad too old to know it; will update that later, just imported sendmail(8) 8.14.6 and lynx(1) 2.8.8dev.15 into base, more to come) and will be enhanced later (should disable auto-indent, wordwrap, status line updates, and possibly more), lots of new functions and bindings, now uses mkstemp(3) to create backup files race-free, and more (read the NEWS file).

In MirBSD, Benny and I just added a number of errnos, mostly for SUSv4 compliance and being able to compile more software from pkgsrc® without needing to patch. This is being tested right now (although I should probably go out and watch fireworks in less than a half-hour), together with the new imports and the bunch of small fixes we accumulate (even though most development in MirBSD is currently in mksh(1) and similar doesn’t mean that all is, or worse, we were dead, which we aren’t). I’ll publish a new snapshot some time in January. The Grml 2012.12 also contains a pretty up-to-date MirBSD, with a boot(8/i386)loader that now ignores GUID partition table entries when deciding what to use for the ‘a’ slice.

If you haven’t already done so, read Benjamin Mako Hill’s writings!