MirBSD has just recently become 17 years old, and I wrote (in German, sorry ☺) a reminiscing piece about that and thanking everyone involved.

Today my calendar(1) reminded me of the first steps towards “MirLinux”, a.k.a. “MirOS Linux”, 16 years ago and given this pops up regularily, especially due to Wikipedia spreading it, I feel I have to clarify: cnuke (the original Jupp) really likes the BSD userspace but wants to play Quake Ⅲ with accelerated 3D, so the idea was to maybe build everything for Linux, add a glibc and other dependent libraries (and we’d use different paths, so linking is unaffected and we’d have nicer linking semantics than those GNU people), and maybe things would just work.

It was a woozy idea right from the start, and there might have been beer involved, and nobody ever got around to actually doing so, and it clearly was never a/the project goal. Yes, we probably could have done it, back then, up to 90% satisfaction, and with some more binaries thrown in from GNU/Linux (e.g. for the packet filter, as — sadly… ― pf(4) for Linux has never materialised) it could have become usable, and there was ecce!GNU/Linux precedent, but BSD’s the focus. Perhaps if a certain few people had been less Verpeiler… oh well — no big loss.

I did turn out fixing stuff in GNU/Linux and porting stuff over in the end, but we never merged them, which perhaps turned out, looking back, to be a good thing.

Tomorrow 16 years ago, plip(4) support was added… I need to dig out the cable and run some interoperability tests some time to see if it’s still working, with both Crynwr and Linux on the remote end, and FreeBSD (if they still have it).

In unrelated news, other activity has been suspended, as I caught a “summer flu”, which turned out (and very quickly, at that) a rather harsh sinusitis-cum-bronchitis, taking me out and sapping all concentration, expected to linger for a few more days.