Category: FreeBSD

“The pointy hat points both ways” — Nate Lawon on freebsd-cvs-all.
A nice way to tell people to be careful when passing pointy hats.

Yesterday I committed a port of JACK, the Jack audio connection kit. It is a low-latency audio server, used by several Linux Audio applications. Unfortunately it is based on ALSA so it was not available on FreeBSD for a long time. But now it has an output driver for portaudio, which is available on FreeBSD. After some bug fixinig i think it should work now. Unfortunatly I was not able to test much, because of university. There is still a lot to do:
* The port does not install its documentation
* It probably does not work on FreeBSD alpha 4.x
* The Jack-OSS driver does not work yet
* Other ports that support jack need a dependency on jack

A BSD conference in Vienna, and I am not even involved. Although pkgsrcCon is NetBSD-focused I will try to attend.
I think the FreeBSD-ports are worth a conference too, but no one has tried yet to transfer a significant number of ports committers to one place.

Traditionally the integrity of third party software downloaded from the Internet has been verified with MD5. The MD5 sums are stored in the FreeBSD CVS Repository. This had been useful for discovering Trojans. A lot of Software vendors like e.g. Werner Koch of GnuPG sign their software with their PGP-key. Should the FreeBSD ports collection support automatic verification of these signatures?

Continue reading “Verifying distfiles with PGP signatures”

Since university starts next week, I have dropped half a dozen portmaintainerships. If you like playing kdelibs-based Games, there are now a bunch of them available for adoption.
I am now back to maintaining 20 ports.

Juli posted today to developers@, that the User Guide of the FreeBSD-based WLAN-Accesspoint “Firetide HotPoint Wireless Mesh router” contains a list of FreeBSD Developers. Nice, although I don’t know if they will now sell more routers, with my name in the User Guide. And I am quite sure, that none of my FreeBSD work is used in the Router, since I am not working on the Networking Code.

For the second time I have proposed a new FreeBSD committer and as my proposal was accepted, I have just activated the new CVS account and I am now mentoring Markus Brueffer during his first commits to the FreeBSD ports collection.
Markus is currently together with his brother presenting FreeBSD at FOSDEM. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to be there.

Just to have some nice content today, here are the numbers of packages per architecture produced by the last bento package cluster run:

i386	7905
sparc64	7346
ia64	7243
alpha	6253
amd64	5905

Since I fixed a lot of amd64 packages recently, with the next run, there could be more amd64 packages than alpha packages. I will keep you informed.

Did I tell you how I hate all those virii? Even more than this Windows viruses.
Unfortunately Peter had to concede to the whining masses, who can’t use their FreeBSD.org email address to impress women or to get jobs, and softened the FreeBSD.org Anti-Spam checks. Now half of the FreeBSD developers spend their time with deleting Spam and improving their Spamfilters. (The other half spends their time surfing on orkut).
FreeBSD is dying!

Yesterday le got his new commit bit. Now Wien-Hernals has two committers, which is a quite high committer-density.
We are now waiting for his first pointy hat to arrive ;-).