Category: FreeBSD

Finally someone else wrote about EuroBSDCon, Dru Lavigne.
The most interesting paragraph of her review critizes the BSD Developers as antisocial:

I have to admit, neither did I attend her talk nor did i talk to her :-(.
But I also noticed that this EuroBSDcon was a bit antisocial.
Some Examples:

• At normal geek events there is a keysigning party (well party is an euphemism but it is at least a start for getting to know everyone). In Karlsruhe people just exchanged keys with people they already knew.
• There was no list of all attendants, so you couldn’t find out whom you forgot to talk to.
• grog complains in his diary, that we had to pay for the drinks at the social event. The social-event suited in a hangar-like hall was too cold to socialize.

Maybe this is specific to EuroBSDcon were 20 languages were spoken and the age of the attendants varies between 20 and 58. Additional people have a lot of respect for each other. But i hope we can do better next year and didn’t scare off Dru.

Yesterday I installed FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 on the Alphastation. The only problem was a usability problem, the kernel/loader didn’t tell me, that output was going to the serial console. I named it roberta, not sure why, the first name that came to my mind, that sounds like an old lady.
Kris has stopped the alpha package builds half a year ago because FreeBSD alpha was too unstable, but there are still a lot of people running FreeBSD alpha, so let’s see when i will see my first crash.
I am currently building a 5-STABLE world and I will build some packages later.
BTW 5.3 was finally released yesterday. Read about it on /. or heise.

I suck at making pictures. None of the few pictures i made is worthy to be uploaded. So I will link to the galleries from guido, simon, erwin and tobez.

Today i attended three talks:

Continue reading “EuroBSDCon Sunday”

Later I attended the ALTQ talk by Adrian Penisoara. I persuaded Arjan van Leeuwen to install SubEthaEdit and it seems to work, although there are some limitations to a real revision control software.
Next talk was by dinoex about his work on a lightweighted package cluster and Yannick Cadin about DHCP (spent most of the time reading email so i didn’t get much of the content). The last talk of the day was by Henning Brauer about bgpd. Interesting presentation but typical OpenBSD argumentation.
After that we left for the social event, an exhibition by Luigi Colani with a lot of airplanes and cars. Maybe I will upload some pictures later. Unfortunately the exhibition hall was cold and the band made a lot of Noise while trying to fight the enormous echoing.
We left early and drank a lot of beer at some pub mlaier recommended.
Today I am awake an hour too early because I forgot about Daylight saving time 🙁
In 10 minutes rwatson starts the second day of talks.

Antti Kantee – “Using Application-Driven Checkpointing Logic for Hot Spare High Availability”
–> See conference proceedings.
– Good technical talk. interested attendantes.
– Outlines the possibilies, advantages and disadvantages of Userland Checkpointing.
– Good: Application knows about all the relevant data Bad: Every Application needs to adapted, Some parts like Network which are provied by the OS are difficult to access
agc & uwe@NetBSD.org: NetBSD on Handhelds
— Nothing works out of the box, as usual with NetBSD :-). The Beamer doesn’t recognize the screen resolution, slides are too large.
— Nice Image of a portable Computer made out of a normal PC
— showed a Journada with Windows CE.
— lots of experimental stuff.
— As usually agc’s presentations are too long

I am now in Karlsruhe at EuroBSDCon, I will try to write more blog entries later, need to attend talks now.

Only two days left until EuroBSDCon starts. I still haven’t organized a train ticket nor have i prepared my journey, because i am quite busy with university at the moment.
Unfortunately I can’t attend the FreeBSD dev summit, because it start on Friday morning and I will arrive at Karlsruhe in the afternoon.

Two years ago I became a FreeBSD committer.
According to Peter’s CVS statistics since October 15 2002 I made 1664 commits to the ports repository (Currently rank 18), 29 commits to the doc+www repository, one src and one sys commit.
Because of the time consuming math courses this year, i failed to keep my rate of 1000 commits/year, but 663 is still nearly two commits/day. Additional I mentored two ports committers during their first steps as FreeBSD committers.
I have to thank Daniel and Jared who donated Hardware to support my work and of course the great FreeBSD community. I am looking forward to continue working on the FreeBSD world domination project with all of you.

Everytime there is a FreeBSD release something in the KDE ports horrible breaks. This time:

1. kdevelop didn’t build on amd64, (okay this my fault, as i noticed this immediately after the 3.3.0 upgrade, but forgot to fix it).
2. kdemultimedia failed to link after a last minute bsd.port.mk.patch. Big thanks for Andy Fawcett for tracking this down.
3. kdm was broken in the 3.3.0 upgrade.

Can we now please finish the portsfreeze?