Category: FreeBSD

Yesterday www.FreeBSD.org was down. I don’t know the reason, but Netcraft already wrote an article with colorful graphics.
Soon the Code Freeze for 5.3 will start. Everybody is rushing in last minute changes, most important for my machines, tjr committed the kernelpart of the linux32 emulator for amd64, njl committed ACPI locking, des fixed fetch(1) on amd64 and iedowse committed a fix for the axe(4) driver. This weeks cvs summary will be a lot of work.
Of course various changes caused a lot of breakage, especially SMP deadlocks and a broken lnc(4). So only upgrade to CURRENT if you want to share the pain.
Portsfreeze was announced to start on September 3, but as there are nearly 900 failing packages on CURRENT/amd64 most of them caused by the gcc 3.4 import, there is a lot to do. Especially I need to get familar with the new obscure C++ errors.

I registered for EuroBSDcon yesterday, after Patrick sent a reminder to the de.comp.os.unix.bsd Newsgroup. He fears that if too few people register the conference has to be canceled, so please register if you are planning to go there. I have not yet planned where to sleep. The conference hotel’s website is not browseable, neither with Konqueror nor with Firefox. Other alternatives are the Youth Hostel (cheap & uncomfortable) or a cheaper hotel.
A bit more than two weeks until aKademy, and I am still unsure if i should go there. Last Year in Nove Hrady was a very nice event, but Ludwigsburg is far away and compared to last year I am less involved into KDE.
Something completely different:

If weather on Saturday is nice, i will probably visit the Freerepublicparade.

Yar sent a pointer to Hendrik Scholz’ FreeBSD source keyword statistics on the developers Mailinglist. The most interesting graph shows that the occurances of ugly enormously increased around 1999 and is now the most used swear word in FreeBSD.

Yesterday I collected all kind of serial adapters, gender changers, Null modem cable’s etc and installed FreeBSD on my blue fridge. fridge’s dmesg. While I had some adaptors left, I finally installed NetBSD on the DEC 3000. becky’s dmesg. Here is a picture of the new serverroom.

It is getting pretty hot, two more machines and I will need to ask for a climate control on the FreeBSD wantlist :-). Additional the E450 sounds like a tornado. I can hear it on the first floor. Luckily my neighbors are either deaf or not in their flat at the moment.
On the group picture you can see (from left to right and bottom to top): fridge, becky, ische, olga, via, huckfinn and polly. (Missing on the picture are Riccardo, Jean, Sauna and Mchammer)

Today I booted my sparc64 for the first time. The preinstalled Solaris 2.6 reminded me why i hate Solaris e.g. vipw is an X11 program which does not open a vi as the name suggests, but a notepad-like Texteditor, the default browser was the HotJava Browser I have not seen for several years, shutdown now does not shutdown the machine immediately but waits another minute. And of course a lot of programs are missing. For a moment i thought about installing pkgsrc on it, but decided to try a FreeBSD installation first. Booting from CD-ROM worked fine, and it looks like all my Hardware was recognized. Unfortunately I need a serial console as sysinstall on the OpenFirmware Console isn’t really usable. Especially the disklabel editor needs cursor keys, and the ones on the Sun Keyboard are not recognized.
So tomorrow i will have to hunt for DB25-Adapters.

If you read the recent comment list, you already know, there is now a BSD Planet. My FreeBSD Category is syndicated there. If you are part of the BSD community and blog please tell Mela, as my blog can’t compete with the Freshports.org feed.

Kris wonders if “The Joel Test” applies to OpenSource Projects. He took KDE as an example that reaches quite high points on the Joel Test because of it’s strong focus on releases.
Mela pointed out that the BSDs are also focused on releases. I tried the test on FreeBSD and got only 6 points. The most interesting question is No. 6 “Do you fix bugs before writing new code?”. Per coincidence, during last weeks debate about bugtracking software on the developers Mailinglist, I suggested that the RE team puts a stronger focus on the Bug numbers. Take a look at this chart and you can see, what I mean: 1250 reported Kernel Bugreports are just unmanagable.

Currently FreeBSD developers started a bikeshed about Bugtrackingsoftware and how much GNATS sucks. Time for the first poll on this blog.

Looks like today I will break the articles/day record.
FreeBSD core team elections are over. 74% voter turnout is a good result. 45% were required to win a seat. I was surprised that rwatson got the most votes (86%).
We now have a new core team, which is nearly identical to the old one. The only new face is scottl replacing grog, who resigned earlier this year. FreeBSD developers seem to be either very comfortable or very conservative. I would have liked to see more fresh blood.