I managed to get my EFIKA to get to the point where it will complain there is no device to mount the root file system from. It is using a few dirty hacks and some code from NetBSD but these should be able to be removed when Peter Grehan has finished his changes to the openfirmware function.
I have made a tarball of the patches and extra files required here.
I’ve written a small script to find the ports that will be installed when the current port is installed. All it does is look at the dependencies of the port and remove all the ports that are currently installed.
I’ve written a port for it so hopefully it will be in the port collection soon.
Update: There is an undocumented target in the Ports collection to do this. To use i run:
make missing
from a ports directory.
I’ve been working on getting FreeBSD booting on an EFIKA. I haven’t got it fully working but I can get it to the point when it will attempt to schedule tasks. It does show the state of the registers before the exception. I can use them to help figure out the state the CPU is in.
I’ve managed to track down the problem to calling the clock interrupt handler. It doesn’t appear to get to the code that handles the clock so I’m looking into where it its that it fails.
I’ve just released a new version of libpkg. It adds the important feature of being able to remove packages with pkg_delete. It also has the start of a testing framework to make sure it will work correctly. These tests include both unit tests of each part and functional tests of each tool as a whole.
The work now is to increase the number of unit tests, implement package creation and rewrite the +CONTENTS file parsing.
I downloaded the new FreeSBIE 2.0.1 release. It is very nice. The only thing I would have liked extra is to have Xfce start automatically from boot rather than to have to type in startx. People new to Unix like systems could find this difficult as the command is explained after the screenshots in the documentation. On the other hand it could mean more people read the release notes and find out how to do more with it.
I would encourage everyone who uses Linux to download the CD image and try it out. You may find you like it.
This image was posted to Digg a couple of days ago:
After that these were posted to a FreeBSD IRC channel:
The first two aren’t so good but the last shows you exactly why you should use BSD.
I’ve been working with FreeSBIE to have a live CD where you can try a compiz or beryl. I’m currently working on getting the basic xorg.conf file working correctly. The current code can be found here. It will build an ISO image with Xorg, compiz and beryl installed. Unfortunately I havn’t managed to get either compiz or beryl to run yet so would like a hand from anyone who has.
I’ve been working on a library with the lofty goal of overthrowing all package management tools (and bringing peace to the masses of Open Source/Free Software users). Failing this I will accept making package tool writers jobs easier by providing an API to add/remove/create/modify packages on a system.
The library is aptly named libpkg. It is an object based design where each package is a separate object. The contents of the object is hidden from view. There are also package repository and package database objects, these are to download from and install packages to respectively. Files are abstracted too. This is mainly to make sure the code will be safe when run as the root user.
Currently libpkg can fetch and install a package and get a list of installed packages based on some criteria, eg. all packages, packages with a name matching a regular expression, etc. I am working on deinstalling packages with package creation next on my list.
Because libpkg uses Tim Kientzle’s libarchive to extract files straight to the file system the speed of installation appears to be limited by the speed of libbz2.
If anyone is interested in working on this with me feel free to leave a comment or if you can find my Berlios email address you can email me (username: zxombie). It is currently FreeBSD specific but I would like to get it working on other Operating Systems.
Below is the announcement I made for the second beta release of FreeBSD+BSDInstaller
I am pleased to announce the second release of FreeBSD install CD’s based on the BSD Installer.
The new Lua backend is now being used in this release rather than the older, deprecated C version.
The CD image is available from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/bsdinstaller/7.0-BSDINSTALLER-BETA-2-i386-disc1.iso.gz or your local mirror
MD5 (7.0-BSDINSTALLER-BETA-2-i386-disc1.iso) = 1becb489666ee97f5e10ebc5a0987f2d
SHA256 (7.0-BSDINSTALLER-BETA-2-i386-disc1.iso) = e5f6114258e1b66adfd84636ffbd3286c7ad41dadab42e615da68f5b0cf8cbaf
As with the previous Beta release there are three virtual consoles available:
* ttyv0: The frontend
* ttyv1: The backend
* ttyv2: A standard login screen to login as root with no password
Changes Since BETA-1
* Can now install Source
* Can now install the Ports tree
* Can now install Packages
* Change to the new Lua backend
Known Problems
* Can only install to one drive, can’t have / on ad0 and /usr on ad1
* fdisk doesn’t alter the geometry
Thank you to Scott Long for providing a computer to build this with.
I was accepted by the FreeBSD team to receive the US$4000 from Google for the Summer Of Code. This is a note to Google: thanks for the check (still waiting on the tee-shirt).
I am still working on getting the BSD Installer integrated with FreeBSD. I now have the Lua backend past the point of the BSDINSTALLER-BETA-1 release I made.
I have been building kernels without Preemption as qemu would cause a race condition to be triggered. This patch went into the FreeBSD tree. It means I don’t need the NOPREEMPTION kernel anymore for use with qemu as the race condition is fixed.