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.
Last night I camped outside Real Groovy Christchurch to get a ticket to one of the New Zealand Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts. I arrived not long after 5pm and had to wait 16 hours until 9am this morning. Luckily I managed to get my ticket not long before they sold out. The Newstalk ZB site claims the tickets sold out in 20 minutes but I got mine at 9:25. It took a few attempts by the lady behind the counter so there must not have been many left.
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 managed to survive in Auckland for the 48 hours I was there. I have almost got my hearing back from watching the Violent Femmes near one of the speakers.
On Saturday we went to the Auckland Gallery and Museum. We only got a little lost attempting to traverse the streets. In the end it was a good weekend.
I’m off to Auckland later tonight. I’m going to the Big Day Out again. I went two years ago and would have last year except Linux.conf.au was on around the same time. It will be exciting going back except this time I won’t be able to laugh at people working my shift while I watch bands they like.