Published on
June 26, 2006 in
FreeBSD.
Last weekend the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) took place at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin, Germany. It was the first time this conference took place and all I can say is that it was great. It was a low cost event (5 euro admission fee) and the organizers did an awesome job. Everything ran smoothly, WLAN worked(!), and the overall atmosphere was great.
My talk on Saturday, “FreeBSD im Ãœberblick” (FreeBSD Overview), seemed to have been well received. There were about 25 people in the audience. All in all, there was great service for speakers. Free food and beverages, a quiet room to prepare for the talks and of course lots of beer at the social event 
The BSD booth was populated by FreeBSD, NetBSD and even DragonFly BSD people. OpenBSD had a separate booth with the usual merchandising. For FreeBSD, we distributed flyers and CDs. In addition to that, there was a demo PC running FreeBSD 6.1 and KDE that people could play with. As usual, the other BSD folks were great company and I met some people I only knew by name till then.
Unfortunately, relatively few people attended the conference (around 350 I heard somewhere). This was probably due to the great weather and the soccer world cup. I hope FrOSCon will attract some more people next year.
Nothing left to say other than looking forward to FrOSCon 2007!
Links to pictures and other reviews can be found in the FrOSCon Wiki.
My slides can be found at
http://people.freebsd.org/~brueffer/slides/FreeBSD_im_Ueberblick_FrOSCon06.pdf
Published on
June 20, 2006 in
FreeBSD.
Every so often, it seems like I need to make a pass through the release notes and clean up things, do some proofreading, and consolidate items. I’m doing that now, but unfortunately it’s going to be split up over about a week because I don’t seem to have any large chunks of “FreeBSD time” at the moment. It’ll get done eventually.
I finally have a machine running CURRENT…something I haven’t done since around 5.0. I’m running this inside Parallels on my Mac Mini. As a tip, selecting a machine type of “FreeBSD 5.X” seems to work just fine for 7.0-CURRENT (and very briefly for 6.1-RELEASE). Having virtualized machines like this is Very Cool.
Published on
June 17, 2006 in
FreeBSD.
If you are confused that the aac(4) driver says you have a SCSI controller even though you have a SATA controller (or vice versa), update to the latest CURRENT, or RELENG_6 in a couple of days. Several device names have been corrected.
Moreover, the aac(4) manpage now actually lists all supported controllers. If you are shopping for SCSI/SATA/SAS controllers, this may be worth a look.
Published on
June 12, 2006 in
FreeBSD.
I’ve been doing a few minor updates to the release notes the past week
or two. This isn’t necessarily really exciting stuff (writing the
updates I mean…the stuff they describe really is pretty cool). But I
like doing updates more-or-less as they happen, so I don’t end up
having to do a whole lot of writing during the release cycle.
The other way to approach the release notes is to save everything for
the end. The advantage of doing this is that you can see the context
for everything that happened during the release cycle. The downside,
of course, is that typically things get a little hectic in the stages
of the release. hrs@ prefers this approach, I’ve seen. I think it’s a
matter of preference.
I’ve been thinking of a couple changes I’d like to make to the release
documentation. The main one is to consolidate all of the
machine-dependent (MD) documents, so that there’s only one version of
the release notes (for example) that has annotations to call out
architecture-specific items. Originally I patterned the structure of
the release notes and hardware notes after a couple of text documents
that were maintained separately for the (then) two supported
architectures, i386 and alpha. This doesn’t necessarily scale very
well to the 5-6 architectures we now support!
I writing a quick-start installer guide a year or two ago that
combined all of the MD information; I found it was a lot easier to
edit than the multiple MD documents, mostly because I could print out
a single document with all the text. At some point I’d like to finish
off the quick-start guide, or if that’s not possible, hand it off for
someone else to finish.
So many things to do, so little time…
Speaking of which, I just checked the RE schedule…we’re only about
six weeks away from the start of the 6.2 release cycle!
Published on
June 5, 2006 in
FreeBSD.
So apparently one needs a blog these days to be cool, so I followed the lemmings and registered one as well, courtesy of Erwin Lansing (erwin) and Florent Thoumie (flz).
In other news, I just committed modifications to the my(4) driver to make it usable with the ALTQ(4) packet queuing system. In the past, these modifications led to lock order reversals. Thanks to the work of John Baldwin (jhb) on network driver locking, this is no longer a problem and everything works as expected.
I wonder how many people actually use my(4)…
Published on
June 2, 2006 in
FreeBSD.
Acutally managed to close a handful of PRs this week.. Haven’t done that in a while – time have only permitted for me to work on my own ports…
Still have some big issues with the amaroK port. I spoke to the amaroK developers and nothing indicates the upcoming 1.4.1 release will have gstreamer support – and I’m still uncertain whether or not I should commit the 1.4.0a update. Some testers say it works fine, and some says it’s buggy.. God, I dislike the xine engine.. though it seems almost stable when disabling crossfading.
A solution could be to repocopy the current amarok port, and have both 1.3.9 and 1.4.0a in the tree.. that would leave it up to each to decide whether they want to deal with xine..
If anyone have some words of wisdom on this matter, I’m all ears !
One cool thing with 1.4.0a is the support for iPod.. I just tried it out yesterday, and it works beautifully – also the support for CUE files..
Published on
June 1, 2006 in
FreeBSD.
As I’m sure many people are aware, the security team released two advisories today (they’re visible on the main FreeBSD site). The timing of some of this stuff forced us (re@) to hand-over RELENG_5_5 to the security team a little faster than we might have otherwise (so they could deal with patches for that branch). We try to cooperate as much as we can with secteam@, and in turn they give us hints about upcoming issues that might affect a release we’re working on. So it’s all good.
It’s been awhile since I had to deal with an advisory (SA-06:16 in particular) that affected four codelines (HEAD, RELENG_6, RELENG_5, and RELENG_4). So that was changes to four release notes and three errata files, plus some Web site updates. That’s a lot to do in a short time (admittedly a self-imposed deadline), but that’s probably nothing compared to the behind-the-scenes work that secteam@ had to do in order to devise and test the fixes (on over ten codelines, worst-case). So my hat’s off to them, as always.
The PDF output for the errata, specifically the table describing the security advisories, is unbelievably ugly. I remember discussing this with someone (hrs?) when this style of documenting advisories was first adopted, but at the time I was getting too burned out to care much (and neither of us had any good answers). Maybe we need to start thinking about this again.
We’re also thinking about some possible errata issues (non-security-related) to be fixed on RELENG_6_1 before handing it off. In some cases we’re waiting for the bugfixes to have proven themselves on HEAD and RELENG_6 first. I might try to at least write some of these items up for the errata document first, even if we don’t have fixes committed yet.
