News
Heads up! System python changed to 2.6
On August 31st, Stuart Henderson (sthen@) announced that the default Python version has changed from 2.5 to 2.6. This was following a commit by Federico G. Schwindt (fgsch@) in the ports tree. Please read on for Federico's full commit message and Stuart's announce:
Read more...Augusts London *BSD meetup
If you use upcoming, you can find the meeting details here
Heads up! OpenBSD turns 4.8-current
Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 4.8-current. This means that we are one step closer to the upcoming OpenBSD 4.8 release. Keep an eye out for pre-orders! Read below for the full commit message:
Read more...A Tale Of Mozilla Ports
Landry Breuil (landry@) writes in with a fascinating and sorted tale of porting:
Here's a tale about the Mozilla ports infrastructure, but it could be titled, "I needed the Lightning calendar extension for Thunderbird, and I ended up maintaining all Mozilla ports."
I work in a small public company where we deal with huge amounts of GIS data so I ported geo/qgis, geo/mapserver and geo/tilecache, but that's material for another story. I'm the IT guy at the company and hence we heavily rely on open source software for all our needs including email and calendar stuff. For the latter, I setup an awesome DAViCal server (not yet ported) coupled with Lightning, a Mozilla Thunderbird extension for the client part.
Read more...NVIDIA laptops wanted
Theo sent a request to misc@ asking for laptop donations. This time, developers are in need of NVIDIA-based hardware. In the past, you may have accidentally bought this kind of machine so this is an excellent opportunity to get rid of it and support your favourite OS at the same time!
Please read on for Theo's message. Read more...
[c2k10] Travel/Startup (Part 7)
When I think about the names of people on mailing lists who have helped
me solve difficult problems or learn something new, often I have no face
to go with the name. In my day to day life I may have walked right past
them without knowing, or saying hello, or more appropriately, asking to
buy them a beer or lunch as a way to say thanks for the help they've
given me. If you've been communicating with someone for years via email
or even phone, and you finally get the chance to meet them in person, it
is always an strange combination of both fun and unusual, or more
accurately, both familiar and unfamiliar. It's the contradiction that
seems a bit troublesome at first, but it fades quickly. There's a lot of
this for people attending their first hackathon, but even those who have
attended many hackathons probably experience a little of it due to the
new people they're going to meet for the first time.
Wondering "Who are these people?" is only natural but keeping the event organized really does help. A great deal of thought and effort goes into planing and organizing each hackathon. One of the smart things done is keeping a master list of arrival and departure flights so people can coordinate meeting, sharing rides and similar. From the master list, I knew I would be on the same flight from SFO as Chris Kuethe (ckuethe@), so we traded emails to confirm and just assumed we'd figure it out at the airport gate.
Knowing one of the developers would be on the same flight was reassuring. I almost never travel and this was the first time in almost a decade where I was traveling alone without the assistance of a family member or friend. As a novice traveler and first time hackathon attendee, I made plenty of poor decisions in picking out what to bring and I seriously over-packed for the trip. Showing you how stupid I was may save you from making similar mistakes.
Read more...IIJ outside-air-cooled data center experiment with 300 OpenBSD servers
Two OpenBSD developers Yojiro Uo (yuo@) and Yasuoka Masahiko (yasuoka@) work at a leading ISP in Japan called IIJ (Internet Initiative Japan Inc.). I was invited to visit IIJ's next-gen data center experiment facility where one of their experiments is running 300 OpenBSD servers.
They're using OpenBSD servers for an experiment with outside-air-cooling using USB thermo-hygrograph sensors. Of course, the driver was written by yuo-san.
Full story and photos are here:
http://syuu.dokukino.com/2010/08/in-iijs-outside-air-cooled-container.html
[c2k10] (Part 6)
How leaders, managers, mentors and coaches motivate others towards a common goal is a very well researched topic. The methods typically used within entirely volunteer organizations center around exceedingly polite interactions, strong encouragement through accolades, and fairly gentle suggestions when mistakes are made. The way the OpenBSD project operates is vastly different from the accepted norms.
Read on to find out more about beck@ and learn why the OpenBSD project succeeds with their goals where others flounder:
Read more...Call for testers: ACPI suspend on laptops
Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has called out on the tech@ mailing list for aggressive testing the new ACPI suspend/resume code to be shipped in the upcoming OpenBSD 4.8 release. Please read on for Theo's message:
Read more...Ports tree locked for 4.8
On the 1st of August, Marc Espie (espie@) announced on the ports@ mailing list that the ports tree has been locked, meaning that users are welcome to test and report bugs. Please read on for Marc's message:
Read more...Neuer .vantronix Distributionspartner
Heads up! OpenBSD now supports multi-byte characters!
On July 27th, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) added support for the multi-byte characters in the OpenBSD libc. Thanks to the work of the people involved in its development, the OpenBSD C library now supports the Unicode character encoding scheme UTF-8. Read on for the full commit message, some words from Stefan about what needs to be tested and how to do so:
Read more...[c2k10] (Part 5)
In all of my interviews at c2k10, there were many things that kept coming up over and over again. One of those things was the release of 2.7 in June of 2000 and 2.8 in November. It was a period when many of the developers, tedu@ included, started to use OpenBSD. There is a reason for these two releases being so popular and a tipping point, so to speak, that attracted many thereafter.
Read on to find out more about tedu@ and learn what this attraction was all about:
Read more...[c2k10] The Hackathon BBQ (Part 4) - June 25 - July 3, 2010, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
With almost two days of hacking under their belts, everyone was instructed to make their way to Bob Beck's (beck@) house for the traditional BBQ event and Swedish beer hurling festivities. The food was fantastic and the camaraderie undeniable.
Read on to find out more about the famous Annual OpenBSD BBQ and a lot more:
Read more...Heads up! OpenBSD turns 4.8-BETA
Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 4.8-BETA (see here and here). Snapshots should be available soon for testing, check the mirrors for availability. Read below for the full commit messages:
Read more...[c2k10] Expectations (Part 3)
(click to see names)
Different people get into OpenBSD in different ways and for different
reasons. I can give you my own experiences and opinions, but as
such, they will fail to be universal or even be correct for anyone but
myself. Unlike most undeadly articles, the following will be light on
technical details, but hopefully you will find it useful.
As Theo told me over a decade ago, "The project is code," but my opinion has always been slightly different. I intentionally fail to draw a distinction between the code itself, the people contributing it, the friendships between them, and the fun of coding. In a formal sense I know I'm wrong and Theo is right. The code stands on its own. The greatest diff in the world should be committed on its technical merits alone. The trouble is, without other people willing to look at it, test it and vet the ideas, its technical merit may never be known and it may never make it into the tree. The lone genius programmer working in isolation and doing everything himself is a myth. When contributing in a group setting like OpenBSD, getting improvements committed is much easier when you know both the process and the people.
To understand OpenBSD development and why the hackathons are so important, the first thing you need to realize is the OpenBSD developers really care about building the very best operating system possible. You could call the OpenBSD hackathons amazingly successful just by the cold metric of increased volume of source code commits, but you would be missing the more fundamental reasons why OpenBSD hackathons are so vitally important. The hackathons are a chance for like-minded friends to have fun spending a week concentrating and collaborating on something all of them care about.
Read more...[c2k10] Preparation - Portable Systems (Part 2)
Tadpole UltraSPARC
This is the continuation and conclusion of the previous [c2k10] article
of the same title on portable systems and test environments.
Bob Beck (beck@) said, "We're actually a hiking club with a software development problem," so you can hopefully grasp how important it is to have reasonably portable systems. The down-side of most developers using reasonably portable and reasonably powerful systems is the lack of diversity. The majority of the laptops used by developers are either 32-bit or 64-bit x86 systems (i386 or amd64 respectively). Just because OpenBSD will run on a monstrous VAX and said VAX will be very useful for finding bugs unseen on other platforms, it doesn't mean you'll want to carry one around with you. Diversity of supported platforms and constantly doing native builds on them makes OpenBSD more robust.
Porting the entire OpenBSD operating system to a new platform would be a lot of fun but requires a great deal of skill and a significant amount of time. Even if you're seeking FUN, you may not have time and skill to do a full OS port, so most people would want to pick one of the already supported platforms. If you pick the right system, there will still be plenty of FUN to be had in adding or improving support for some of the unsupported or under-supported parts. Depending on your personal requirements and how much FUN you want to have with it, you always have a number of great choices available within the realm of supported platforms.
Read more...[c2k10] Preparation - Portable Systems (Part 1)
The staggering volume of hardware the developers bring to hackathons sometimes causes delays, raised eyebrows or pointed questions when going through customs on international flights. The customs officers are usually wondering, "What kind of person needs five laptops and a suitcase full of parts and peripherals on a vacation?"
Some of the systems hauled to hackathons are generally non-portable, large servers, or smaller embedded systems, but the majority of systems are various types of laptops, each with their own unique challenges and headaches. One of the most frequently asked questions is, "What is a good laptop for running OpenBSD?" Although there have been countless opinions voiced in the mailing list archives, there will never be a "correct" opinion. Requirements and preferences will always vary from person to person and situation to situation, so defining your personal requirements and preferences is a good first step. There is the obvious question of, "What do you plan to do with it?" but defining your own preferences and requirements involves a lot more questions where the answers are often trade-offs.
Read more...[m2k10] mandoc mini-hackathon
Development on the mandoc(1) manual formatter is moving fast these days. Currently, mandoc was hacked on during two hackathon in less than two months. From May 13 to May 17, 2010, Kristaps Dzonsons (bsd.lv and OpenBSD), Joerg Sonnenberger (NetBSD) and Ingo Schwarze (OpenBSD) met at the BEC.de site in Elmenhorst near Rostock, Germany for a mini-hackathon (m2k10) dedicated exclusively on mandoc. Ingo was again focusing on mandoc during the yearly OpenBSD general hackathon (c2k10) and Kristaps was strongly supporting him remotely.
The mandoc utility is a lightweight, portable mdoc(7) and man(7) formatter written in C, started by Kristaps in 2008, so far supporting ASCII, HTML and simple PostScript output. Kristaps has committed to develop PostScript output during the current GSOC.
OpenBSD -current has recently switched over to pre-format the base system manuals with mandoc instead of groff during the system build. The current plan is to release OpenBSD 4.8 built with mandoc this autumn and to remove groff from the base system by the OpenBSD 4.9 release next spring. The NetBSD, FreeBSD and Dragonfly trees also include mandoc, and NetBSD is planning to eventually switch over the tree to mandoc just like OpenBSD did.
If you're unfamiliar with mandoc, you may enjoy reading the previous undeadly article on the topic, otherwise read on for more technical details of the on-going work. Read more...
NYCBSDCon Call For Presentations
The New York City BSD Conference (NYCBSDCon) is the main technical conference on the US East Coast for the BSD community to get together to share and gain knowledge, to network with like-minded people, and to have fun. This event is organized by members of the New York City *BSD Users Group (NYC*BUG). Read more...