PC-BSD Install backend committed to SVN
I had a nice surprise reading my Facebook timeline this morning: Matt Olander announcing that Warner Losh committed the PC-BSD installer backend to the FreeBSD SVN repository.
I didn’t know anything about it before BSDCan this year, so here’s a quick summary of what I remember (and is of interest, to me at least):
- Can install either PC-BSD or vanilla FreeBSD
- Supports ZFS and GELI partitions
- The backend is all shell and quite easy to read/modify to suit your needs
- There are at least two frontends: a QT one (default for PC-BSD) and a dialog/curses (not quite sure, fairly recent in any case) one that looks like it would be a good drop-in replacement for sysinstall.
- It supports a configuration file that isn’t dissimilar to the one you can use with sysinstall at the moment: the frontend actually only generates a config file and the backend does the job without intervention.
So really, how is that for morning awesomeness?
BSDCan 2010 Report
First I’d like to start this post by thanking the FreeBSD Foundation for funding my trip. I’ve been contemplating attending BSDCan for years and without their financial support I would have missed it this year again.
I’ve been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2006. In 2007, my commit privileges were extended to the src tree. In 2008, Pav approached me to become part of the Ports Management Team.
I’ve had the chance to meet up with a few people (Ed Maste, Garrett Cooper, Tim Kientzle) and discuss the coordination of the work that is being done and will be done on package tools as part of Google Summer of Code. During the developer summit, Mark Linimon, Erwin Lansing and myself held a discussion about the current state of packages and how to improve the user experience. A few people offered suggestions and portmgr took good note of them. I did take some time to go through the problem reports assigned to portmgr. I also attended a chat about FreeBSD mirrors along with some members of core, admins and portmgr.
There were a lot of interesting talks during the conference and obviously choices had to be made on which ones I would go see. I really enjoyed Will Backman’s keynote. The talk about the PCBSD installer was very interesting and it looked like there could be a drop-in replacement for sysinstall in the very near future. Lawrance Stewart’s talk was a good summary of what tools to use when doing FreeBSD developement work.
BSDCan 2010 was a great time, I really enjoyed it and I feel it was time spent in a productive fashion. I would like to thank the following people: Dan Langille and his volunteers for the brilliant conference they put together, Sam Leffler / Philip Paeps / Gavin Atkinson / Jonathan Anderson for sharing a room with me, Jordan Hubbard for a memorable meal in the Works Burger in Glebe and Kevin Van Vechten for the invaluable insight on American Sports and the FreeBSD Foundation, once again, for sponsoring my trip.
Attending conferences makes the difference between being a contributor and being part of a community. It is the perfect opportunity to meet new people with similar interests, meet people you’ve been exchanging emails with (putting a face on a name) and make sure you stay updated with the works in progress.
BSDCan and Planet FreeBSD TLC
I’ve had the chance to attend BSDCan this year (thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation) and while Day 0 had been packed full of fail (some of it being caused by a lack of preparation, some was out of my control), the following days definitely made up for it. I’ll write a proper summary when I come back home, this isn’t really the object of this post…
I just noticed BSDTalk wasn’t aggregated on planet, it was only in the sidebar as a simple link. This is now fixed and I’ve also added Dan’s “FreeBSD Diary” and Dru’s “A Year in the Life of a BSD Guru”.
I’d like to use the opportunity to ask what other blogs you think should be aggregated and/or listed, also how you think I can make the blogs.freebsdish.org service better.
iPhone, Twitter and Push Notifications
So, everybody’s raving about the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, me included, but that’s not what this post is about.
A few months ago I got tired of not having push notifications in Twittelator Pro and then I realized that since I had Prowl installed on my phone, there was absolutely nothing stopping me from pushing the notifications myself. After writing my own Twitter watch shell script and having used it for quite some time now, I present you: twatch.sh!
To use, just make sure you have prowl.pl and curl installed in /usr/local/bin (or adjust the paths) and create a ~/.twatch.rc containing login=”yourlogin” and password=”yourpass”. Also you need to have a ~/.prowl file containing your prowl API key.
The first time you use it will push the last few mentions. Now you just have to add it to your crontab. Tada!
Get your fingers out…
... and send your Google Summer of Code application.
Deadline is in 3 days. Kthxbye
My FreeBSD Wishlist for 2010
Alright, I know, we’re well into 2010 already, but after a couple months I’m finally settled in my new home and my computers are in good enough shape that I can actually start doing some work.
So here goes:
- Bugtracker change, my choice is on Bugzilla but after Gnats, anything would be an improvement. Bugzilla also offers RSS feeds for bug queries.
- Wiki change, it’s a bit the same as for the Bugtracker, except not everybody uses the wiki. Moinmoin was a good choice at the time, but really now it’s time to change. My personal choice is Dokuwiki because it’s simple to use, well maintained and has a plethora of plugins available. There are scripts on the web to do the conversion, the only thing that’s in the way is the change in the syntax (which isn’t really an issue since Dokuwiki ships with a WYSIWYG editor). Dokuwiki also provides RSS feeds. After the change, a revamp of the index has to be done, there’s far too much stuff on the frontpage and it’s not organized so well.
- RSS support for CVSWeb and/or ViewVC. ViewVC supports CVS repositories, so I’m not quite sure why we still have both. RSS support apparently requires MySQL support, so I don’t see it happening. Still, having to use FreshPorts/FreshSource for RSS feeds is a bit backwards, let’s eliminate the need for the middle man!
- VCS change. Just kidding, I’m not gonna go there.
That’s right, no code involved here, which makes everything a low priority task obviously. You also probably noticed that while RSS support isn’t the main reason for all these items, it goes a long way towards having everything FreeBSD-related in a single place (be it an IRC channel, Google Reader or your favourite RSS aggregator) and thus saving some time searching for information or catching up with latest development.
New Ports Committer: Romain Tartiere
Please welcome Romain Tartiere (romain@) to the FreeBSD Ports Committers ranks.
Romain has been a driving force in bringing our mono ports up to speed. He’s also been maintaining a lot of C# ports out of our CVS tree. I will be mentoring him.
FreeBSD Blogs and Planet FreeBSD
First, I’d like to apologize for the extended downtime planet freebsd has suffered in the past three weeks. The server was back up a few days ago but the issues I’ve been experiencing since early december were still present. The load on the box was insanely high all the time for very little traffic.
I’ve finally managed to find what was causing it and it seems to be working properly again (as in, requesting the front page doesn’t take 30 seconds amymore). While I was at it, I upgraded WordPress-MU to the freshly released 2.9.1 (video embedding is now dead easy, there’s a integrated picture editor, ...).
Again, sorry for the inconvenience. Happy reading!
Planet FreeBSDish update (again)
So, that WordPress plugin I mentioned previously has been working pretty well and I might replace Planet faster than I thought. Actually I might do that over the weekend.
A few users probably won’t be happy that the “complete” version is going away. I don’t have plans for it at the moment. If you think something else is missing, leave a comment.
If you’re meant to be listed on blogs.freebsdish.org but you’re not, then drop me an email or leave a comment and I’ll (re-)add you.
If you’re in the list but don’t put your posts in the FreeBSD category, then they won’t be aggregated.
Another Planet FreeBSD in testing…
Alright, so I just found out about that FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress and I figured I would give it a spin. It seems to be doing everything I did with Planet, and has a few features (shared admin rights through wordpress accounts, mark new posts as pending instead of publishing them straight away) that could prove useful if I want to poke core@ about planet.freebsd.org once again.
Anyway, check it out.