Florent Thoumie

As you may have noticed, freebsd blog stuff has been down lately. Erwin was hosting everything and apache crashed while he was away. For some reason, people with root access to the machine couldn’t restart it and Erwin isn’t supposed to come back before a few days.

I decided to move everything to my own server, so it’s now back online. If you haven’t done it yet, please update your bookmarks and use planet.freebsdish.org and blogs.freebsdish.org rather than the names ending in droso.org or droso.net (as I have no control over those DNS zones).

I haven’t blogged about this in a few weeks so I figured that could be a good time to give everybody an update.

It has been decided that the X11BASE to LOCALBASE migration would happen when we merge the new X.org in the ports tree. The necessary infrastructure changes have been done but some ports are broken by these changes. There are also a few ports broken by new X.org import left to fix.

Good news is that lesi is back so he’ll take x11@ leadership back and work on this; and miwi volunteered to fix part of those broken ports as well. An exp-build has been done last week-end and all of us got the errorlogs, so now it’s only a matter of fixing stuff.

With help from mlaier and sam, I finally committed my first significant contribution to the src tree.

Few months ago, anholt gave me email addresses of people at Intel that would be willing to discuss terms under which we could redistribute their firmwares. After a few emails (and some months), we came to an agreement. I added support for restricted firmwares to firmware(9), mlaier/sam reviewed it and voila!

Commit is here and heads-up is here.

Update: Now, here comes the Press Release!

I guess it’s time to review what I’ve done for the past year. Not much actually. I’ve focused on X.org ports while trying to get my ports up-to-date. There’s also the USE_LDCONFIG variable.

Anyway, I think I can tell that this was a very unproductive year. I guess I’ve spent too much time playing games and going out. My src commit bit anniversary is the 30th of march and I don’t remember anything significant I’ve done in this area besides breaking /etc/rc.d/jail.

I’ll have a few pints to celebrate and meditate about what I’ll be working on this new year.

As you may have noticed, ajax just announced the release of X.org X11R7.2.

There are a few things left to do for me before it is ready for inclusion in ports, some of them are: update a few ports, write minimal support for XORG_LITE, fix nvidia-driver, send a new tarball of the tree to kris to run a new experimental build, fix remaining failing ports, ...

As I previously said, we’ll do the PREFIX merge at the same time, so this is something that delays the X.org update merge even more. So please stop asking for a schedule, it will be merged as soon as we’re ready. I hope to be ready for the end of february, but since I’ll be spending the next week end in France, it may not be the case.

I’ve sent a WIP port few days ago to some mailing lists but got no feedback yet. I think this is a valuable piece of software to have in the ports collection but I’m not going to commit it without at least two success reports. So go ahead and try it, now!

If you don’t know what it is or don’t know how to find the port, check out the announcement.

Jimmac posted a blog entry about his new cursors set yesterday so I took a few minutes to create both ports. Update your ports tree and have a look at cursor-dmz-theme and cursor-dmz-aa-theme.

Also, I’ve had these extra tango icons installed on my machine for a while now, port was ready but I didn’t feel like maintaining them. Since there haven’t been any update lately, I figured it wouldn’t be such a burden to maintain it, so it’s now in x11-themes/icons-tango-extras

I just MFC’ed latest DRM changes in RELENG_6. If you happen to have a i965-based chipset and couldn’t get dri working, this is your lucky day

I’d like to kick in the butt that guy who decided that setting XKB_BIN_BASE to XKB_BASE as default was a good idea.

If you’re using X.org 7.2 from the experimental tree and you tried to use anything special in keyboard properties, you probably got an XKB error. I spent a significant amount of time trying to find that bug, and I just noticed that, for some reason, libxklavier tried to execute /usr/X11R6/share/X11/xkb/xkbcomp. WTF!! So using the right configure switch (—with-xkb-bin-base=${X11BASE}/bin) it’s fixed.

One showstopper down. We’re not too far from the holy day.

PS: I somewhat decided that we’ll do the PREFIX merge at the same time that we’ll commit the new X.org so it’s likely to delay the merge a bit.

My flatmate (formerly my friend) is complaining cause I’m not talking about it him in my blog. I’m having a hard time trying to get into his head that this is a technical blog but let’s talk about him for a change.

His name is Nicolas. He’s like … 26. He recently got a job at IBM in Clontarf (D3) as Software Engineer. We’ve been sharing this apartment in Stillorgan for around 10 months now (he’s been there first, approximately 7/8 months before I moved in).

So, we went to the Barge in Ranelagh (D6) last saturday (6/1/2007) for a couple of pints and there was a birthday party on the first floor I guess. Anyway, I think he fell in love with half the women in that part of the pub, so if you’re a woman and you were there, please leave him a message on his blog