So, seems like Gentoo/FreeBSD, that for some people is pointless and useless, is continuing through the road of improvements in general Free Software. But before explaining this, a little parenthesis.
As my ISP hasn’t resolved the routing problems yet, I had to find an alternative to be able to continue working on stuff, so now I’m slowed down, but able to browse the net, through Tor, a huge thanks to EFF for that software. Just so that you know, I’m controlling it through TorK, that you can install from my overlay for now. The problem is that you need to make /usr/sbin/privoxy executable by user by hand right now; I’ve already asked net-proxy to change privoxy’s ebuild; when that will be done, I’ll add TorK to portage. I’ve tested it on AMD64 and PowerPC Linux and x86 FreeBSD, as usual 🙂
Okay so what is this whole porting thing I’m talking about? First of all, Timothy Redaelli, a FreeSBIE developer, is currently helping me with Gentoo/FreeBSD. It’s a good thing to have a more “insider” look, as up to now the project was entirely in hands of nothing more than “advanced users”. He already ported netselect, the special ping-like program used by mirrorselect, to work with *BSD and OSX, and that allowed us to finally have mirrorselect itself, that was a missing thing respect Gentoo Linux; and he also provided (both to us and upstream) a patch to allow D-Bus to actually build and work on FreeBSD (finally), while now is working on creating an ebuild for the special FreeBSD branch of HAL, that will hopefully close the gap we have respect vanilla FreeBSD on that part.
Myself, instead, after making sure that upstream xine-ui builds on FreeBSD with the latest snapshot, I’ve been working on making PulseAudio working on FreeBSD. I currently have a patch that allows PA to build, and seems also to work. Unfortunately that box does not have a PCI soundcard (although I should have one stored somewhere) and I haven’t tried setting up the networked sound yet, so I’m not 100% sure it works. Of course on FreeBSD it can only use OSS output. I’m going to submit the patch upstream now, although Joe Markus Clarke (the GNOME FreeBSD guy) is listed as FreeBSD porter. FreshPorts only points to a 0.7 version of polypaudio, that is quite old….
I’ll be working more on PulseAudio support in Gentoo in the next days probably, starting from adding the support utilities, and hopefully trying to get it out of package.mask at the end of the next week, but I won’t promise anything. Support in software for PulseAudio 0.9 right now is likely to be little or none, xine-lib 1.1.2 does not support it and I’m not going to add 1.1.3 snapshots just yet.
Who said that Gentoo/FreeBSD was a way to waste precious time?
