Lately I’ve been neglecting Gentoo/FreeBSD on my blog, mainly focusing on the description of the work-in-progress PulseAudio support (and its relation with Gentoo/FreeBSD of course).
But there are really many changes lately, mostly thanks to the help of Timothy Redaelli (drizzt) from FreeSBIE who’s helping a lot, but I don’t want to leave Javier (The_Paya) and Victor (Daijo) without their share of honour, they are working hard too and this can be seen in the quick responses to bugs and to the proceeding work on amd64-fbsd.
First of all, he ported netselect, then he also summarised the dbus patch and prepared an ebuild for hal-fbsd. I’ll be merging those to the overlay soon, leaving time to Cardoe for testing the dbus patch, and to tell me what he thinks of the whole hal-fbsd idea, before they get into main tree and thus can be used.
Even more important, at least to me for biased reasons ;), he helped making sure that UTF-8 support works correctly on Gentoo/FreeBSD (although the support in console is not available at the moment, but the same holds true for normal FreeBSD), so that finally I can see my name correctly on the FreeBSD boxes I have! 🙂
For this to work, you need freebsd-share-6.1-r1 that has the patch to fix the ctype, and drops the symlink patch that broke LC_COLLATION.
Now he’s working on diablo-jre and diablo-jdk support, FreeBSD Foundation’s Sun Java release that is needed for Java to work on FreeBSD, although he’s hitting the problem that I didn’t want to cope with just yet (and thus the reason I didn’t pay much attention to diablo): libz.so.3 is not present on Gentoo/FreeBSD, it’s called libz.so.1.2.3 because we follow upstream’s naming scheme. To avoid this, one can either use LD_LIBMAP variable or libmap.conf, by telling the loader that libz.so.3 is libz.so.1, but this might be a problem with a true libz.so.3 is present… so I’m not entirely sure about this approach, and I’d be looking if there’s a way to edit the ELFs on the fly.
Myself, instead, I worked on something yesterday, and that something is keywording of roguelike games that I could test. The reason for doing that is not strange nor silly, to my view: BSD always had rogue, but we cannot build bsd-games-non-free where rogue is (because it’s patched to build on Linux most likely), and I don’t really want to spend time right now preparing a freebsd-games ebuild… so the result is that you won’t have rogue in the base system, but you can choose between a vast series of rogue-like games, as I keyworded almost all of the textual ones a part slashem (does not build, needs fixes, is not even ported to modular X) and noegnud (haven’t tried it yet, it’s still p.masked tho).
I probably will take a look to other simple stuff to keyword too, games and multimedia, as at least we can say to provide something working and useful not only to servers (considering we’re not production ready yet).
I know I should start preparing a new stage, but the temperature here is too high to get the distcc cluster working 🙁
