Author: Michael G

Writing a great “request for proposal” is often the first step on your journey to successfully migrate your Drupal 7 sites. Mark and Dave sit down to discuss some essential points to include in your RFP so that you can close the trust gap between you and a potential partner, and pave the way for a successful transition.

I’ve published the 10th issue of my Ruby on Rails newsletter. Check it out!

The p2k23 OpenBSD packages hackathon just concluded, and Marc Espie (espie@) wrote in with this report:

Off to Dublin, or almost.

This ports hackathon started with a reminder that real-life bugs do matter:
my morning flight was cancelled and I arrived in Dublin late that day.

Turns out that air traffic uses named waypoints, which are supposed to be
unique, but there’s no central name registry, and two local waypoints ended
up with the same name, which caused huge confusion in air traffic to Ireland:
planes making large detours. As it turns out, there ARE some safety
regulations, so crews can’t fly forever, and Aer Lingus had to cancel my
flight: no idea whether the plane didn’t make it to Paris, or if the crew
logged so many hours that they couldn’t fly back.
(all of this info courtesy of sthen@ and mlarkin@, one being the thorough guy
who always finds out the most obscure details, and the other one having
actual flying experience)

Read more…

New committer: Joel Bodenmann (ports)

Hi,

GNU Boot has published its first release candidate, and we need help

for testing, at first from people who are able to recover from

computers that don’t boot anymore.

This is because, while we have very minimal changes on top of the code

used by the last Libreboot release that didn’t contain nonfree

software, we didn’t test all the images ourselves yet, so there is still

risks of ending up with computers that don’t boot anymore.

If the code works fine, we will most likely be able to release it as-is

but we (the current maintainers) still have a lot of work to do before

the release.

For instance we still need to integrate the code from the website, find

good ways to deploy it, make sure that the installation documentation

works (for instance by asking for help from testers and fixing it), etc.

As for accepting patches, we’re not ready yet to do that yet, but we

plan to have that done for the first release, or before that depending

on how things work.

For reporting what images work, you can reply to this mail (or open a

bug report).

The GNU Boot maintainers.

What, you thought we were done with the operating systems written in Rust? Oh sweet summer child. rxv64 is a pedagogical operating system written in Rust that targets multiprocessor x86_64 machines. It is a reimplementation of the xv6 operating system from MIT. As a pedagogical system, it supports very little hardware other than the text-mode CGA device, serial port, PS/2 keyboard controller, and PCIe AHCI SATA storage devices. xv6, in turn, is a reimplementation of Sixth Edition UNIX in C for x86 and RISC-V, widely used in teaching operating systems courses at various universities.