FreeBSD doc-el picking up speed

As pleasures go, it is a strange yet somewhat refined one to see a project one has started pick up speed. My fellow translators at the Greek documentation team of FreeBSD have been busy lately, and the result of our collective work is a fairly large number of commits to the “doc-el” repository.

There are now at least four translators actively working on a chapter of their own: Manolis Kiagias, Vaggelis Typaldos, Kyriakos Kentrotis and me. Changesets flow between our repository clones almost every day, and I often find myself pulling patches from two or three places at the same time.

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Apparently Elephants and FreeBSD are Quite Popular

Looking at the search terms that people used to reach this weblog, I noticed that one of the most popular posts of all time is the “Contributing to FreeBSD” post of Feb 2009.

This is fantastic! I didn’t realize readers of this weblog would like the particular post so much, but I am extremely pleased you did!

BEST Patras: Διημερίδα Τεχνολογίας στο Πανεπιστήμιο Πάτρας

Το BEST Πάτρας είναι ένας από τους πιο εντυπωσιακά οργανωμένους πανευρωπαϊκούς συλλόγους φοιτητών. Ο σύλλογος είναι μη κερδοσκοπικός, μη πολιτικός και εθελοντικός οργανισμός με μέλη 64 πανεπιστήμια της Ευρώπης.

Οι δραστηριότητες του συλλόγου έχουν ως στόχο, μεταξύ άλλων, τη γνωριμία και την προώθηση της συνεργασίας μεταξύ των φοιτητών στα Πολυτεχνεία της Ευρώπης, και περιλαμβάνουν ανταλλαγές φοιτητών, σεμινάρια, πολιτιστικές και τεχνολογικές εκδηλώσεις, και πολλά άλλα πράγματα, τα οποία σίγουρα δε με φτάνει ένα blog post να τα γράψω όλα.

Announcement: FreeBSD 7.2 release

The FreeBSD 7.2 release is out!

Spawning Fetchmail with a Minimal Environment

I often ran fetchmail in the background, in “daemon mode”, to keep fetching my email from multiple accounts and piping it all through the Sendmail instance running as the local MTA of my laptop.

But I don’t always remember to run fetchmail before launching GNOME or before “polluting” my shell’s environment with dozens of environment variables that may be either useless or even mildly dangerous for a long running process like fetchmail.

GNOME updated to 2.26 in FreeBSD Ports

The FreeBSD GNOME ports have been updated to GNOME 2.26.

Slowly but Steadily Getting There

The Greek FreeBSD translation team has been working on and off on the Greek translation of the FreeBSD documentation set for a long time now. We started getting a lot of commit actions when Manolis joined the team, and he is now an undisputed “overlord” of the Greek Handbook.

Stalking Keramida

Quick tip for finding if keramida’s been active in a machine the last few days.

Run the command:

% ps xau | sed -n -e 1p -e /sed/d -e '/keramida.*emacs.*daemon/p'

Watch for activity in the Emacs daemon, and if you see any, well… you know that keramida is active :-)

Contributing to FreeBSD

As part of the FreeBSD team, I often get asked the same question: “How can I get started as a FreeBSD contributor?”

There are usually two reasons why a new contributor feels overwhelmed by the idea of getting started. One of them is that he or she feels that it is difficult to find out exactly how to start contributing to a free software project. The second reason is usually a feeling of impotency, the notion that “I am such a newbie, how could I ever make a difference in such a large project?”

Both of these concerns can be addressed quite easily. This post is my attempt at recording what I have learned by being a part of the FreeBSD team for almost a decade now, so let me start by the most serious one of these two obstacles to becoming a FreeBSD contributor: the feeling of being too small to make a difference.

Announcement: FreeBSD 7.1 Release

The FreeBSD 7.1 release is out!