Development Updates - July 30 2026

[pkgdemon]

I actually did this a couple of weeks ago but I've been pulled other directions. I made a new daemon wland which uses mach to talk to configd/IPConfiguration and coordinates with wpa_supplicant. It also does all the right things to create wlan devices automatically with ifconfig. There is now also a new tool for connecting to wireless networks. The basic usage can be shown by running the wlan command but it will list devices, scan for networks, or connect to a network.

I'm thinking about bluetooth as well, and I've been drawing up plans for how to bring in more kexts, and how to deal with making linuxulator work in a kld free environment.

Aside from that this project had it's first contributor @jrjsmrtn who helped me close a couple of open tickets by fixing interactions via the kernel that prevented the shutdown command from working, and a getty issue. Along with that interaction I fixed CI to make it more contributor friendly so that workflows to run the automated tests could be run after approval against pull requests from forks.

I worked on centralizing image building for Gershwin Desktop, adding enhanced CI to check basic things like making sure menu works, file viewer can be opened, and more that will gate the rc images. The more bleeding edge dev images will show test errors and allow images to be consumed to investigate issues. All images show screenshots now so we know what to expect before downloading. How this relates to NextBSD is the rc image can be downloaded, and graphically installed with the Installer Assistant in Utilities. The enhanced CI will help make sure future development isn't causing regressions between the projects.

This will be the new home of gershwin-on-nextbsd ISOs going forward:
https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop/releases/tag/nextbsd-rc

More bleeding edge development images can be found here:
https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop/releases/tag/nextbsd-dev