Some how it figures rofl. I tried to download the .NET 3.0 framework from Microsoft using Opera and they told me the file can’t not be found on their server.

I fire up Internet Explorer 7 and vola ! It works like a charm ^_^

Microsoft.com is very crippled for Opera Users I think, going by the times I’ve dropped in of my own free will. I wonder if they are that pissy to Mozilla or Netscape :/

Managed to get every thing up to date and even cleaned up my start menu. On my laptop I usually just open a konsole or xterm & tell it to run the programs I want (I’ve always got a terminal emulator handy). It’s more bugger then its worth imho to do that with cmd.exe and my %PATH% is fat enough now. So I think this is a nice solution, especially since I do not like the Programs->Vendor->Product->Many files arangement used on Microsoft Windows for the start menu and file system.

Click to view image -> Warning it is a 1600×1200 JPEG !

Techno Nightmares

Screamers…. now that is a nightmare of a movie.

In the not so far future (2078) a new source of energy was found, berynium on some rock probably in the middle of no where. It looked to be the best thing since coal or sliced bread judging by the intro. But after awhile of mining for it, the process started throwing up huge amounts of radiation. To stop it the workers and scientists banded together to put pressure on the company. Who in turn launched an all out war with the Alliance.

After being Nuked half of the planet… can’t blame them for needing every last trick in their book to hold on. They invented a monster, the ‘Screamer’ an Autonomous Mobile Sword. That tracks targets by their plus and use the cutting buzz saw like blade that makes up most of their body to cut the enemy to death. In the opening a N.E.B. (the company) grunt trying to deliver a message got a leg and an arm chopped off before the screamers finally lopped off his head. Built by an automated factory under the Alliance bunker, they proved valuable at protecting the base and stopping the enemy. The only way they could tell friend from foe required you to wear a ‘tab’ on your wrist to block their sensors. When the poor sap with the message came in it was their first N.E.B. contact in like 6 months.

After the journey to respond ensures (hey I’m not spoiling the entire picture:-P) two Alliance soldiers, a green kid and a seasoned local. Meet up with a new and improved version. A little kid claiming to be a survivor in the waste land, begging to come with them. The trick? It’s really a droid, so real you’d think it was human – once it get’s inside the enemies bunker. It releases it’s payload, a deadly ‘Screamer’. A N.E.B. squad they link up with tells how effective it was. The droids murdered most of the N.E.B. forces inside their command bunker during dinner time. Also another model…

A wounded soldier begging for help, go to help him and vola ! You’re ripped apart by the screamer. The things we’re self manufacturing as far as the viewer is able to gather. And some how self improving, more advanced models developed by machines, as it was stated that none we’re sent to the planet from command since the prototype years ago. When the scientists effectively built the factory, pushed the on button and ran like heck. In the N.E.B. base they found another model, simple lizard/reptilian like screamers. Slow walking but flast leaping buggers with a Dinosaur like look & feel, right out of a museum.

When the merry band returns to the Alliance bunker… they find out the same thing that happened to the N.E.B’s destroyed the soldiers there. The voice of the bunkers 2nd in command beckons them in over the radio. A repetitive conversation and multiple personality show its a trap. Faced with an Army of droid children clutching teddy bears and having a screamer inside marching out of the base. Trust me it’s not as corny as it sounds lol. Using their high powered by todays standards weapons til the ammo ran out. Then dropping down to the built in flame throwers… They couldn’t hold off the onslaught. So using a recovered micro-nuke they blow the place to crap.

Only to discover one of the N.E.B’s with them injured, when the green Alliance kid goes to help. He’s ripped apart by the advanced screamer… horrible, not even the ‘tabs’ worked any more. The Screamers now could kill any one and every one. After being put down the last two people left, The Alliance commander and a N.E.B. woman set out for the one way off the planet. The ‘oh crap the place is about to explode’ escape system for the bases commander.

To prove that she is human the commander nearly cuts the womans arm off. To do like wise he almost does the same to his own hand before she stops him. The two apparently falling in love head out, only to be greeted by the commanders friend and the next in the Chain of Command. Another screamer !! The screamer was said to have cut off the mans face and took it, hence the appearance. After disposing of him they find another horror, the escape shuttle only has room for one.

Pulling every trick in the book the commander tries to make sure the N.E.B. woman is the one to go, yet theres some reason why she “just can’t go”. When a duplicate shows up, we know why ! Another screamer… the most advanced yet. The two fight to the last fembot standing, the victor gets a blast of rocket engine as the other dies. Leaving the poor guy to use the shuttle and hope he gets back to Earth… and meets HUMANS !!! It’s made clear that his and the fate of earth may be undesirable…

You’d have to see the movie to really appreciate it but it is really horrifying. Man kind is deadly enough without machines surpassing us. The screamers evolved to the point that they killed their own side. Then to the point that they killed each other. It’s pretty dang sad when your own governments weapons try to kill you !

I hope that People are never removed from war, unless war is removed it self. One can argue that there is no such thing as ‘honor’ in a war. If one see’s the goal as to live to see the end in victory. That’s one thing but there is some point. Where a line is crossed, it’s not a matter of honor or fairness but of right or wrong.

Killing the enemy is one thing but murder is another. In screamers you can’t tell if the person next to you is on your side or even human. The chap you’ve played cards with for the past year might try and rip your arms off the next. It’s a sick idea… when machines have evolved past their creator, all but destroyed their creators, and start killing themselves too.

The Terminator is a scary idea but this is worse, just watch the movie and you’ll find out why lol. I think it’s a good thing when you can have some one sit out of the line of fire. Control a robot and have it drop a bomb on the enemy, thats good. But when your toaster oven is modified to kill the enemy while you go on a smoke & coke break. You’re going to be pretty dang sorry if it tries to kill you after getting an upgrade !

Writer’s Block: In The Money

If you won $100 this afternoon, what would you do with it?

Hmmmmm, probably bank it for next months bills. If I had $100 laying around and nothing to spend it on, I’d probably find some one that needed help with money or get setup on paypal and send it [SAS}’ward.

My incomes basically $0 until December… so I wouldn’t mind finding $100 on the side of the street :/

Trying to work around here is ridicules unless every one else is asleep…

It’s like in the Man and the Iron Mask (98) when Aramis is trying to pray and Porthos comes roaring through with two wenches.

*shakes head*

Thinkpad

*drool* I wish I could get one of these babies.

Looking at the custom options, 1.66Ghz Core 2 Duo. 15.4″ Display, 1024MB DDR2, 80GB HDD….. $895.00 man I wish I could get that baby.

This laptop costed $650 for a 2.0 Ghz Mobile Sempron, comparable widescreen displace, 512MB DDR, and 60GB HDD. Plus I had to put up with a $100 restocking fee, because I exchanged a $750 laptop for it -> Because it wouldn’t run any thing but Windows (slowly). Which I had picked because they we’re out of any other laptop in my price range… Best Buy Bastards !! lol.

But I’m lucky, my laptop works great on FreeBSD aside from shitty 3D performance

Partition plan

I’d like a small partition in the lead, doesn’t need to be big, I’ll probably use OpenBSD or an old FreeBSD 6.0 disk for setup. I just want a pretty minimal install, kernel, manual pages, and required binaries. I’d like it to be a pretty small slice but with enough room to hold a few files in a ‘pinch. Its basically just there in case I need to do some recovery operations and can’t boot the primary OS.

As far as that goes, PC-BSD v1.4 when it is released.

# PC-BSD v1.4
ad0s2 66560MB (65GB)
/ 10240MB (10GB)
/swap 1024MB (1GB)
/home/ 20480MB (20GB)
/usr/ 25600MB (25GB)
/var/ 512MB (0.5GB)

All sizes are approximate but I’m figuring I should have 7-8gb free space in the slice. 512mb will be more then enough for /var, my current system has /tmp linked to /var/tmp and is only using 120-150mb on a 2.5gb partition. 10GB should be plenty for the root partition. My laptops not even 10GB with /:/usr:/home all being on the same partition. So I expect roughly 20gb for my home directory and ~25gb to be plenty for /usr. I could probably thin back /var and add a nice fat /tmp/ but I figure the spare space on / will do if I need the extra room in /tmp when un-packing a file. /usr/ports and /usr/src is only about 800-1200MB so it won’t make much dent into my /usr partition.

# My Laptop, PC-BSDv1.3.4 is on ad0s3, the other partitions are for storeage
Terry@Dixie$ df -h 8:41
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s3a 36G 8.2G 25G 25% /
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
/dev/ad0s3e 2.9G 135M 2.5G 5% /var
/dev/ad0s1 10G 1.1G 8.9G 11% /mnt/ad0s1
/dev/ad0s2 20G 48K 20G 0% /mnt/ad0s2
linprocfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /usr/compat/linux/proc
Terry@Dixie$ 8:41

I can finally clean up my laptops partitions… which I have wanted to do for a long while but havn’t had time or wish to do to a ‘stable’ system. If its not broke don’t fix it ! But since I’ll need to reformat, may as well. I like to have issues of partitioning set out BEFORE I do any install. That way I know roughly what I want before hand. So I can adopt it to what I need when the situation comes up. As I have it now, I’ve got a few Gigs worth of free slice planned, more then enough for a minimalist BSD install. Plus a few free gigs on the main PC-BSD slice. So I can add another partition if I need to, it does leave me room to use growfs on my future PC-BSD install if I need to later on.

I hope the Release will be soon, that way I won’t have to lose much time. My home directory is cut down to only what it needs to function with copies of the backups near by in case I need some thing. Once my little synchronizer is done I can complete my change of browsers and get Vectra (an OpenBSD box) setup running an FTP server on the LAN to felicitate it. Thus I should again be able to keep my bookmark/mail/settings the same between computers again. Since I remembered Lynx has good support for Vi and Emacs keybindings… I’m almost tempted to switch to using Lynx as my primary browser but I know sasclan.org is pretty crappy in Lynx !!! And Links doesn’t work natively on Win32 yet afaik.

5 minutes to local 0500…. time to go to sleep !!!!

Digital Boxes

I started the day about 0915 today, went on the ‘country run’ to let the dogs out. Came home, had a fast breakfast and started my backups. Went to work till after 1600. The usual crap after RTB (Return To Base), set up SAL1600 to share a folder on the workgroup. Before my laptop could see the SMB Share I had to reboot the (windows) box hosting the share.

I’ve finished backing stuff up and got it all moved onto SAL1600. So my darling Dixie is ready to have her hard drives wiped clean for upgrade.

 Terry@Dixie$ du -ch ./*                                                   22:28
4.6M ./Documents.tar.gz
1.8G ./Music.tar.gz
308M ./Pictures.tar.gz
33M ./Programming.tar.gz
422M ./Videos.tar.gz
36M ./dotfiles.tar.gz
288K ./lastminute.tar.gz
2.0K ./loader.conf
928K ./misc_files.tar.gz
8.9M ./root-compat-linux-opt-navigator.tar.gz
304K ./root-etc.tar.gz
1.7M ./root-usr-Projects.tar.gz
1.3M ./root-usr-local-etc.tar.gz
42K ./root-usr-local-share-uemacs.tar.gz
10M ./root-usr-local-share-vim.tar.gz
14K ./sh.tar.gz
2.6G total
Terry@Dixie$ 22:28

Backed up my Documents, my Music collection, my Pictures, my Programming directory, my Videos, my shell script/binary directory, the .dot files I want to keep and a few files sitting around my home directory. Also /usr/Projects where I have files for PBI Making stored, my loader.conf and a few things from the file system. the two major etc directories and my files for Vim and MicroEMACS, even Netscape Navigator 9, so I won’t have to re download it.

When I started out my home directory was about 3.4GB according to du(1) and its -h switch. Now all the files I have archived are just over two and half GB. Its a strange feeling to see a major part of my life packed up into ‘digital boxes’…

Since I’ll be reformating for PC-BSD v1.4-Release I’m not going to keep most of the KDE or QT related files, just the ones I don’t care to replace (konsole schemas, Konversation settings) and things for Amarok and Kopete that I can have on record if I need to ‘restore’ them.

For backing stuff up I really do prefer to use dump & restore for major stuff, I can get the system live and mount the disks. Then start a dump and feed in through a Secure Shell login to the server where it’ll be compressed. Since a level 0 dump is pretty big for me, I tend to use bzip for compression. But for this job, since its just the files I’m interested in I’ve used a bunch of TAR Archives and gzip’d them. That way I can unpack them at my leazsure when the system is finally operational, Just waiting on PC-BSD to release v1.4, in the mean time I want to work on my partitioning scheme. I may also try to install a very minimal OpenBSD 4.1 into a partition. Reason? Get it set up so I can boot into OpenBSD, mount the PC-BSD slice and dump it over the network with less hassle ^_^

*sigh* time to leave for work again….1841 local, at least it’s a very short run.

High speed, low drag

Hmmm, an interesting plan.

             4 Man Element (Alpha)
Red Team (#1, #2) -- Blue Team (#3, #4)

#2 would be EL and #4 the next in command, EL is the senior & while Blue is out of his sight, #4 will call the shots needed to complete the team.

Red Library Offices

special: Rasa Room Clearing Challenge (RRCC), so shoot tangos on sight. Skip securing civlians and weapons, at least 2/3 of Element must live. Map is ‘Clear’ when all areas have been secured.

Spawn: Front entrance

Gear: at least 6 Flashbang and 1 Wedge recomended.

Element: Clear the insertion zone,

Red Team: move out into the large room, keep to the right for cover (from upper level) & bang over the wall. Secure the AoR and head into the hallway system.

Blue Team: move into the hallsystem, secure bathrooms, wedge level 4 door, top of side 1 stairs and return to hallsystem.

Element: Use the side 4 stairs (level 2 door) to accend to the server room (level 3). Stack up, shotgun bang & clear the initial room — getting the FB as far in as possible to the 12 o’clock. Clear and secure initial room.

Red Team: Secure sever area (two rooms) and head via current stair well to the level 4 entry (side 3 stairs).

Blue Team: Fall back, head down to the garage (level 1) via current stair well (side 3), secure area. Then head to Level 4, entry from Side 3 stairs.

Element: Stand by, Column Stack (Red left of door, Blue Right of door). Button hooked entry (grenade optional).

Red Team: Button hook (left) continue to clear the area, secure all rooms in said area of responsiblity (2 rooms) using Flashbangs.

Blue Team: Button hook (right) continue to clear area, secure all rooms in said area of responsiblity (2 rooms).

The Element is ONE team, yet when peiricing the enemy is not possible. We strike with the left and right hand, crushing the enemies stronghold.

EL takes control of the Red Team, His XO takes charge of the Blue Team. The EL is in overrall command. They strike together, yet the strike sperately. A very fulid flow of command & control would be necessary and a great amount of pre-planning would adopt for speed.

With the kind of set up I have planned…. And 4 good [SAS] Operators, that map would be clear pretty dang quick and professionally. Each team would have a set of AoR, in the front Red has the Office, Blue the Hallway. In the server room they strike togther, yet Blue breaks off to clear the garage as Red secures the adjacent rooms. They regroup and strike at the top floor. One team to clear one side of it. Every one should operate under the idea that they have got to clear these sectors within approx 30 seconds.

Keep a fast, agressive pace, utilize pre-planned actions while commanders adopt to what can hit the fan. Good solid team work and a well developed Command & Control implementation.

Result? One Element, and a bunch of tangos that will never know what the heck hit them!

PC-BSD v1.4 Beta Review

About me:

I am TerryP, I have been using PC-BSD since the days of the 1.0 Release Candidate #1. I’ve also dealt with FreeBSD 6.x, NetBSD 3.x, OpenBSD 4.x, Debian 3.x, Slackware 10.x/11.x, Ubuntu 6.x, MS-DOS 2.x, and Windows 9x/NT systems over the years. But my main computer usage is centred around PC-BSD and OpenBSD systems. The Windows machine for gaming aside 8=)

I’m an avid computer learner and have been around the PC-BSD Support forums often. Up until recent months I was perhaps the most active member of the forum. Both offering what help and advice I could and putting in my two-cents in the language and feature requests when ever possible. I have contributed a handful of PBI to www.pbidir.com, most of which I no longer maintain due to ‘personal’ issues related to PC-BSD and PBI development. And occasionally I submit new ones when I see a request (such as the Marvel-Yukon driver) and try to get them perfected as my free time allows.

Computer Science / Programming and related issues are among my most common avenues of study. I receive no credit (piss on high school !!) but get to learn much when I’m off work. Thus poking around UNIX systems is a lot of fun for me, both at the perspective of Joe User, having to Admin the bastard, and trying to understand the code involved. I’ve been using computers since the early 1990’s in one form or another and discovered BSD in late 2005 / early 2006. Since then its been a wonderful time learning every thing I can get my head around.

The Review: PC-BSD version 1.4 Beta

I Downloaded both CD’s with wxDownloadFast using the Metalink feature… bloody fast compared to the usual FTP methods.

Booted Disk 1 without a problem. Instead of being prompted with the old ncurses dialog script, it went straight for the installer. The old script is in /root/ as PCBSDUtil.sh if I recall the filename correctly. Could come in handy but one can do it any way without the script if you know to use a shell.

The installer asked me for a System Language, Keyboard Layout, Timezone plus checkboxes for syncing with NTP (Time) servers and submitting data to bsdstats. No reason not to, all BSD Stats does is tell them non traceable information, like OpenBSD Machine w/ CPU ?, RAM ?, e.t.c. located in ‘country’ that kinda stuff.

Default settings was for US English language & Keyboard, a safe default in computing since you don’t need a mouse to change the keyboard layout. Assuming your rat works ^_^
Time zone was set for California, LA which is oddly appropriate considering this is an Operating System based on the Berkley Software Distribution originally developed at UCB (University of California, Berkeley). Still no apparent way to set the bloody TZ to Zulu time (Universal Time Coordinated), to do that I usually set it in my shells RC files. I opted to go with a New York time zone since its the same as mine as well as bsdstats and ntpd.

I had to accept three End User License Agreements with one ‘I agree’ button. The BSD style License used by PC-BSD plus the licenses imposed by the Intel Firmware and nVidia drivers included with the Beta. I expect in future versions of PC-BSD some day we will see Adobe Flashplayer make a pop in here, should the bloody thing ever become stable. Maybe even a Realplayer one should it ever be fully ported to FreeBSD (rather then using the Linux ABI).

I was then prompted to set up the user accounts for the system, providing an administrator (root) password and adding at least one user. Since my standard root password at the moment is pretty strong, it contains more then A-Za-Z0-9 it warned me that it ‘normally’ can only contain regular alpha-numeric charactors. Then I added my normal user, tested my old password which was week. But required non AN char’s, it wouldn’t let me use it so I used another. Unchecked the box to ‘autologin’ the first/top user account added. However I could not continue without setting a weeker root password because of the limitations on allowed charactors. So I set it to ‘root’, ha! I know why this is done but I still think it should be allowed once you know the language and keyboard layout used. It saves on having to run passwd or the GUI tools later.. Oh well most people would probably pick a password that would pass through it on the first try 8=)

Next phase was setting up the disk, I only have one disk (/dev/ad0) and a PC-BSD v1.3 Beta or RC in the third slice, so I installed into /dev/ad0s3 with the following setup:

Mount          Size (MB)          Type
/ 17137 UFS
Swap 4096 SWAP
/home 20480 UFS
/var 256 UFS
/usr 40960 UFS

It prompted me that /home was a symlink to /usr/home and the link would be adjusted correctly… Which I am happy for !!! In older versions of KDE having /home on a different slice was a problem, I’ve no time to test this at the moment but will in the future. Its never had a problem with it being its own (bsd) partition through. I opted for encrypted swap space but did not set a /tmp yet. Because I didn’t know if PC-BSD had kept the annoying tmpmfs. Looking in /etc/rc.conf I see it is still insufficient, tmpfs is set with a size of 800m. This should be set during installation based on the amount of installed memory. In the past (e.g. <= PC-BSDv1.3) there has been problems. That if you require placing 'huge' files in /tmp, as is the case when using ark to unpack, say huge backup files onto a mounted disk. It goes tits up and runs out of /tmp space. It is *supposed* to be backed up by the hard disk but never seems to work that way. So much for telling people and hearing that it needs to be corrected. Then shouting loudly at them for not doing, since its still ignored. Given the option to install stuff from Disk Two, I selected the KDE SDK and KOffice packages, plus the FreeBSD Source Code. KDevelop gives them a very featureful IDE ready to go for C++ work, looks like it might even have integration with the valgrind profiler. I'm sure theres plug ins for other languages but they seem to be missing as far as starting new projects from the GUI are concerned. If I had to go with a traditional IDE, it would be Visual Studio but I hate Microsoft's compiler (I'm more into C then C++). I thunk I selected to install the FreeBSD source code I see /usr/src is empty but forgot to. Popping in CD2 after the first boot, I got the old automount prompt which is nice, thank you HAL. I also see on the disk that theres a ports tree on it too. I can install them later or download more recent ones.

The usual software is installed and a full list can be found here. Its still a pretty standard KDE system but its a little lighter then PC-BSDs older releases. Yet you can still install the stuff thats missing and more from CD2.

Support for Linux Binaries is on by default, as is cups (printing), samba (SMB file/print shares), powerd (for laptop power management), hal/polkit (HAL daemons to appease KDE), NTP & BSDStats since I opted into it during install, PF the OpenBSD Packet Filter / Firewall. Also the SSH server Daemon (a secure remote login), USB Daemon (you really want this), The Device State Change Daemon / Devfs, and a Console driver for the mouse… So you can use the mouse on a Virtual Console.

After logging in with my user account I was told to set up my graphics card. The default was suitable, 1024×768@60hz. It also went up all the way to 7680×4800@95hz. I had to chose ‘intelligent’ answers my self. I also picked the latest nVidia drivers. System works but the max refresh rates the LOWest supported for my resolution as far as Windows XP SP2 is concerned with much older nVidia drivers. Needless to say, my eyes are uncomfortable. when using my preferred resolution on this monitor (1600×1200).

The users home directories still have Document, Image, Music, and Video folders but no sample content. This has always been lacking since these were added. Not essential but always a ‘nice touch’. With most PC’s setup with Windows XP, you usually find a handful of sample pictures and a sample track or two for Windows Media Player.

Less needed stuff like Games and Toys have been moved to Disk 2, so the clutter after boot is a lot less. Yet you can install stuff you may want from disk 2. Like other languages (many choices), KDE based Office, Development, Educational, Games&Toy based packages. Also PBI’s for Firefox 2.0.0.3, K3B 1.0, OpenOffice 2.1, and Opera 9.2 are on the disk.

dmesg shows both my Audigy 4 (detected as an Audigy 2) and on board AC97 (disabled in BIOS) based sound cards. But reading /dev/sndstat only shows an Audigy 2 installed. I have no sound but the PC’s system bell thingy. This is normal with the emu10k1 driver the system has loaded. I’d need to install the emu10kx driver to get audio with my system.

Networking is fine out of the box no need for setup. Taking a look at the control centre its nice to see that theres a Software & Updates menu where we can add/remove PBI and stuff from Disk 2. Also configure the PC-BSD Online Updater, which is turned off -> Probably because this is a Beta and it won’t have updates to download. Theres also the old never used for much PBI Updater checker/downloader. Sadly you have to login to root 3 times to view all 3 sub-modules. This sucks, imho it should remember it in a more ‘cookie’ like fashion… but that’s a KDE thing I’m sure.

There are now *TWO* service managers, the KDE one (kde components->service manager) and the PC-BSD one (system administration->services manager) these should be merged IMHO. If not literally into one screen then into a tab bar where you can select ‘KDE’ and ‘PC-BSD’ oriented stuff.

Splash screen on boot is off, probably for the beta since its more help to have the messages during testing (imho). Its nice to see that the SMP Kernel was loaded, since I have a Dual Core EM64T Processor.

linux_bas_fc-4_10 provides the Linux Application Binary Interface, Linux xorg, gtk20 runtime, and flashplugin7 packages are also installed into that. Nice to see that not only is there support for ZIP but RAR archives. This is good because you never know when you will encounter an odd .rar or .7z file, to bad theres no 7-Zip support.

The usual GTK+, QT3, and KDE libs are here, C/C++/Python centred development with Perl and Ruby on hand with less tools.

Kaffeine is still the default multimedia player but Amarok is installed (yay!), the existing AllCodecs PBI should work with both. Because Amarok is only setup for the xine engine (which kaffeine uses too).

Its very nice to see the ‘start’ text gone from the K-Menu button and that the menu is staying lean & mean. Icons are pretty basic and a good set for a desktop. Beryl is installed…. so people can have their eye candy and hopefully not shout on the forums “Why won’t feature foo work right with card bar that beryl hates on FreeBSD’ hehe. The tray icon icon is on by default and its very in depth. It looks like its some thing I would like but most of the options at first seem to deal with appearances more so then user interaction. Most stuff of major importance seems there. Maybe I’ll play with Beryl later.

All in all, PC-BSD’s v1.4 Beta looks like a very good overall improvement over the v1.3 Release. Strangely the under the hood FreeBSD system has changed from 6.1-Release to 6.2-Stable, this is the first time I’ve seen PC-BSD use a FreeBSD -Stable instead of -Release. I find it some one supprising but at this point, I would expect 6.2-Stable to provide more then enough.

Theres still room for improvement but I think in a few years they will get it just right. Ether that or it will become Microsoft-BSD (very strange expression….) and by that I mean, a Pain In The Arse to do any thing to. I think through they will make a very fine Desktop System, not very BSD inspired in the end…. but still BSD under the hood. I’m no mind reader so I’ll stop thinking about PC-BSD’s release in the year 2012 lol.

I think when the release is made. I’ll probably take a weekend, to let any major issues blow by before hand. And dump my home directory and configuration files to the winbox (big harddrive) and any thing else I might want to save, like most of the crap I’ve done in /usr/local/[dir]/*. Reformat the drive all together, its about a 60GB one. So maybe a 18GB Recovery/Storage partition plus 40GB for PC-BSD v1.4.

Do a clean install and restore my home directory some where and get things working again. To be perfectly honest, even if the ‘upgrade’ option in the installer is working, I don’t trust it to do the job *right*. And every now and then, because my laptop is a PC-BSD v1.1 install that’s been updated over the releases, I run into occasional issues that only come from updates from older versions. Not new releases. It also seems like /usr/Programs/ is officially ‘the’ place to place the PBI. Because /usr/local/MyPrograms links to it instead of /Programs now, which is still a link to /usr/Programs (which I had to create my self as a symlink to /Programs on my laptop).

I think I’ll get my laptop hooked up with PC-BSD v1.4 Release and ditch all the PBI and just live with traditional software management… less risk of FUBAR”ing my workstation. If I ever get another laptop, it would be a toss up between OpenBSD and PC-BSD for it. I’ve never tried OpenBSD under X11 and why I use PC-BSD these days is mainly because I don’t want to screw with Xorg+KDE on FreeBSD. Compling it on a Sempron 3300+ (2.0Ghz) and 512MB RAM != my idea of fun.
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