Computers

Linux distro family tree

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http://kde-files.org/CONTENT/content-files/46315-linux_timeline_poster_v1.1.png

Special thanks to MetaCosm of #vim

Never knew suse was descended from good ol’slackware hehe.

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Hmm, arguably I have my bad days, and then I have my worse days…

Tomorrow can’t get much worse in terms of work, I hope : Nearly 0500R, so no time for a proper days log; I really need to stop staying up so late.

At the moment, I’ve nearly got nail configured to my needs. The addition of macros and IMAP support is a real improvement over the old Berkeley Mail program. With a little more adjusting, I just might be able to dig into my back-log of mail sometime lol. So far, I only have one major complaint – no line editing at the prompt beyond the most basic level (provided by the terminal). That’ not really a problem though, it allows that old ed like terseness, it’s easy to keep the commands short.

Software, like physical tools should empower users to get work done efficiently, A little bit of learning how to use the program, is worth it when the reward is productive.

One thing I’ve also come to enjoy, is a useful trick for generating HTML manual pages. The mail/heirloom-mailx port installs as /usr/local/bin/mailx on FreeBSD, corresponding manual page being /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz. Because nail has a big manual page, it’s worth while to use a web browser or a text editor with tabs, in place of the usual $PAGER used by man.

$ zcat /usr/local/man/man1/mailx.1.gz | groff -Thtml -man > ~/mail.1.html
$ firefox3 ~/mail.1.html &

which is much more fun then my shell alias:

alias   man-nail="man -M /usr/local/man mailx"

PC-BSD, 3 years of PBI corruption continues!

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Username: mrhbit

Hi@

This is available in FreeBSD ports.

Here some screenshots.
—
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/index.php?page=1&lang=en
—

regards Soeren

Username: mrhbit

Or a package for PC-BSD 7.x ?

Username: Gon

have done it. Gimme a week and i will approve it into pbidir.com

_________________
Gonzalo Martínez-Sanjuan Sánchez
PC-BSD Core Team Member

Problems with this:

  1. Getting a PBI approved is supposed to involve community testing, and review by those in charge of our PBI’safety (e.g. Gonzalo and a few others on the team page), which should also be impartial auditors – it’s called common sense.
  2. This would make Gonzalo a repeat offender in by-passing the normal approval procedures for his own PBIs, if he does what he says he will do.
  3. If he does as his record and choice of words suggests, this is a conflict of interest, which I deem unethical.
  4. This is not the first time. someone involved in the PC-BSD project has “bent” the PBIDir rules, or endorsed doing so… when they are supposed to be enforcing them, for everyone including themselves!
  5. In the past a number of PBI’s that have “skipped approval”, and have resulted in stinging users or violating the rules of the day (ref: Kris (Realplayer, Java, BSD4Win), Charles (Firefox, Thunderbird), Gonzalo (Gnome, …)), or just had half assed [lack of] testing that didn’t catch obvious problems (ref: the 2nd Amarok PBI, Gnome 2). Considering the state of Documentation (how many general users know how to extract PBI w/o install, or how to reach the scripts before they are run), users will not see the code executed when they install a PBI (and most woulnd’t understand it, or the implications), which IMHO is a major security risk — unaudited PBI.

Is it a wonder, that I never send patches to these people… I wouldn’t want my name associated with PC-BSD in any such capacity, period and end of quote. I remember I once compiled a list of the PC-BSD projects deficiencies, and took it up with one of the team members…. That was quite a while ago now; but no actual changes seem to have occured, beyond referencing revisions in the changelog for 7.0.1.

I think, if Gonzalo doesn’t go by the book, maybe I will just happen to go public with them this time — and expand the list!

I’ve had about enough of watching this chicken shit project. I may have mellowed in my increasing age, but not that far just yet.

Miscellaneous ponderings

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/bin/ed isn’t so bad after all, but hey… knowing how to use ex, vi, and vim helps lol.

The old Berkeley mail interface is very interesting, but seems to lack mutts infinite configuration. Most of the time, I just use webmail. Google Chrome (Windows) or some thing from $BROWSER (*nix) is always open, so typically use that; but some times I do like to work from my terminal hehe. It even looks like the nail/heirlom-mailx program might add the stuff I desire.

TODO: inhale /usr/share/doc/usd/07.Mail (the reference manual), inhale nail documentation.

Reboxing the box

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To go with the changes in my working environment, a new style for blackbox 😉

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Since I left KDE in favor of more compact systems, I’ve found that I tend to change my layout of things less often. Most of the arrangements are calculated for muscle memory, and my visual patterns, and have become a set of very quick reflexes.

I don’t miss a taskbar at all, and have still yet to find an excuse to use the slit or dock in Blackbox lol.

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I love this thing….

Laptop is under abusively heavy load compared to what my much more powerful windows machine does, but it’s still in a very usable state. If this system ran Windows XP instead of FreeBSD, it would be slow’n to a crawl lol.

currently running: 155~165 processes, 6 shell sessions, 1 x session, temperature is at 64.0 Celsius

  • X.Org is up and I logged in from GDM.
  • Blackbox is running with bbkeys, dcopserver, gkrellm2, and two rounds of fbpanel in support.
  • Psi, Pidgin, and XChat are running, with a total of 7 networks going between them (1 of which is freenode, with 3 channels open)
  • rxvt-unicode + gnu screen is open with 4 windows
  • linux-flock is running with 5 tabs and the mplayerplug-in streaming music
  • The www/firefox3 port is compiling
  • My vimbuild script is fetching/building a newer version of vim from cvs
  • I am csup’ing my systems copy of the FreeBSD source tree
  • And doing the write/compile/test rinse & repeat in vim 😉

This kind of workload, is fairly typical for me when running FreeBSD. On the windows machine, I don’t even bother – doesn’t take well to it :.

running off the deepend

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Well, finished one portion of my docs (Grrr… wasting time in #kde-chat and #vim lol); even got one of the manual pages written out.

Ya know, with the mdoc.samples(7) and mdoc(7) manual pages + a few simple manual pages for reference (head, cat, pkg_add) the process of writing a manual page is actually much less painful then I remember it being. I’ve only got one small problem so far, thin I’ll post on daemonforums later and see if anyone has an idea; if not I’ll probably have to adjust the man pages wording a lit’ bit.

nroff/troff is also strangely addicting once you start playing with macro packages…

The problem with typing to quickly

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Check if the program ‘named’ is running and listening. I don’t know off the top of my head if /etc/rc.d/named supports the status command or not (rc), but finding out if it is running the hardway is still easy.

I’m not familiar with any of the dns/ apps in ports, so I can’t say what name they would run under; but I’m sure someone here would point it out.

—

$ ps xa | grep named
   ... is named running?
$ cat /var/run/named/pid
   ... does the pid file exist?
$ netstat -n -p tcp | grep 53   -- s/tcp/udp/
   ... is anything listening on the usual port?

-> Assuming that the standard issue name server was used, you may want to check named.conf first, in case the settings were changed. On FreeBSD I believe this is etc/namedb/named.conf.

I really should check my posts for typo’s more completely, before I make an ass of myself so easily…. at least J65nko spotted it. Most times I try and check what I write, but after work, it’s not exactly a high priority – compared with finishing the sentence before I get AFK’d for the umpteenth time lol.

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Believe it or not, I’ve just spent the last several hours spelunking around FreeBSD, and end it with a smile lol.

I got tired of a program I was writing (and a minor headache), so… I turned my attention to something that’s been on my todo list for ages. Tracking more and more of how the system handles it’s startup procedures. It would certainly be a bit more helpful to my understandings, if I had ever had time to learn x86 assembly. Maybe someday, I’ll get to that part of my todo list, lol but by then AMD64 will probably be old as a Pentium :

Well after 0500 now, time to get some sleep…. Flibin’ work early tomorrow, and another day of… annoyance.

Terry@dixie$ uptime && shutdown -p +2 'head hits keyboard, begins to snore loudly'
 9:23AM  up  6:15, 2 users, load averages: 0.07, 0.09, 0.06
Shutdown at Fri Oct 31 09:25:48 2008.
shutdown: [pid 3624]
Terry@dixie$                                                                                
*** System shutdown message from Terry@dixie.launchmodem.com ***             
System going down in 2 minutes                                                 
                                                                               
head hits keyboard, begins to snore loudly