Computers

PC-BSD v1.4 da Vinci released !

by

I was pleased to see the brain new website this afternoon and 1.4 released. I’m also very happy to see that the new website is LYNX COMPATIBLE !!!! It works and looks nice in modern browsers like Firefox. Yet it still presents a nice clean page to Lynx users.

I downloaded both CD-ROM’s, checked the MD5 Checksums, burned them and got a Quick & Dirty backup of my home directory and config files while I waited.

I think I did some thing like:

tar -czf backups.tgz /boot /etc /root
cd /home
tar -cf - Terry | gzip -9 > /usr/Terry_Home_Backup.tgz

Basically, I made a gzip’d tarball of my old kernel, drivers, and boot-config (/boot), system configuration (/etc) and roots home directory (/root). Then I tar’d and compressed my home directory with gzip. I also made a tarball afterwards of my vim installation in case there was any custom files in it.

Normally when I want to archive a file in a hurry, I use tar’s -z option to archive it (tar, tape archive) and compress it gzip (-z). But since I don’t know how if there is even a way to change the gzip/bzip2 compression level with bsd’s tar implementation. When I want to store some thing big in a hurry however. I usually make use of a pipe and redirection, namely tar -cf – archives the list of files to the standard output rather then a normal file. Which is in turn piped | into gzip who is instructed to use maximum compression on it’s input. And the final data, is redirected > to a file of my choice. Some times I will use bzip2 (higher compression) but I generally favor gzip. As normal, I keep a copy of the backup on this machine and my file server just in case.

My laptop was running PC-BSD v1.4BETA so I was not sure if the upgrade would work correct but it seems to have. The update went smoothly and I was allowed to reselect optional packages from disk 2. I elected for kdeedu, kdesdk, koffice, kdegames, and the FreeBSD source code. All installed fine except for the Source Code !!! My /usr/src is empty, as it was each time I installed 1.4BETA. Oh well, csup will get me newer sources…

Before logging in as my normal user, I had to drop to the console and log in as root in order to change my user accounts log in shell from zsh to one installed (sh, csh, tcsh, bash – I chose sh). Other wise it is impossible to log in from KDM. Of course once I made sure my laptop booted into KDE. I went and installed zsh and changed it back. — I never change roots shell but I do change mine unless I’m sticky. My OpenBSD server still only uses the default (hacked pd)korn shell it came with.

I found 1.4 Release to be much like the Beta but with a new loading screen. I noted that most of the (many) screen savers were removed and one could now specify the rates of the monitor when asked to set up the Xorg config file. It was also nice to see my rc.conf.local file preserved well enough. Although the onboard Winmodem and Winfi don’t work, the ethernet card is now detected by the msk driver as mskc0; I don’t know if it works since I use a Atheros based Wifi card now. It was very nice to see MPlayer back in the install. It was removed from 1.4BETA along with the GTK GUI, in 1.4 Release we have MPlayer and the KMPlayer front end. Although Flash7 seems to have been lost now. Oh well, I’d rather skip compling MPlayer then use Flash ^_^

Since the upgrade process basically nukes all installed software. I had to reinstall most every thing I’ve added. Since I’ve stopped using PBI, that has made this take a little lower. I tend to use ports and a few packages.

My hit list

 codecs   # Hand installed from MPlayerHQ
 cscope   # code browser, I've been meaning to learn how to use it.
 elinks   # Web Browser, text/gui
 exuberant ctags  # What I use to generate my system tags file in ~/.vim/tags
 gmake   # Needed for GTK/QT development and building Vim with GTK support
 konversation   # The worlds greatest IRC Client
 kscope   # GUI front end for cscope, might be worth toying with.
 lynx-current   # Web brower, text; If it supported decent html layout it'd be my default.
 mg   # Micro GNU Emacs based editor maintained by OpenBSD people.
 portaudit   # Was in 1.3 but removed in PC-BSD v1.4
 portupgrade   # Was in 1.3 but removed in PC-BSD 
 prboom and files   # Doom I/II updated to *RUN* on modern hardware.
 psearch   # port searching, I wonder why no one wrote a GUI for this dandy script.
 rtags   # CTags like program for Ruby written in Ruby file, works with vi/emacs
 ruby-doc-stdlib   # Docs of Rubies standard library
 ruby-gems   # Ruby package manager for extra Ruby code
 ruby-usersguide   # Duh
 rubygem-rake   # make done Ruby style
 scheme48   # Scheme, a Lisp like language.
 supertux   # Hey Super Mario, ehhh Super Tux !
 vim   # Compiled from source as per my norm
 xemacs   # Last time I used GNU Emacs, now I'll return to my old emacsen (I prefer Vim)
 xpdf   # Useful tool

I also need to install a decent web browser (gui) and JRE/JDK. I might bite it and use PBI’s for the JRE/JDK but not for any thing else. I’ve found Firefox 3.0 Alpha and Netscape 9 to slow for my tastes (my laptop is only a sempron-m 3300+ and 512mb ddr). Konqueror I’ve found tends to lock up on some websites, maybe it’s the Javascript engine I can’t really tell.

Ether way, I need to find a decent browser I can *live* with that works on most OSes I’m likely to use. Or one that uses the same bookmark format as Konqueror any way xD. Lynx is still the best browser I’ve ever used though, even if it lays out web pages in Text Only and crappy.

My laptop is basically my workstation. So it has a lot of stuff in it, paramount in it is my current home directory. Most important being ~/{Documents,Pictures,Music,.vim,vimrc} and 

Terry@Dixie$ /bin/ls -1 ~/Programming                                      6:53
Ada
Assembly
C
C++
GTK
HTML
Java
NCURSES
PHP
Perl
Python
QT
Ruby
Scheme
Shell
Style
templets

I should probably restructure that directory, make it neater.

Future todos, clean my home directory up again.

reorganise files.

clean up my bookmarks file in prep for a new browser.

Make new XMMS and Blackbox PBI’s.

Pass out… Work in 6 hours…

Emacs pinky

by

Beware of attractive Blondes in tight cloths…. lol

On a lighter note, I’ve had emacs on the brain lately. Which is some one strange as I’m Vi man with a strong liking for VIM.

Generally GNU Emacs is the emacsen by which I compare emacsen. I first learned the basics of using emacs day to day using XEmacs on a Windows machine. Nice editor although i’ve never cared much for the Meta key. Generally I found emacs key bindings to be the kind, that if you could remember what type of key sequence it was you could figure it out. Generally things are some what consistent, Control + D, deletes the next character (right of the point). While Meta + D deletes the next word. Basically as I remember it for regular commands. A Control+Key combo does a smaller action while a Meta+Same Key combo does a larger action. Like if Control+Key works on words, Meta+Key works on lines e.t.c. And classes of commands I think generally had a consistent prefix. Control+X+Control+F Open/Find files, Control+X+Control+S Save current file, Control+X+Control+C exit editor, e.t.c Most of the mutli-file Editor related commands I recall focused on a Control+X prefix arrangement, like Contorl+X+2 to open a second buffer, Control+X+O to switch to the other e.t.c

I’ve tried a number of emacsen but never found one I really like enough to use a lot. GNU Emacs I don’t’ care much for but respect it among emacsen. I find it to fat and slow to be effective. On my desktop it’s no problem to run it, theres a lot of RAM and a fast CPU. On my laptop theres a budget CPU and moderate RAM so it’s slow as nails to get it’s motor warmed up. Not being much of a GNU Emacs man, I usually keep a fairly out of the box installation.

I haven’t tried XEmacs on my laptop but I don’t expect it to be faster then GNU Emacs. I think I would prefer XEmacs though.

MicroEMACS 4.0 and variants I’ve used and enjoyed, you could say MicroEMACS is my favorite. I like MicroEMACS in that it is small yet extensible. With just enough features to be useful Some what like Vi but with perks. Most of my issues with the editor would be solved by learning more about emacs ways of doing things and the marco language. I remember poking around a Traditional C style code base as well.

The only emacsen I find my self using often when I do actually use one. Is mg, a Micro GNU Emacs like editor maintained by OpenBSD. It’s a pretty bare bone emacs but it gets the job done nicely. Since I’m to stuborn to install Vim on my file server (OpenBSD) and would _NEVER_ dream of installing GNU Emacs on it. I’ll usually use mg when I need to edit multiple files. Although I could probably use Window and multiple instances of nVi for the same purpose.

I’ve tried Jove but never cared for it. An intermediate between the GNU Emacs/XEmacs variants and MicroEMACS variants I’d say.

I generally have preferences but I do believe in knowing a lot of things when possible. While I don’t remember most of the commands I learned in XEmacs, and prefer the Vi style of doing things more to my taste. Especially to my wrists and fingers liking !! (Escape Meta Alt Control Shiftritis). I can use Emacs fine but generally prefer not to. I generally prefer a light and fast emacsen to most other editors if I can’t have a Vi based one.

Reading Raider

by

A nice trip to the library…

C in a Nutshell -> Nice book, finished it in about 2-3 hours.

A Book on C -> I’m interested in some of the algorithms.

Learning Perl -> I have mixed feelings about working in Perl, but hey it’s a nice book.

PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites -> I really can use this… lol

Maximum Security: A Hacker’s Guide to Protecting Your Internet Site and Network -> So fat I’ll have to be restrictive in what I read of it. But a very interesting find indeed.

I know C, like I know English: I’m not terribly skilled at some of it but I know it well enough to use it. So I don’t really need to read most of the C books but theres some common algorithms discussed. That I’m interested in reading their implementations of; not to mention a brush up on Function Pointers, Variable-length arrays, and Unions -> I don’t think I’ve ever actually used a Union :/

Perl, I was learning at some point but gave up on it as boring. I like Perl for it’s syntactical style, it’s closer to what I’m used to. But I’ve rarely seen Perl at any great length. Feel beautify to me, it’s effective yes. Pretty, not often… but heck if it works use it!

If it’s some thing I’m not likely to use again or it’s a quickly on the CLI. I’ll usually not care if it’s understandable or well written. But when I do write a script; I kind of like to make it hard to foul up, easy to understand, and function well.

Ippimail

by

www.ippimail.com offers a free webmail service, the catch?

You get a few advertisements in the webmail interface, to be honest I barely notice them unless I’m looking for them. Many peoples sig-blocks on internet forums are more obtrusive. A single line appended to out going E-Mails as well. Just a sig-block consisting of a one or two lines of message I think.

--

 Email and shopping with the feelgood factor!
 55% of income to good causes. http://www.ippimail.com

Compared to some mail I’ve received with a yahoo html ad a page long at the end of the E-Mail!! This is no problem for me.

The money they get from it, goes to them and a good portion of it to several charities which is a very good thing IMHO. Plus like 10% to supporting Open Source Projects, a very nice thing considering that they use a lot of FOSS.

The Webmail is essentially a Squirrel Mail setup with a number of plug ins and customizations. Including a theme thats much nicer then any of the ones I’ve seen come with Ippimail, which are not provided ^_^. The usual set of style sheets and features of course.

I’ve come to enjoy using Squirrel Mail and when I learned about Ippimail it was from reading about Squirrel Mail on Wikipedia, so I knew I’d probably get a good Web mail interface. What I was worried about was the ads and possibility of spam. I remember when I had registered for a free Hotmail account some years back, it was like being placed in the worlds biggest Please_Spam_Me_List loool.

With ippimail I registered for the account and filled out even the extra questionnaire, which is for targeting the ads better and what not. So far I have gotten _0_ spam E-Mails !!! Heck, I get more then that from my ISP’s account. The data involved not really a major security risk ether. The Terms of Use and Privacy Policy is compatible with my views, and I can be quite pissy about agreeing to such things too.

I’ve only had two issues with Ippimail and I’ve found excellent service if thats what you want to call it. The average response time has been within 24 hours. And very friendly support for issues, unlike a call to an ISP. No need to call 3 freaking times to get some one competent, an issue on ippimail gets some ones attention, that actually can tell the difference between a file and a folder. I’ve been very satisfied with Ippimail in every thing I’ve seen and I’m a rather picky bastard :/


Maybe that’s the difference between the people at Ippimail and those at an ISP, they ain’t doing it just for $$$$.

One thing that I really love about the Squirrel Mail software they chose for the actual webmail interface. Is because it’s output is all HTML (with Javascript optional) and the people creating it had a nice brain. You can customize a lot of the User Interface, a very nice feature for people like me (Yes I am a KDE user not a Gnome user :-P).

We have the ability to have mail forwarded to another account, e.g. Ippimail to your Primary E-Mail. To have Ippimail fetch messages from another account (via POP3) and to set up Mail and Spam filters. It can filter messages into different folders based on the filter rules. And even provides a Spam/Anti-virus filter option. I’ve never needed them but my Ippimail account is basically my personal E-Mail address, so I’m not prone to signing up for accounts with it (I use my ISP’s SpamMeAlot address for that).

The address book used while composing mail is crappy IMHO but if one enables the Javascript version you get a quite nice one. It’s also never tripped my popup blocker or slowed down my browser ether. If Konquerors (annoying) Javascript engine can handle it fine I’d be even happier with it. Unfortunately while Ippimail seems to use the import/export address book plugin (hooah!). It can only handle CVS files, one thing I like about this; especially since you can customise the output. Is it means it’s not to hard to use other tools (sed, awk, perl, e.t.c) to process the file into a format more suitable for other things of Unix nature. But it means no real support for Outlook Express or Thunderbird address books 🙁

E-Mail storage is roughly 250MB right now, not as big as some (like gmail) but it’s more then enough for most people I think. Unless you’re prone to storing a lot of junk mail with attachments :/ Even with a real mother load of messages piling up, I’ve never surpassed 30-50mb before. If I really wanted to keep a few 100MB of mail in storage, I’d download it and archive+compress it %_%

The UI is fairly intruitive as any you’ll find and easy to change in options. It’s also very easy on the eyes, in addition to a simple E-Mail system. It comes with fairly simple Calendar, To-do list, and notes system. They even will provide a Blog with the account if wanted. Since I use Live Journal, I’ve never investigated it. I rarly use it for more then E-Mail but I’m interested in the To-Do and Notes plugins they have installed.

As a Web based Mail User Agent of sorts, I’ve found Squirrel Mail top notch and Ippimail to be a great provider. I’ve used many programs but never really been happy with any for E-Mail. Especially for dealing with mail in _volume_ and from multiple PC’s. So far, ippimails usage of squirrel mail has proven to be one arrangement I really like.

The website is quite compact and down to business, I like it even if it’s not very flashy. Theres links for site news, blogs, shopping, and google-searching. The thing Ippimail does best is E-Mail and thats what I use it most for 🙂

I almost went with a gmail account but didn’t quite like Googles policy, when I found out about ippimail I probed for awhile and thought about it. Then I dove in head first and I’m glad I did. I don’t like software that gets in my way, I like software that helps me get my work done, efficiently!

Things I would pay for….

by

Being an extraordinarily stingy bastard, I’m generally only willing to pay for what I need or want a lot. An example would be The Regiment, I want the game… So I’d be willing to buy it. I don’t need an IDE so why would I buy Microsoft Visual Studio??? And to be honest I’d rather make a charitable donation because of how much I love and use Vim then pay for MS Visual Studio $_$

I’m used to not having a lot of money, so needless to say while I don’t have problems spending a lot of money. When I do spend my money it is often as carefully Analyzed and as wisely as I can.

Products and services I would pay for if I could afford to:

  1. Strongspace
    • Strongspace would save me so much trouble. Not only would it make things easier then having to set stuff up on my lan and configure every thing (clients/servers) and deal with Winsucks | Nix relations… Namely that Windows my options. My server lacks a good sized hard drive so I can’t even make use of a similar solution with my own hardware. Even the cheapest plan on strongspace could probably hold my entire home directory! 5GB storage for $15/month is not bad. The medium plan costs more (25GB Storage for $50/month) but it could hold all of my personal data on the network. Geeze my laptop doesn’t even have 25GB of data on its 80GB disk. And my server has less free-space then strongspaces startup plan offers :/. If I could afford strongspace I would definitely go for it fast

  2. Live Journal
    • While I wasn’t sure if I would like it at first, nore blogs at all. Since I started using Live Journal I’ve come to like it quite a lot. If I had the spare money I’d go for a paid account. While my account at this time is basic and I do occasionally experiment with setting it to Plus (ad supported), feature wise I’ve found Basic (free, no advertisements) to be more then enough. A paid account would probably be more helpful to LJ then useful for me. I like Live Journal so I think it would be worth while even if I don’t need the extras;-)

  3. Ippimail
    • Webmail with a heart, they use Squirrel Mail with several plug ins and a custom theme. It looks very nice and provides a lot of features for a free service. Most of there setup is using Open Source Software and a portion of their profits goes to charities and supporting OSS Projects. The ads on the webmail are basically what pay them. The advertisements on the webmail are very on-obtrusive and dispite having filled out the surveys to the fullest, I have _NEVER_ gotten an ounce of spam from ippimail. I wish I could say the same about my ISP !!! Ippimail has saved my mail… Since I can’t afford a new UFD and mailx+lynx on my server would be a bitch. I’ve all ready tried mutt+lynx, I liked it but not when people sent me HTML mail ! I’m glad ippimail is free, because I probably wouldn’t be able to use it other wise 🙁 but it is a service I would pay for if I could + had to.

  4. DX For Nix
    • Some way to play any game on Linux and BSD and an assurance that any game would work. Would be worth a small fortune to me. The closest thing to it only works for Linux based systems but not on BSD using the Linux ABI. I don’t use GNU/Linux very often. Although I’d rather run a GNU/Linux Distro on my desktop then Windows XP hehe.

  5. Vim
    • If I ever win the lotto, oh boy is there going to be a donation sent this way 🙂
by

I don’t know why…. but some how every time I start looking at web browsers. Lynx just keeps coming up as #1.

Lynx seems to be able to give me every thing I could possibly want out of my browser. Except for Tabbed Browsing, the options of Images, and most importantly… being able to lay out a page decently !

Links does a much better job on laying pages but I’m more comfortable with Lynx, dang I wish I had time to see what trying to create a new browser based on the Links and Lynx code bases would result in :/

Netscape navigator 9 I like a lot but it’s just too bloody slow.

Firefox 2 I can’t stand, it’s crap as far as I’m concerned… Hopefully 3.x will rock.

I like Seamonkey but since I use only webmail now, theres no need for it when theres Firefox and Navigator.

Opera I like a lot, it’s got a few rough edges but it’s one of the best browsers I’ve ever used. I’ve got to reinstall it on my desktop, keeps crashing…. never had that problem before. It’s nice enough to ask to restore my session on the next run tho.

Konqueror and Safari I like a lot but nether are portable enough for my needs, *yet*

I need to find a decent web browser, some thing I can use consistantly on Windows NT, Linux i386/AMD64, *BSD i386/AMD64, and Mac OS X. While I don’t have a Mac and rarly use Linux Distros. I like to have the SAME program as much as possible between OSes. Like Vim, works on every OS I’m likely to use and nearly any OS I’ll probably bump into. The major difference is I tend to preffer GVim (Vim’s GUI) only when I don’t have a decent terminal emulator, like on Windows XP. CMD.EXE is a poor one compared to Konsole.

Thinkpad

by

*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

by

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 !!!!

PC-BSD v1.4 Beta Review

by

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.
< br />

by

http://www.nabber.org/projects/appupdater/

Hmmmmm, I might want to take a look at that later.