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I figure for today, I can probably work on updating my PC-BSD test machine to using FreeBSD 7, for updating the ports that will likely have to wait for later. With luck I can leave it running over night.

I want to spend some time working on the user-interface for NPM, I know what I want but I am not sure what value it will have. Essentially my idea is for the user to select from several implementations of the main window including the ability to use custom made modules for it.

I also want to implement an option by which each module is checked against a given list of checksums, if the module fails the checksum it won’t be allowed to load. With this method one could theroectically restrict any non-NPM supplied window layouts from being loaded but it’s probably a useless feature but one I’d like to tinker with just for the fun of it lol.

I also know if I don’t get a few things out of my head I’m going to pop.. Maybe coding will help :.

Whistling FreeBSD 7

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Hehe, as a friend requested a screen shot of when I got FreeBSD 7 up:

[click to enlarge]
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Well actually it is about an hour and a half to two hours after but I dunno how to take a screen shot of FreeBSDs system console without image magic, then again I could’ve always used the camera… But no one wants to stare at the command prompt but me <_<.

FreeBSD 7.0 booted incredibly fast for my exptation, even off the install CD I think it out paced PC-BSD 1.4 (which uses FreeBSD 6.3-stuff). As always I set a few of the install options before hand, low output while installing packages, debugging console on etc. Normally when I setup a FreeBSD box I do a custom installation and exact maximum control over what goes in. For this, I just chose to use the canned X-Kern-Developer installation set which is essentially FreeBSD + Kernel Sources + Xorg which is what I wanted, I’m not expecting to need any sources other then the kernels.

For the optional packages I picked out a bare minimal to get me started, zsh for my user account -> I can use any of the standard shells easy enough but I ‘like’ the zsh hehe. Also portupgrade to ease any installation issues and a desktop environment, I chose to go the gnome2 meta-route.

The install went very fast as usual and the whole time was basically spent installing X and associated crap. It did however bomb out on LibIDL not being found on disk 2 fragging the gnome install so it would seem and barfing at the ruby package on the disk set. I think this is rather /strange/ for having downloaded all 3 ISO’s to avoid things like that… But hey, I don’t mind. Usually when I install FreeBSD I only take off the CD-ROM’s what I’ll need to get the machine connected to the internet, usually nothing as far as whats in ports goes.

However despite the lack of a desktop and portupgrade utility I booted into an other wise fully functional system. Mounted my existing install on /mnt and merged my network config into the FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE one and copied over the xorg.conf file, volia we have working internet and X.Org ! No need to even load kernel modules, although sound didn’t work because I never added the line to /boot/loader.conf for it: no problem on a test install. Whether or not sysinstall has gained the ability to handle WPA Encryption over the years I didn’t bother because setting up my well supported PCMCIA card is a breeze as long as you can use a text editor.

I then set the gdm_enable variable in /etc/rc.conf then I had to change the site to fetch packages from because ftp.FreeBSD.org was still shouting about to many connected users so I set PACKAGEROOT to ftp://ftp13.us.FreeBSD.org/ in roots .login file, logged in & out and proceeded to pkg_add portupgrade and gnome2.

That took about an hour !!!! A little toying with pkg_info and wc, and I would say that gnome depends on about 365+ things… Glad I got a working X.Org install off the CD-ROM… It took ****for freaking ever**** to download all of the packages for gnome but one console command and a single line added to the config file and it just /works/ out of the box after a reboot, although of course I already had the xorg.conf file hehe.

I’m a KDE user by taste not a Gnome one but I decided to install Gnome and while I don’t care much for Gnome I am glad to see that aside from the long wait that installing and setting up Gnome on FreeBSD is as painless as it gets thanks to the hard work of those maintaining the port. Now, customizing Gnome to do your evil bidding is some times problematic hehe. I only like two things about Gnome, that it looks nice (usually) and that it gets well the **** out of your way.

If that is worth the horrendous inefficient user interface they have for file open/save dialogs I dunno… But KDE is the best in that regard that I’ve ever seen.

There was just one small problem, since the FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE install was going into a partition previously housing a linux distro I was testing a few months ago, it also took with it the GRUB configuration as was planned. So I had my GAG install CD ready before I started with FreeBSD because I knew I was going to be removing the boot loader I was using for PC-BSD (GRUB).

The problem, 2 OSes setup for booting in GAG but only the first would boot (FreeBSD 7). I even used the install disk to overwrite GAG with BSDs normal boot manager but no luck, it wouldn’t boot ad0s2a ! When ever I chose to boot off the second partition in GAG it would boot off the first, FreeBSDs boot manager would just beep at the second partition.

There is always more then one way to screw with a boot procedure, man I love thinking ^_^. Loaded up my trusty never wanta leave home without it Knoppix Linux LiveCD and used QTParted to unmark ad0s1a (FreeBSD 7) as active and to make extra sure I did the same to ad0s2a (PC-BSD 1.4) and set ad0s2a active again before commiting my changes.

Reboot and reinstall of GAG, PC-BSD boots fine and so does FreeBSD !

I know you’re only supposed to have one partition marked active and GOD and IBM only know what could happen if more then one ended up set active :. I figured that either GAG had to be goofing it up or there was some thing slagged. Sure enough QTParted told me both partitions were marked active..

I ain’t gonna ask how, not even if it is possible, so long as nothing explodes and my laptop works fully I am a happy spider hehe.

In my personal opinion, aside from my booting mixup I think any one able to read & understand English (I’ve never tried installing in another language) could get a working desktop in less then 2 hours if they sought after the suitable level of knowledge to configure there systems internet connection, for most wired users that is a cake walk during the install. And to setup an X.Org config file which is not a very hard task, when the proper values work that is lol.

PC-BSD on the other hand, 30-45 minutes time spent installing (mostly installing the files while you relax) and you have a fully functional KDE Desktop. That’s why I have PC-BSD on my laptop, because other wise I would have to install KDE manually… in which case I would probably skip it and just install amarok and friends 😉

With the increased performance in FreeBSD 7, I can’t wait to see PC-BSD 2.0 when they finally switch over. It should sure as heck boot faster for them then Ubuntu on a first date 😉

One thing I personally find weird, when I do have a problem 90% of the time if it makes sense I can figure out the problem eventually. The other 10% of the time, what makes sense doesn’t work 8=) so the only solution is to ‘fsck with it a bit.

What dreams come

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I can’t help but wonder if my dreams begin to haunt me or to comfort me..

To see the things I long so hard for come forth only to have them torn away. I look to and fro, and wonder if I be in heaven or hell. As the scene continues, oh so sweet a scene.. It seems as if life may finally be on the upward course. I see my desires fulfilled, my hopes grow at the sight of my dreams. The things that ebb away at my mind are put to a rest… My life finally has peace and a promise of prosperity to come. A stoll through the woods, in search of nothing but communication without eave dropping ears as it seems the torments of my life are set right in this era of happiness but it is only a short time before business must part me from our shared path. I must leave to attend to things but will return home shortly. Yet what unfolds is only to be replaced by horror, replaced by the monster.

Nothing left but to survive and return home… Business gone astray what ever it may have been and the terrors of the jungle standing in the way.

While I’m not built like Arnold Schwarzenegger, in life or dreams the creature is infinitely more deadly then the Predator ever could have been. While Dutch was also unarmed against the monster, he was able to build weapons and utilize camouflage… The predators naked eyes being much less accuate a judge of heat sources. No such luck in this case; the creature has no weakness that I can exploit as it pursues me, like a demon in search of prey. It is fast, impossibly strong yet ever so nimble a creature and twice as deadly. Human wit however proves more then a match for its brute force even when left weaponless in the jungle. It is only my will to drive me, the will to keep going and punch through the struggle.

Now with no harm left, I stand and realize that I am trapped here. Nothing left to harm me, nothing left to fight. Yet how do I return home?

And I awoke to the world around me… To the questions that plague my mind, will I ever succeed in reaching such a life?

To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act III, Scene I

To be, that is the answer…

Practical Fusion Power, getting closer to the real world?

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MIT Fights for Clean Power With Holy Grail of Fusion in Reach

This article is quite interesting for me, maybe I’m an old ‘Mech head at heart but I think a practical and eventually miniaturized fusion power source is the real block on some day seeing a real ‘Mech walking about. Well, that and about 20 Billion dollars a year to develop the rest of the hardware and software environment xD.

And to top it off, there research seems to be putting the concepts used in tokamaks to work. Man I ain’t heard hide nor hair of one in ages..

Who knows, maybe in 70-150 years the power problem will be solved, if there’s still a planet left.. Either way I probably won’t live to see it but hey, a lad can dream. If a practical fusion reactor could be developed and put to propulsive uses without needing a capitol ship or any thing else huge to do it, oh baby would that open a few doors to what we could do. But what ever comes up over the next few decades, will still probably be to large to be very portable :

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Downloading FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and hoping my internet connection doesn’t fuck up on me…. freaking phones !!!

I’d like to tell bellsouth where they can stick there equipment…

Currently running 334MB of 509MB (rounded) and going at 270~340KB/Sec and still going full steam a head downloading i386 Disc #1.

I’m shocked really, the main download server already popped past the max connection limit when I went to browse the files.

Seeing the situation I started looking to see which US mirror was the fastest, several seemed to be KiA when I started pinging to find the best response time. Oddly enough ftp13.us.FreeBSD.org had the best response and by a vast majority !!!

Oh baby is this gonna be a goooooooooood release xD. I started with FreeBSDs 6.0-RELEASE and look forward to seeing the things coming out of current hehe. There’s also a driver for 7.0 that I want to test out some time soon, I might have to wait awhile… I know my desktop did a kernel compile of 6.1-Release in like ~45 minutes but my laptop is not quite as powerful….

Haha, this reminds me of when my file server ran FreeBSD. Chugging away on that little 500Mhz Pentium III it used to take like 6 to 8 hours to recompile the entire operating system but always rock solid.

Even if I was sound asleep by the end <_<

Now I’ve dreamed everything

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It’s normal for me to have a string of dreams but this last one just takes the cake. I woke up around 1030R and went back to bed…

I dreamed I was a part of a U.S. Army raid on an island to destroy a weapons cache in the middle of World War II. We stormed the house with frags, going room by room. No one there…

Heading up stairs, swapping a M3 Grease Gun with another soldiers M1 Grand we started working throuhg the upstairs.

Kicking in door by door we cleared, I walked point with the M1 rifle… Maybe 30-45seconds later we had secured 5 or 6 rooms with little more man power then that. Moving so quick we didn’t need modern conviences like flash bangs, we even checked the closets for any one hiding but still no one there !!!

And then some one saw out the window and remarked….

They ground up the guns and fed them to the birds, it was all sitting out on the roof :

CCAN YOU GET CRAZIER A DREAM THEN THAT !? Who the heck grinds up weapons and feeds the seagulls with them before the enemy arrives !?

Dissatisfied I kept looking with the captains permission, moving my fire team about determined to until I spotted two troopers loading weapons on the roof… Flung open the window and opened fire with my Grand emptying a magazine but like magic nothing hit, I must be playing to much Raven Shield these days !!

As the alarms raised, was forced to retreat… when I realized I was alone, no one else left. Kept moving through the cleared rooms to find cover as the enemy closed in, only to find an officer… Dropping an apparently useless rifle I dropped to my knees with hands on my head as the Officer shot a round over my head.. To his thanks lol.

I found out every one was captured while we were clearing, winding up in the brig with the rest of the squad we started planning how to escape from our cells and carry on the mission. But I woke up before we got beyond the underground brig :

Now I’ve dreamed just about everything loool.

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Ahh some time to rest I hope.

Bumped the chair into the roof moving it from the living room to mybedroom… woke ma up which got me sent out to cover the car, which woke up the dogs lol.

It’s only 35 degrees Fahrenheit out (~1.6 Celsius) even with the wind chill so it’s not to bad, just breezy. Call me strange but I’m out in a T-Shirt lol –> Born in Florida I love the cold weather xD.

With a little luck maybe I can get some rest. I know Willow is pissed that it’s to cold to go outside (lucky for me). Hopefully I can catch the rest of Jumanji snd get a bit of work done before any one else wakes up…

:

NPM going Beta soon !!!

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I’ve spent the last 3 hours or so hashing out changes in NPM’s sources.

I’m not totally satisfied with the look of the settings dialog, I don’t think it looks professional enough for a proper release… Maybe it is just me. This is one reason I’m axious for the Qt4/KDE4 port because I’d like to get my arms around some of the changes in layout but I guess it can wait.

I still need to come up with icons for the menu to replace the text labels (ports, logging, network) but I think this is a good enough settings front end for now. I took a quick screen shot of each of the pages that show the preferences that I’ve setup so far:

[click to enlarge]
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Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

That should take care of the basic user settings for now. I really think it is time I start to focus on the back end slots. Because as much progress as I have made in the last several commits of getting the GUI to work with the settings system I never got around to writing code to get it to make setting changes persistent through the GUI :o)

Once that OptionsInterface and related code is done and interfaced with the code in portactions.py I can work on the next phases I need done before a beta release:

  1. Implement the GUI front ends for running portsnap/cvsup/csup, atm it should run but without user output and a start button lol.
  2. Write the about dialog and integrate access of the Options GUI (the above screen shots show it) into NPM_MainWindow (the main application window).
  3. Alternate NPM_MainWindow forms that can be loaded at user choice 🙂
  4. Tweak code for setting ports build options more

After that, I guess Neo Ports Manager will be ready to have a Beta Release.

The handling the dialog that stands in for make config, I know sooner or later I’m going to have to resort to calculating a full scale depends list of options much like make config-recursive does because doing otherwise would screw up during any operation that tries to do a make config: the display area is read only to the user, no I/O form user to portupgrade and friends. Fixing that will come later… I also need to get my tookus back to the German translation when I’ve got the time to spare.

Oh what fun it will be when NPM hits a 1.1 Release, I can finally have a coffee break of sorts <_< hehe.

I would do more tonight but work is in the morning… Thus time to go to bed when you consider it’s after 0330R [local morning], well at least this is the earliest I’ve gone to bed in awhile LOL.

FreeBSD 7 draws near!

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I think the word is euphoria hehe.

FreeBSD 7.0 is nearing it’s release with many many improvements, if I was in the business of having huge SMP servers doing lots of databases and network intensive stuff I’d probably have testing going on for months in advance..

Being a single spider, well I’ve yet to test it xD

So far FreeBSD 7 is looking like it is the best software update to hit my radar since Vim gained spell checking support in it’s own 7.x release 😉

Blessed number seven hehe !

I’ve already nearly blown out the walls and then my ears setting the radio ^_^ Celebration time ! Hooyah !

Hurt, Fear, and Sorrow.

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I sit here trying to concentrate on getting stuff done. I can hear the mutterings of my family behind my back, in both in the idiomatic and physical sense since my back is to the wall which is in front of them. Some how I find the song that is playing in Amarok interestingly a stroke of semi-logic.

The muse to my productivity, hell 13 hours today complete the work I started the day before yesterday — it’s like being at the zoo ! Is it a wonder I may be awake till dawn to complete my endeavours?

And of issues they wish… To release me from my chains only so long as to shackle me anew to another post with stronger bindings. An effort I resist, if I’m made to suffer I will not sacrifice my entirety that others may lounge. It’s of my opinion that if you fail to plan a head, you best be prepared to weep the whirlwind that shall follow…

My mother got a torn stuck in her foot that was tracked in, do I hesitate to help? No, instead I do what I can.. Including tracking down the teasers. I’m not a cruel person by the soul, although I have more then a few brutal bones… The only time I aim to hurt others with my words is when I know from [to much] trial and error that it is all they will understand, or worse all that will keep them from striking at my spirit further.

When there’s trouble, I run, whether I think aid is deserved or not. But I will only go so far.. While I might pull a thorn, I’m not about to go as far as mental seppuku over her lack of planning.

I will not have my future bared from me until I am unable to pursue it further, I struggle enough to reach it now. I seek the opposite path then the one they bid me to take. The one that leads me to a chance, a chance to see my hopes realized, myself validated. To some day walk a free man among my peers with my head held high, that only GOD may choose for me and no other without my consent.

There is a poem that I came across in my web travels awhile back. I think it explains things all to well as I feel them.

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

–Constantine P. Cavafy (1896)

In retrospect those words should be required reading in American Schools much like a few others are already. Hmm, what was it that dear Mr Jefferson helped to pen?


“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

About the only right I have freedom to exercise here is my right to life, my right to choose and I will not relinquish it.

My soul belongs to the LORD, to no one else.