Free Software web magazine

I just came across a new web magazine called "Free Software Magazine".  The latest issue talks about things like X Windows, Debian and free browsers for Mac OSX.  Another article I was pointed to is "How to get people to work for free", found in Issue 9, where the author talks about how to get people to contribute to your free software project. Good reading!

Free Software Magazine - Free Software Magazine

I'm also trying out a new Firefox extension called "Performancing". It lets you do posts directly from your web browser.  It's a little more complete than the MovableType quick post button, as it shows you your post in full HTML glory.  Of course, it doesn't use my styles, so it isn't completely integrated. You can find out more here:

Download Performancing for Firefox 1.1 | Performancing.com

Technorati Tags: free+software, performancing

Keeping your software secure

Great ideas all by Babak on keeping your FreeBSD machine safe and up to date.

Geek Style: FreeBSD Tip #1

Back in the saddle again

Finally, my server is back up! It had a catastrophic hardware failure last weekend, leaving only quiet little beeps. Luckily, I had a not-too-ancient AMD looking for work, and it is finally up and running. I took the opportunity to upgrade my FreeBSD (now running 6.0) and MySQL (5.0). I started with a blank hard drive, and just installed the pieces I was using. I will give a full report soon!

Debugging PCI hardware

I'm having a problem on my system, in that it doesn't seem to be able to find my SoundBlaster AWE-32 (oh yeah, cutting edge stuff:-) sound card. I just ran into this command:

$ pciconf -lv

This lists all the PCI devices that FreeBSD knows about. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to notice my card at all. I'll have to follow the current freebsd.questions thread, where someone else has a similiar problem.

pciconf

portsnap - a better cvsup

There's a new cat in the forest when it comes to keeping your /usr/ports tree updated - portsnap. It does it a little better than trust old cvsup.

Good discussion about it here on the PC-BSD forums:

portsnap instead of cvsup

A short discussion about portsnap and why it is better than cvsup:

FreeBSD Portsnap

And, of course, the FreeBSD.org doc page about it:

Using Portsnap

FreeBSD virtual memory

In depth, technical document explaining the "VM" (Virtual Memory) system of FreeBSD. How it works, what swaps and when, etc. Pretty amazing document, all in all, although it isn't exactly clear when it was done and for what version it was written for. Looks like it was written in 2000, so it's kinda old but probably still is accurate.

Design elements of the FreeBSD VM system

pgrep and pkill

New as of 5.3 are the commands pgrep and pkill. They are related to ps and killall respectively, in that they show process status and can kill a running app, only they allow a more flexible manner of specifiying which process(es) you are interested in.

pgrep / pkill

Directory tree

Here's a cool find command line that will print out a reasonably nice looking directory tree:

$ find ./ -type d -print | sed -e 's;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g'

And the output looks like:

|____
|____.bashprompt
|    |____bashthemes
|    |____functions
|____.ddd
|    |____sessions
|    |____themes
|____.dia
|    |____objects

Don't ask me what it does or how it does it! It was posted by Warren B. on the questions list. It uses the find out put of directories via sed, which does the formatting.

Running Oracle with FreeBSD

Not that I have any interest in a commercial database like this, when I'm perfectly satisfied with the sort-of free MySQL and the very free (as in beer) Postgres, but I thought I'd point out this page if you absolutely, positiviely need to get Oracle running with FreeBSD:

Installing Oracle9i Database on FreeBSD

Installation Guides

Here's some installation guides that I've come across. Most deal with 5.x or even 4.x.

• Of course, you need to start here : Installing FreeBSD, which is the installation guide from the FreeBSD.org handbook.


• Installing FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE
  from the Colorado State engineering department's very useful looking FreeBSD Guide


• 
  FreeBSD Stable Release Install Guide : It is a 4.9/4.10 install guide, but it is very well done. Edit: It now includes a 5.4 install guide. Still very well done.
  


• Installing FreeBSD 5.0 : a more barebones "type this type that" approach to a FreeBSD 5.x installation


• How To Install FreeBSD Primer : Another well done primer, this one is a 4.x installation guide.


• Installing on a Thinkpad : Follow along as he installs 5.3.1 on his laptop


• FreeBSD Install Guide from MadPenguin : Installing FreeBSD 5.x from a Linux users point of view

Creating PBI files

My local FreeBSD machine is of the PCBSD flavor. It's been working pretty solidly, installed easily and in general has been working well. I had to do some development on the machine over the past few days, and so I've been using it pretty heavily. I have to say, the /usr/ports system is just a wonderful thing. We use a couple of libraries (curl and cryptopp) and installing them on Linux, Windows and MacOSX was a nightmare. But from the Ports it was a snap!

While you can use ports and packages in PC-BSD, they also have PBIs, which are completely self-contained packages, taking advantage of the massive amounts of hard drive space available these days. And Dru Lavigne has a nice article on how to create your own PBI. I think I'm going to do this for some packages I use, esp. Emacs. I can't believe there isn't an Emacs PBI yet!

ONLamp.com: Building Binary PC-BSD Packages

nohup

I was reading the FreeBSD Questions mailing list (an always fascinating source of information), when I came across this response by David G. to someone who was having a problem with their KDE taskbar and desktop disappearing:

if you can get a command line up, can you do "nohup kicker &"?


(I have to restart kicker every month or two)

I found it interesting because I had never heard of either nohup or kicker! So, being the curious sort, I decided to look into both.

nohup

First up was this nohup command. First stop is, of course, the man page for nohup. But it is its usual terse self, telling me something about "at this time sets the signal SIGHUP to be ignored.". Well, I'm a programmer, and I'm still not sure what this means! A little more Googling leads me to this definition:

nohup : Runs a command that keeps running after you log out

Ah, now I get it. Normally, when you run a program in the background (by appending the & to the command), it automagically stops running when you completely logout. This isn't always true, as a program can disconnect completely from your session and continue running (this is what a daemon does). But if you have a program that isn't normally a daemon, or something you want to leave running after you've logged out (say, if you log in as root to get a server to run), you can use the nohup command. So David is saying that he is re-running this kicker command as a daemon process, and using nohup means it will stay running after he logs out.

kicker

A quick search on the KDE home page lead me to this page: The Kicker Handbook. It is headlined with this grammatically challenged note:

Kicker is the KDE application starter panel and is also capable of some useful applets and extensions. It usually resides on the bottom of the desktop.

Ah, so it is the task bar that runs along to bottom of the monitor. So the nohup kicker & command restarts the kicker process for others to use. See, you just never know when there is an interesting comment on the FreeBSD Questions mailing list!

SiS Graphics chip X support

Here's a page on how to get the XFree86/X.Org X server to run on an onboard SiS graphics controller. Luckily, I haven't had to deal with this, as according to the page, SiS only officially supports WIndows, and is, in fact, almost anti-X. Remind me to avoid any laptops using this chip in the future! But if you happen to be stuck with one, perhaps this page will help.

Thomas Winischhofer - X.org/XFree86/Linux and SiS/XGI graphics chipsets - Part 1

Yet Another BSD distro

I haven't been real good about updating this site! I do have a couple of excuses:

• I've been real busy at work. We're working on a Mac OSX port. Once we get a little further, I'm going to try and port it to FreeBSD, which hopefully won't be too difficult.


• Holidays!


• My FreeBSD test machine has been quite flakey. The main, old, small hard drive sometimes fails to wake up, and it takes me a few reboots to get it there. Maybe I should just pull it and start over.


• I'm still frustrated that no disto of BSD will find my KVM mouse. I have to remember to leave a USB mouse plugged into it and switch to using that.

Anyway, here's another BSD distro, only this one is a branch of OpenBSD, of which I know nothing. I guess in the "pocket" description, it is the 'secure' one, as opposed to the 'flexible' one (FreeBSD) or the 'portable' one (NetBSD).

MirOS/MirPorts: a wonderful operating system for a world of peace