Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Crickets chirping

Been a little quiet here, hasn't it? That usually means a combination of two things:


  1. Things have been working pretty well. My PC-BSD box has been running solidly, although I haven't really had time to do much with it (see #2), while my FreeBSD 6 server is working hard and playing nice 24/7, without any problems (knock on wood).

  2. I have been very busy on a variety of things, both work and play. My "personal" blog, Jiggle The Handle, spells out more clearly what I've been up to on a more personal note. But with the improving weather, there is lots more to do outside, away from the keyboard.



But it is amazing how much information can be gleaned from the freebsd.questions mailing list (which I actually read via GMane, as a newsreader can deal with the high volume of mails much better than my email client. Just a quick glance at a couple of postings already gave me the two previous entries. I also have long postings on using INN as well as mucking about with the size of a partition. I just have to finalize the notes and get them up here before I forget completely!



Portsnap Magic flag

It seems that the previously mentioned portsnap that is in ports is an old version and can run very slow. This doesn't affect post-5.3 systems, as they come with a newer version pre-installed. Let's hope for an update to the ports version soon!



In the meantime, users of the ports version can boost their portsnap performance by using the magical and undocumented "-x" flag to portsnap:




$ portsnap -x fetch

$ portsnap -x update



Enable Internation KB layout in X

Want to enable international keyboard layout for your X.org X server? Just add the following options :




Options "XkbLayout" "us"
Options "XkbVariant" "intl"