Movin' on up

So I think I'm going to take the plunge and move my main home system over to FreeBSD, specifically, PC-BSD 1.2. I've been having a good time with it on my oldest machine (an 833mhz overclocked(!) Celeron), and I've moved most of my professional development over to my work machine (a real beaut - dual 3.0ghz dual core, hyper-threaded CPUs with 2gb of RAM), so I think I can finally break free from the shackles of Windows on my everyday personal machine. I will be dual-booting it for my game playing, though, so the break won't be complete.

So that means I should be updating this blog a lot more too. I've released 3 new PBIs to PBIDir.com:

• Enscript : a pretty amazingly flexible "filter" from the GNU folks that translates text into Postscript, HTML and RTF. It's especially cool for creating HTML files from your source code. The example line in the man pages is:

  
  
$ enscript -E --color -whtml --toc -pfoo.html *.h *.c

  
  

  But oddly enough, that complains about a bad -w parameter, although 'enscript --help' lists -w as well. Just change it to the more GNU-like "--lang=html" and you have an html file that contains all of your .c and .h files nicely colorized. Very cool. I created PBIs for both the a4 and letter versions, which I guess just pick the default paper size.

  
  


• gnuls : It's kind of a pain that Linux and Cygwin use GNU file utilities like mv, cp and ls, while BSD uses, well, BSD ones, with their incompatible arguments. I especially the colorization, although upon further reflection, the BSD ls has the -G option for colorization. But it sure makes sharing .bashrc files difficult between my Cygwin, Redhat Linux, and BSD machines a pain. So I created the gnuls PBI, which makes on program that matches anyway. There's probably a GNU utiities package too, somewhere, that would make the transition easier too.

I will try to put up some notes on the process of creating the PBI. I'm getting to be pretty good at it.

First step is to consolidate my hard drives. I have three on my machine - 2 120GB drives and a 160GB - wow, who would have imagined such numbers just a few short years ago! I just recently put in the 120gb, so it is pretty empty and I will dedicate that to be my PC-BSD drive. I'll also re-install Windows XP for gaming, to get rid of 3 years of cruft. And I'll keep my current WinXP boot as well, just in case I forget something.

For a boot manager, I'll go with BootITNg. I always used to be a System Commander guy, but I started to have problems and have settled on BootIT. Very nice program, albeit a little rougher our the edges than System Commander, and it doesn't have the wonderful Partition Commander either.

Other specs on this machine include an 256mb ATI Radeon X850, 1GB of RAM, using a 2.5ghz Intel Pentium 4, a SoundBlaster Live! sound card, a no-name 50x CD and a LiteOn DVD+RW drive, an LS120 floppy drive (remember the 120mb floppy drives?), an SiS onboard network card, and two monitors, a Samsung SyncMaster 997df (very nice 19" monitor) and a no-name 14" LCD monitor. Wonder how tough it will be to get X to work with them both?

It'll be interesting to see how it works out. I've had some problems in the past getting PC-BSD to recognize hard drives beyond the first one. It should be something to do on a rainy Labor Day weekend. We'll see how it works this time - wish me luck!