It's been awhile since I've posted. Been battling some kind of flu-like illness, which has laid me up for about five days. I have barely felt good enough to sit up, never mind actually type at the computer. But I haven't been completely inactive, tech-wise, since I last wrote.
I got a new keyboard. US$21 for an old-fashioned, PS2-connector, Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard. My KVM switch, a Belkin Omniview SOHO, uses PS2 connections for the mouse and keyboard. My boss tried to talk me into the USB-only version, but I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to connectors, so I stuck with the PS2 connectors. I think it may have been a mistake, because my fancy Logitech G7 Laser mouse doesn't work with a USB->PS2 adapter, so I haven't been using it either :-( I didn't like the Saitek for normal work, as I've become far too accustomed to the nice feel of the "natural" keyboard, with its wide keys and contoured layout. This is working very nicely, even if it has the lame "Fkey lock" that I guess has finally gone away after a brief spurt of popularity. I have to see if there are ways to activate the many special keys in FreeBSD.
I also installed and played with the Win4BSD PBI for PC-BSD. I had been holding off on installation, because it seemed to be a pretty involved process, but the PBI promised an easy one-click installation (yes, sometimes PBIs make sense) and so I gave it a whirl. The first installation didn't "take", as the /usr/local/win4bsd folder wasn't created for some reason. But just doing it again seemed to work just fine, so I installed WinXP in it. It took forever but it did finally install, boot up and run just fine. I did have one BSOD having to do with the TCPIP.SYS driver, and a couple of other seemingly network related oddities, but nothing too outrageous.
And, *very* strangely enough, after using it a bit, all of a sudden /usr/local/win4bsd disappeared again and I had to re-run the PBI again. My virtual machine was okay, but that folder disappeared. Very strange.
I thought Win4BSD worked pretty well. At boot time, there was a request for an option to be added to /boot/loader.conf, for me to set debug_mpsafenet="0". I'm not sure what that was all about, but I set it and the warning went away. Win4BSD is a commercial app, and the PBI gives you a 10 or 14 day trial. The cost is pretty trivial though - currently only US$49 for a license.
But actually, I don't think I'm going to use it. I just have found zero need for any Windows apps on my personal PC. While it is still required for work, it helps me to separate out my work and personal PC time even more. I just KVM over to my work machine, do my best to hold my nose while using Windows (without Cygwin I would be lost), and get stuff done there. The only thing I was really missing was Quicken, so I installed it in the virtual machine and it worked pretty well. But then I decided I could live with kMyMoney, as I had been playing with it a bit (there's a good review here). My bank charges me US$10 a month to use the automatic Quicken download, so I can cancel that finally. I sure wish it had check printing though.
The only other thing I do in Windows any more is to play games. I've read some places where you can supposedly play pretty intensive games on WINE, and I wonder how good Win4BSD is at it, but it just doesn't seem worth it to me. I'll play my dosbox games on PC-BSD and just dual boot into a vanilla XP to run other games that I play. This actually keeps me away from their addictive game play by making me think twice before rebooting to play!
By the way, if any of your are into Day Of Defeat, the Half-Life mod (we don't play much of DoD:Source yet), be sure to check out my clan, 95th Rifles. We run a good server with lots of excellent game play. I haven't actually played much lately, due to the aforementioned illness, but you can look for [95th]Cpl.HeadwoundHarry to be around sometimes!
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