NanoBSD

A cool project to put a small version of BSD out there that will fit on a flash drive. Sort of like a live CD, only for appliances. The flash drive can be as small as 64MB (yup, sixty four megabytes)! You set how big you want it, and bulid it yourself. Neat!

NanoBSD: FreeBSD for appliance use.

Configuration and Tuning

Sometimes, it is good to re-read the Handbook in various places, just to take a little refresher course for the mind. Here's a link to the Configuration and Tuning chapter of the handbook. I often forget where this stuff gets set up, and here it is all explained. Note well the section on crontab and on basic core configuration. It's amazing the subtle bits of information you can pick up by reading through this!

Configuration and Tuning

New Version of Xandros

Xandros 4 was just announced. Xandros is my favorite Linux distro. I was amazed at just how easily it installed and, more importantly, integrated into my Windows network. It really could be my mother's Linux. There isn't an "Open Circulation" version 4 yet. They usually wait a bit before releasing the free version. You can download the OC v3 here though. I highly recommend this distro.

Xandros 4 Home editions

More Free programming books

A great page with links to many classic Computer Science texts that are online:

Classic Texts In Computer Science

Also see Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, by Brian Kernighan (co-creator of C).

Algorithms book

An interesting looking book called "Algorithms", online in PDF format. Free!

Algorithms

Frenzy 1.0 is here

The Frenzy project came out with their official 1.0 release! Now to download it and give it a real try.

Project Frenzy - FreeBSD-based LiveCD

My First PBI

My first PBI is, of course, an Emacs one. I know when I first started using PC-BSD, I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that there wasn't an Emacs PBI. That's the first thing I install when I move to a new OS is Emacs. So I set about getting one built.

For those of you unfamiliar with PBIs, they are the self-contained "packages" for PC-BSD - you try and put everything you can into a PBI, so to uninstall it you pretty much just delete the /Programs/application folder for it. It does mean some wasted space, but it is a pretty good solution in this day and age of big hard drives. There's still plenty of discussion going on in the PC-BSD Forums about exactly how much needs to be put in one, but it is still a pretty solid set of technologies.

So this one wasn't too bad. I carefully followed Dru Lavigne's detailed tutorial on how to make a PBI and it went pretty well. Emacs has an annoying dependency on some non-default fonts, so I had to play some font installing games in the PBI.SetupScript.sh, using the 'xset fp' command to tell the X server about it. And there was some other default paths that needed to be linked to, but it works well, I think.

Another very useful tool when building the PBI was the VMWare image you can download from the PC-BSD web site. By "playing" this in the free VMWare Player, you can test how it will work in a vanilla installation. It exposed a few problems with my script that would have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Unfortunately, while I took some notes, I did most of the work on it a month ago or so, and I can't find the notes, and I can't remember exactly what they were. So I'm going to try and make another one, with a little quicker turnaround. But it isn't too bad - give it a shot and you'll see!

Emacs PBI