Category: FreeBSD

The new Daemonnews issue is out.
As always they are suffering from lack of content (hint, hint). But this time there is an interesting article from phk, where he is reasoning about the FreeBSD projects relation to money

Continue reading “The FreeBSD project and the money”

Today, I went to university with the pkgsrcCon T-shirt. Although it was quite cheap and I don’t like the backside, a lot of people on the Subway looked at it, and at university some people asked questions about pkgsrc.
Probably because pkgsrc is a word with a lot of consonants :-).

Today I tried to remember how this program was called, that printed pretty graphs out of CVS repositories for various Opensource projects. Before I forget it again, i will write a blog entry.
Here is an example for the FreeBSD ports tree. Unfortunatly only the KDE CVS seems to be up to date.
The difference between this one and Peters commit stats seems to be, that it is based on touched files and not number of commits.

Last week some BSD hackers visited Vienna. On Monday Lukas and me met Alex Langer. On Wednesday we met Brooks Davis and from Friday to Sunday the NetBSD pkgsrc developers met for pkgsrccon.
Pkgsrccon is now over, and I survived being in a room with around 30 NetBSD users with a FreeBSD shirt on :-). Well in fact most of them were cool guys and the presentations where interesting, since a lot of problems are similar to the ones FreeBSD ports collection is facing.

I have a Logitech Quickcam VC for the LPT-port. I bought this cam years ago, because at that time I had no machine with an USB port, and because there was a Linux driver for the Quickcam. Well after i bought it, i noticed that the Quickcam _VC_ is incompatible with the normal Quickcam. Die, Logitech, Die! This cam really sucks. First It requires Windows, second it requires a screen resolution of 800x600x32bpp, so you can’t run it on an old computer and third it requires a lot of resources, so you can’t do any work, while the camera program is running.
Now that I have enough computers with USB I am thinking about getting a new one. Unfortunately information about Webcams on BSD is hard to find, but last week someone posted a pointer to takaM’s list Some of the models listed there are even listed on Geizhals. So maybe I really should try to get one. I have also considered buying a standalone camera, like the Axis ones. I have also seen cameras with WLAN, but my budget is rather tight, 200 EURO’s is the maximum I can afford.

While working on the freedesktop-libraries Metaport, I made a dependency graph of the freedesktop.org packages with dia. If Eric choses to make the freedesktop.org libraries the default, you will have all those little ports on your harddisk. Frightening, isn’t it?

XFree86 4.4 has been released for a while. Additional there is now the X.org release and the Freedesktop.org Xlibs.
FreeBSD has still XFree86 4.3 in ports, because Eric Anholt is currently in Cuba. If you read my older blog entries, you probably know that I am interested in the new XServer, because i need the via(4) driver for riccardo. Additional there are still issues with the Xlibs on amd64, more shared libraries (libXau and libXRes) are required because of the usual PIC issues.
Dejan Lesjak has now submitted an update of the XFree86 ports, and Jung-uk Kim sent in fixes for amd64. I am trying to test these fixes on all my machines.
On mchammer, everything seems to work, except that I can’t terminate the Xserver with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace anymore. I am planning to test them on riccardo this evening.
I am still looking for someone with an IA64 for testing, as this is the only architecture this has not been tested yet.
The plan could be to get everything ready for the end of next week and to commit it after the portsfreeze ended, but at least we are in a good state when Eric returns from Cuba.
In case you are interested, a tarball of the XFree86 4.4 ports can be found in my stuff directory.
Until the portsfreeze starts, i should fix the shared library issues in 4.3 and I want to commit a few updates to the fd.o ports. done.
Now we just have to find volunteers that make a port out of the X.org release and that help Eric finish porting the fd.o Xserver (kdrive) to FreeBSD.

Yesterday I updated my NetBSD box olga to 1.6.2. There were several things that annoyed me, so that I will not switch to NetBSD in the near future.
The update started smooth. The old NetBSD was recognized and I just had to confirm that I am really sure I want to overwrite my old installation. The problems started after the reboot. First, the update replaced the rc.conf and instead of using a reasonable default (like interfaces with DHCP and starting an sshd daemon), they put a variable there to drop into single user mode. After I fixed that I wanted to start the sshd daemon, because the box is running headless. But the update procedure removed the ssh hostkey, which prevents the sshd from starting. In FreeBSD if there is no hostkey, the rcNG startscript regenerates the hostkey, but not on NetBSD. I had to copy and paste the relevant parts of the FreeBSD startscript to regnerate a new hostkey. The next problem. The updated replaced the /etc/passwd, so there was no other user then the root user. Why did they do that? If they don’t have something like mergemaster, than they should not overwrite the old values. This is not rocketscience. But that’s what I love about FreeBSD, reasonable default values.
BTW, I will be offline during Easter, so don’t expect blog entries until Monday.

Looks like another travel to Karlsruhe in autumn, after Linuxtag in June (23. – 26.).
EuroBSDcon 2004 will take place in Karlsruhe from 29. – 31. October 2004.


BTW, the banner’s colors (red, white, black) look really Austrian. Anyone from the austrian BSD community, who wants to present a paper?

“[..] I write new drivers by choosing an existing driver that
most closely matches the design of the chip I need to support, run
it through sed(1) to change its name, strip out all the device-dependent
stuff specific to the old device and replace it with stuff for the
new device.
And then the stork comes, and it’s a driver.” — Bill Paul on freebsd-net