Category: FreeBSD

After nearly 4 years i thought it was time to buy a new FreeBSD desktop.
Last week I bought a Shuttle XPC, with an Intel G31/ICH7 Chipset, a Core 2 Duo E8200, 2×2,66Ghz. It is faster than mchammer, my previous desktop and a lot quieter.
I named it dilek, a beautiful name which means something like desire.
Since last weekend was a party weekend it took me until this weekend to finally finish the installation.
Because it is not possible to disable the BIOS Boot sector protection, you may want to run boot0cfg -o noupdate
The ACPI implementation is buggy, so unless you like console message everyfew seconds, you have to run with debug.acpi.disabled="thermal"
The X installation was a bit problematic, as i had to add the device ids to the agp kernel driver and had to install the git version of the xorg intel driver. But now it is running smooth.
I am now installing KDE4 on it. With the new desktop i now have enough CPU power to help porting KDE4. Now i just need some more free time…

Yesterday a thread started on freebsd-cvs-ports about peer-reviews and policies. So here is my opinion on this:
Unfortunately recently there have been two tendencies that I dislike.
First several people got a ports commit bit, that take peer-reviews as a personal
offense. This discourages people from doing peer-reviews, which is bad.
I am all with dougb: “Peer review IS a critical part of what makes any open source project successful.”
So i think mentors should pay attention, that their mentees understand the concept of peer reviews, before they let them fly solo.
Second there are way too many policies. E.g. I don’t think there is a need for a policy about silencing mkdir commands and similar issues (BTW: I only use @ in Makefiles for silencing echo or printf). Trying to add policies like this will either end in a bikeshed or unhappiness.
To quote Pav: “Oh no more policies, please!”

Today i have made experimental ports of strigi and strigiapplet. If you like to try them, take a look at this page.
I have also started working on upgrading QT4 to 4.3.3.
Now for really working on KDE4 i should really think about getting at least a new hardddisk or even better a new machine.
But first of all i have to master this terms university exams….

Today i got an email about one of my FreeBSD ports, help2man. Usually this means the person emailing me, is using a system with a 4.x base system perl 5.0 together with a more recent perl version from ports.
What was unusal about this email, the sender mailed from an ISP in Tanzania, Arusha Node Marie. This is really cool, that FreeBSD is running on some system in such a remote area.

The first system i updated to 7.0-PRERELEASE after the branching was my via my pf/squid system. The update went painless, although i first screwed up mergemaster and merged from the RELENG_6 directory instead of the RELENG_7. My desktop was updated to 8.0-CURRENT too.
After these two went well i decided to upgrade my home server. Unfortunately this one did not went as well, i am now running into the “panic: ffs_blkfree: freeing free block” panics few times a day. Yes, i should have read the CURRENT-mailbox before updating, there have been a lot of sightings of this panic in the last days..
But i am currently permanently short on time, so i am not following the mailinglists that careful 🙁
Note to self:
ALWAYS READ THE RELEVANT MAILINGLIST BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO INSTALL PRERELEASE SOFTWARE.

While the switch to xorg 7.2 has been quite painless. The update to 7.3 was a big problem on both of my desktops.
My Desktop at home has a display with an incorrect EDID, and in xorg 7.3 it is broken to override these values. Hopefully this is fixed in the next version.
My Desktop at work has several problems. Problem 1: xf86-video-mga 1.9.100 is broken with my Matrox Millenium 2064W. I had to downgrade to 1.4.6.1, otherwise the Xserver would abort with a signal. I have no idea how to debug this further, as a Backtrace does not seem to give more hints.
Problem 2: If i move the mouse to the right screen (Screen0) I can’t move it back to Screen1. There was one thread on the mailinglist, but no general solution. Any ideas?

Jun 12 20:59:34 knut dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 150 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I'll just kill myself now.

It happend on boot, most likely ntpdate was run a bit late…
Now of course it would have been more cooler if it just restarted itself….

Yesterday the Eurovision Songcontest Semifinals were broadcasted.
I was quite surprised that the ORF commentator when introducing the Croatian entry said something like “Dragonfly is not only an OperatingSystem but also the name of the band representing Croatia”. I think this was the first time DragonFlyBSD was mentioned on Austrian Television.

Today i shut down the last computer in my old flat. I have been using 213.225.30.218 for approximately 6 years and now i have to get used to new IP Addresses :(.
With all my computers in the new flat, it is time for a firewall. Since i now have more than one official IP address i decided to try a combination of if_bridge(4) and PF.
The bridge seems to work fine, but PF sometimes drops TCP packets, it should not drop. Yes even if pf.conf did contain only pass rules. Now i am updating to latest stable hoping for a fix.
Another problem i am struggling, nat from the third interface to bridge0 did not work out ot the box.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-ports/2007-January/116700.html
Lol, funniest commit today, I wonder why nobody noticed this before. And of course i would like to know which tool did this substitutions.