Slashdot Mirror

FreeBSD also has details in their security notification. Those guys are fast - if you want to have up to date info on security vulns., FreeBSD has them (usually with patches) way before the news hits slashdot ;) For those who are asking for line numbers, just take a look at the patches included. Or better, here is a kompare screenshot.

This needs no special tuning whatsoever. Plain vanilla KDE will work fine without any tweaking on a puter with 256Megs. My main machine has 512, and even after extensive use, my swap partition isn't even touched. That with lots of apps loaded by default: skype, amarok, kmail, 4 preloaded instances of konqi, etc. My system begins swapping only if I start up firefox or ooo-build. (Or perhaps krita with an 50meg PNG :)

KDE's memory management is very efficient. In fact, considering what it does, I would say that I'd expect higher memory usage. Of course, we can throw numbers around here with little or no way to back up our claims, I realize that, but if you check the specs of people running kde (on forums) you'll see that configs like a 700Mhz duron with 256Mb RAM (I mentioned this in another post) is enough. I don't know where your K browser using 384Mb RAM comes from (well, except if you pull it out of your ass). Actually I made some screenies of kde 3.4.3 here. One of the screenshots displays memory usage. If you check the clock, you'll see that it shows the state of memory after opening a lot of apps, including scribus, with images loaded, etc (and you'll see what I have running in my systray). So I don't understand people who report excessive memory usage of KDE - it is either FUD, or they should switch distroes :)

This is how the advanced settings look like (if you click properties in the print dialogue - normally you don't need that, for the defaults are sane, in fact, I never changed anything in those settings).

This is how the advanced settings look like (if you click properties in the print dialogue - normally you don't need that, for the defaults are sane, in fact, I never changed anything in those settings).

First.
Second.

Thanks :)

First.
Second.

Thanks :)

Here is mirror for your jpeg. Send me (email) more (preferably less compressed ones, or even png) if you wish, and I'll put them up there :)

Anyhow, with my MA and doctorate (which I'll hopefully get in two years) I will be qualified to teach at a university. Only problem is that they don't throw tenures at you these days. I calculate 5% chance of getting a job in my area of expertise, which - and I don't mean to brag - covers a fairly broad area compared to other students: classic literature (from the Bronte sisters through Balzac to Thomas Pynchon), philosophy (from Kant and Hegel to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault), feminism and gender studies, and whatnot. So, it was this year that I began to face reality and recognize that I will probably have a (much) greater chance to find job as an *nix administrator.

So here is where I stand now: I switched to linux 4 years ago and to FreeBSD two years ago. I gradueally learned how to secure a FreeBSD system (using pf/ipfw), some basic networking stuff, some very basic scripting, ~ 10 commands I need to set up mysql and manage its accounts - just enough so I can use some CMS. I have a part time job working for some folks at the university, maintaining their site (which includes everything: the underlying os - FreeBSD, translating geeklog into hungarian, writing documentation for non technical stuff to handle moderation, well, every apsect of running this site, and another hobby site. I recognize that this knowledge is almost nothing for a serious job application in the field. So in the upcoming two years, I must set aside time from working on my dissertation to learn more. I just bought a book on introduction to php and mysql, with lots of examples. Knowing php and mysql is a must. Javascript comes next, along with a good working knowlede of a scripting language (most likely python or pearl). Along with these I need to learn setting up more complicated (not just NAT and basic load balancing via pf) networks, vlans, etc.

This is both a fortunate and unfortunate. If I manage to get a job that has something to do with *nix, I would be happy. But then, there are those 7 years I spent learning and thinking about literature and philosophy. I don't regret it, I enjoyed it, and would enjoy working with it, but if those years were spent learning programming, then I would be better off now. On the other hand, I know that I would not be the same person, and I would not know what I have missed. And there is a chance that I will be able to return to my "official" field. There are so many things I want to do and write (I have already something for another book if I finish my dissertation) - so maybe, I will be able to do it in my free time, while earning my living working with unix. Anyhow, the next 3 years will be probably the most difficult years in my life, for I'll have a double workload: finishing my dissertation in two years (that basically means writing a book that will be accepted for publication) + acquiring an in-depth knowledge of everything that a good system administrator needs. And I have no choice in this: no matter how good my dissertation will be, it won't be enough for a tenure, because the staff at our univ. is young and talented, and there won't be any job openings in the forseeable future. And I can't think of anything else that I might somewhat enjoy than working with linux/unix.

My favorite is geeklog, which has medium complexity, and it is easy to develop your own plugins for it. It has a good user management interface, and you can do almost anything with the built in static page plugin (a misnomer, for the pages are just as dynamic as the rest), like running php scripts for instance. Also, geeklog is written with security as a priority (even though you need register globals on). An example for a geeklog site is groklaw.net - a pretty good reference, no?

My own tftpanel.hu runs on geeklog, as well as another site I maintain. Hosting requirements are pretty good for geeklog: mysql (if you have access to only one database, that's fine) and php support, plus works on windows as well.

There are lots of CMS out there, ranging from pivot (simple) to typo3 (overkill) - so you might look at them at opensourcecms.org before you decide.

ULE works for me just fine. What's your setup? Because as far as I know, stability issues come up in smp environments with ULE. On single processors it should work - and it works very nicely: desktop interactivity remains top notch when using ULE even while doing CPU intensive tasks (like I do right now, compiling oo.o-2) - meaning smooth playback of movies with mplayer and all. See my kernel config here.

I tried several tweaks I found on the net (some specifically aimed at low end/high bandwidth machines) but they didn't make much of a difference - even though it was possible to limit memory usage. The problem is mem+cpu, in other words, it is a resource hog (which you won't notice if you run it on a more or less idle machine). Increasing memory has a huge impact on its performance, but it doesn make it on par with opera or khtml.

Disclaimer: I don't write this because I don't like Firefox. I write it because I care about it and free software in general. I spent considerable time for writing howtos and tips for various OS software I install on the machines in the small comp. lab I sysadmin: gimp, gaim (the most popular among the users), firefox (made it the default, yet some more computer savy users put back the IE icon on the desktop, so it was not that successful), etc. Also, I have the get firefox logo on the page near my username (www.tftpanel.hu) as well as on another site I maintain. I'm afraid however, that as the feature gap b/w IE and FF closes (with tabbed browsing and all in IE 7) users would find even less reason to switch (ordinary users, no ./ readers mind you), especially if FF's performance is not on par with other browsers. There are three workstations that run FreeBSD with Blackbox and a simplified menu serving as "internet terminals" (that's how I named them so not to scare users with *nix talk). They are actually useful and well liked, but I had to install Opera on them, because they previously ran win98se (which was a nightmare to maintain), and my users only know that previously "the internet worked fine" (IE 5.x was not slow even on these machines) and now (with firefox) it doesn't (terrible load time, and clearly perceptible rendering slowdown). So firefox, after a short stay was replaced with Opera (even though opera is not a perfect solution either, because it has issues with more pages than FF).

As sad as it sounds, sometimes only publicity of a problem convinces developers to shift gears or change attitude (like in apple vs. khtml case) - and I don't see that (negative) publicity for the slowness of ff and gecko. I see lots of apologies, and I understand that, because we care, and we want Firefox to succeed, but actually this does disservice to FF on the long run. FF devs should realize that there is a serious issue (I know they know about it, they just don't see their users clamoring for change). Then they should throw whatever resources they have (and they have more than some other, equally important open source projects) at the problem. I wait with great anticipation for 1.1, but frankly, seeing the attitude of some of their developers, I don't have high hopes - I'm thinking of criticizing khtml devs for not cutting corners and keeping correctness, compactness (only 140.000 lines?) and cleanliness of code as important as features, even though those qualities make optimizations easier.

If you read the ext2 notes, it is not supported very well. Nevertheless, I have never had any issues with it - except for dirty filesystems after boot. One of them devs sent a patch (Michael Nottebrock) - download it here. - that will unmount your ext2 filesystem before running the rest of shutdown procedure.

Then I was wrong in my previous post (above yours). Thanks for the info. Screenshot of jerkiness of bottom part of screen - playing the 1920x816 batman trailer (using -vo gl2 to be able to capture the screen).

A FreeBSD-röl: nekem problémamentes. Elsösorban azért ez, mert nagyságrendekkel könnyebb volt megtanulni mint a linuxot. Kezdve a tüzfal konfigurációtól (ami angolul van - tényleg, megírni még egy bonyolultabb filtert is olyan, mintha angolul beszélnél) az oprencer konfigurációig. Aztán meg ott van a csomagkezelöje, mely ötvözi az APT és a ports funkcionalitását. pkg_add -r openoffice-2.0-devel az egyenlö az apt-get install openoffice-blah paranccsal. Szóval nem muszály ports-t használni, lehet teljesen a bináris csomagkezelöre hagyatkozni, amely funkcionalitását tekintve minden szempontból lefedi a debian csomagkezelöjét. A bináris csomakog relatíve frissek (kábé 1 hónap csúszás van a ports-hoz képest, de ezen még akarnak a jövöben javítani): xorg 6.8.2, kde 3.4, openoffice-2 (még a magyar verziója is!!!) stb.. Aztán ott van a webes infrastuktúrájuk. Lehetöség van feltölteni az installált portjaidat a a freshports-ra, és emailben értesítenek ha valamelyik csomagot frissítették.

Aztán: nem kell skipfirst meg ilyesmi. Mikor felteszel több portot, ha az egyik nem sikerül, egyszerüen továbblép, tehát nagyobb lelki nyugalommal hagyom ott hétvégére a gépet fordítani, mert mire megérkezem, ott lesz egy lista hogy miket installált, mik nem sikerültek, és hogy miért nem sikerültek. Aztán: a már felinstallált (mindegy hogy forrásból vagy binárisból) csomagokból egy paranccsal tudsz binárist csinálni: pkg_create -b pkg_name. Ez pedig pont olyan lesz mint egy .deb csomag: tartalmazza a csomag telepítéséhez szükséges dependenciák információit, tehát amikor egy másik gépre fel akarod tenni, automatikusan felteszi a dependenciát vagy az általad megadott útvonalról, vagy a netröl. Így telepítettem a két ratyi gépet is. A jobbikon telepítettem a csomagokat, -p kapcsolóval (mondjuk portinstall -p blackbox) - ami felteszi a csomagot és csinál egy bináris csomagot is egyben. Majd átmásoltam ftp-én keresztül a binárisokat a gyeng

There are pros and cons against both portage and apt. Portage last time I tried it had no proper reverse dependency lookup, but used something like a worldfile as a workaround. As a result, sometimes it was really hard to completely remove a package (all its files and installed libs). APT doesn't have that problem, however, dependencies are fixed. Portage handles dependencies more flexibly, that's a +. However, it does it in an unnecessarily complex way: useflags. Without configuration portage is brain dead (installing xfree as a dependency of mc?). However, to configure it properly, you have to know the interdependencies of 300+ useflags. I think a much better approach is the original ports, where you have to remember one thing: if you don't want to accept the defaults (which are more sane than with portage), you can check the makefile for additional options. Not only that, but before a port is built, you can choose additional dependencies from a menu. Your choice will be saved, and next time you upgrade, it will be remembered (ie. no user interaction is needed) See this for example.

What I don't really understand is why they didn't clone the damn thing (I mean ports) instead of inventing their hodge-podge of a ports system. They would have the best of both worlds (source based and debians apt). I mean the package management of freebsd doesn't care about the origin of the package. In fact, you can create binary packages from an installed port with one simple command: pkg_create -b pkgname. And that's not a simple binary - it has all the functionality of a .deb package: it knows of the dependencies, and if you move it to another machine, it would fetch its dependencies from either the place you specify or from the net. pkg_add -r mplayer has exactly the same functionality that apt-get install mplayer has. Same thing with deinstallation.

The linux distribution of my dreams would be slackware with ports (the original one, without modification)! I would love that!

I created a journal entry for would be LCD buyers where I might answer some further questions about various LCD technologies, give some tips about settings for linux/unix, etc. (I'm the maintainer of a site that collects information about various models: links to reviews, the panel used in them (there are far fewer panel manufacturers than monitor vendors) etc.)

It all depends on what kind of panel type it has.

• TN+film panels: they are the fastest, and on the new lesser than 12ms response time monitors you'll not see any difference b/w a crt and a tft. Downside is that they don't have good blacks (although there there are some good quality tn+film panels that are not that bad) and they have a narrower viewing angles.
• S-IPS panels (APPLE uses S-IPS exclusively) - they are slower than tn+film, but have wider viewing angles and better blacks (although they take on a bluish/violet tint viewed form extreme angles).
• MVA/PVA good viewing angles, good color reproduction, good blacks, slowest (not good for FPS games). PVA is Samsung's own variant of MVA, and it is supposed to be better than traditional MVA panels, but lately various panel manufacturers (AU Optronics, Fujitsu) improved on MVA - Premium-MVA, S(uper)-MVA etc.

I bought a viewsonic vx912 a few weeks ago. Prior to buying, I bumped into a forum discussion about various technological aspects of different panel types (tn+film, S-IPS, mva). It was an interesting topic, and after a joined in, we decided to compile a table that shows what type of panel each specific monitor has. You can see the results here. (it is in Hungarian, but the table should be still readable and useful). It is still at a BETA stage, and it's aim is to help would-be customers to decide which monitor to buy. For instance, sometimes you will find exactly the same panel in two different types of monitors - and you will be surprised at the lenght some manufacturers (notably LG) goes in lying about their specs. Anyway, I hope that link is useful.

Thanks for your comment again, it's appreciated :)

How does wordpress compare to geeklog? I've been using geeklog for a site dedicated to finding out about the panels used in various lcd monitors and I was planning to use wordpress for another project. Geeklog comes with SpamX as a default plugin that does a pretty good job at stopping spam comments (and sites like groklaw use geeklog) - so what's so cool about wordpress? I was attracted to it by the professional look on their website, but except fo that, at first glance it didn't have anything special...

This is more cute than that. Gulliver and all.

What?! One of the best things in FreeBSD is that startup scripts are much less complicated than in linux. Startup scripts for services included in the base system: /etc/rc.d Startup scripts for packages installed from ports: /usr/local/etc/rc.d - And that's it about it. And you don't even have to no anything about startup scripts. When you install a package, it installs a startup script in rc.d, and you only have to know one thing about startup scripts to have it enabled: put one single line in rc.conf. Just to make it sure that no one thinks that FreeBSD is complicated - this is my entire rc.conf, which controls almost all aspects of the system:

# networking
ifconfig_rl0="inet 172.17.141.160 netmask 255.255.252.0"
defaultrouter="172.17.140.19"
gat eway_enable="YES"
hostname="mcsaba.sh.nek.klte.hu "
ifconfig_ed0="inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0"
tcp_extensions="YES"

# network services
sendmail_enable="none"
sshd_program=/us r/sbin/sshd
sshd_enable="YES"
lisa_enable="YES"
pureftpd_enable="YES"
pureftpd_config=/usr/local /etc/pure-ftpd.conf
samba_enable="YES"
apache2_e nable="YES"
mysql_enable="YES"

# other services/options
linux_enable="YES"
usbd_enable= "YES"
# clear_tmp_enable="YES"
moused_flags="-z 4"
moused_type="auto"
background_fsck="NO"

# pf options
pf_enable="YES"
pf_rules="/etc/pf.conf" # rules definition file for pf
pflog_enable="YES" # start pflogd(8)
pflog_logfile="/var/log/fw/pflog" # where pflogd should store the logfile

The only reason for thinking it's complicated is that it is simple :) - as weird as it may sound. When I switched from linux, (of course I read the handbook) sometimes I had this feeling that there must be something more to it I am not aware of. And I thought that because I can't find it, it must be more complicated, until I realized that it is really that simple. No /etc/sys/networking/somefile (mandrake) or /etc/networking (debian) just to config your network interfaces. See my rc.conf - that's the simplicity and user-friendliness of BSD.

About yum - please, don't suggest such things. In FreeBSD, the best thing is that you don't have to worry about dependencies and about adding some package repositories (than removing others, because they conflict with each other). The ports system just works, without any need to configure it (except one line which is like "CHANGE_THIS.freebsd.org" preceded by a comment to put there your local mirror - but only if you installed the portupgrade tools). No freaking repositories (just over 12000 ports - see freshports.org)

As to the desktop: some obligatory screenshots.

Well, I would assume that a binary would come with all the optional functionality included, in order to work in the widest range of configurations. I think this depends on the distro maker. Perhaps ubuntu is such a streamlined distro (I heard raves about it, though I'd never touch - I'm a KDE guy).

Now ufed (first I thought you missed the s) sounds like a very good idea. It would be nice to see a gui implementation. For instance, KDE could be represented as a dragon, and if you want nspluginscanner to work, you'll have to add a larger nose or something. Anyway, joke aside, it would be extremely hard to implement in a user friendly way, but still, the idea sounds interesting. Note that I didn't touch gentoo since may last year, so I'm a bit out of touch, and I might be wrong on several points. I hope next portage will be better (I want proper reverse dependency lookup implementation, not a world file).

Anyhow, I think use-flags is complex. Or rather, portage is complex, just like ports is complex in freebsd. My problem is that most of that complexity is dumped on the user in gentoo, while in fbsd, it largely rest on the shoulders of the port maintainers.

Now I don't mean to advertise my favorite OS: frankly I don't care whatever other folks use (Just so you know: I installed windows xp sp2 on my girlfriends laptop). This is just an example how it is done in ports.

Example: amarok. snippet from the makefile:

OPTIONS= ARTS "aRts support" off \
GSTREAMER "GStreamer support" on \
XINE "xine support" off \
XMMS "XMMS visualizations" on \
LIBVISUAL "libvisual support" on \
OPENGL "OpenGL support" on \
AMAZON "Amazon cover fetching support" on

Now you (as a user) don't have anything to do with that. When you first install amarok, you will see this. Then the options you choose will be saved to /var/db/ports/amarok/options, and it would look like this:

root@mcsaba# cat /var/db/ports/amarok/options
# This file is auto-generated by 'make config'.
# No user-servicable parts inside!
# Options for amarok-1.1.1_1
_OPTIONS_READ=amarok-1.1.1_1
WITH OUT_ARTS=true
WITH_GSTREAMER=true
WITHOUT_XINE=t rue
WITH_XMMS=true
WITH_LIBVISUAL=true
WITH_OPE NGL=true
WITH_AMAZON=true

As you can see, it's not very difficult to parse this file or write them with hands, but you don't even need that. Ports will be configured as you go installing them, and the only thing you have to know (instead of lots of useflags) that you can always check the Makefile for additional build knobs - which are very well commented by the way. (takes only a few seconds). You can instruct the ports system to build those ports first that need manual intervention, so you can have all the config files in place. Or, alternatively, you can instruct the portsystem to build only those ports that don't need manual intervention. And you can safely leave your puter to build for the weekend (even if some ports fails, only those package/ports won't be built that depend on them), and when you come back, you'll be presented with a list of those ports that got build, those that were ignore or failed (and the reason why they failed) in a nice summary.

Anyway, if a nice frontend can be written to use-flags, be it gui or text (or ncurses) based, that would solve this problem, and gentoo would have best of both worlds (less work for maintainers - not that writing those Makefiles is that difficult) and less work for the users, but the problem is: it is a very complex task, and it should still give the user a good idea of what will be the (missing or present) functionality of each software he or she installs (before he or she installs it tha

Also, FreeSBIE made a very nice fluxbox desktop (I learned about torsmo and idesk through it) and now I use it as a template for creating a light-weight, yet nice looking fluxdesktop for lower end machines. Also, another nice thing was that TVcard worked out of the box (just had to give the proper chanlist in motv, and in a minute after boot up I could watch TV on the machine of my roommate (winxp box).

Here is a must have screenshot of a FreeSBIE-like screenshot.

I don't know about other people's experiences, but I've had no trouble at all getting Quake 2 to run in XP, as long as I used the "setup.exe" installer on the CD instead of the Autorun frontend.

Also, there's two native Windows executables on the original Quake CD. "Winquake.exe" is a win32 native software rendered Quake (which I've never tried in XP), and "GLquake.exe", which uses hardware-accelerated OpenGL, and worked just fine for me in XP.

Of course, there's also other modifications of the GPL Quake/Quake II sources that you might try out if you have a fast-enough machine. I like JoeQuake, Tenebrae, and QuakeForge for the original Quake, and Quake2Forge for Quake II. These Quake engine ports are available for Windows and Linux. I don't know about OSX though, because I never bothered to look into it.