So what if we run FreeBSD (and let's for a moment assume there isn't Linux binary compatibility)
Nautilus is in the ports collection (/usr/ports/x11-fm/nautilus). I'm sure it'll be updated to 1.0 within a day or two. A lot of companies don't recognize FreeBSD (or others) since Linux is the only thing they've heard of, but if the source is available or if the Linux binaries run fine, you can bet it'll be in the ports. One of the great things about FreeBSD and the people who maintain it.;-)
Yes, this is what I had to do. I didn't like it though....Although I did manage to get it working by
using the ports version, they only have old stuff (Apache 1.3.14, modPHP 4.0.3pl1)...I downloaded
all the latest stuff, Apache 1.3.17, the latest modssl and modphp4 4.0.4pl1, etc. It built fine under
FreeBSD, but the resulting module did NOTHING. It worked and Apache installed the module
perfectly, but it just didn't work - so BSD doesn't "just work".
I've been using FreeBSD about 2 months longer than you (after 7 years of Linux), and it took me awhile to figure this out (hint: subscribe to the freebsd-questions mailing list for awhile and search the archives when you need to). The ports tree is kept very much up to date - the trick is updating your copy. I did an update the other day and I have Apache 1.3.17, mod_php4 4.0.4pl1, and Apache+modssl 2.8.0 all in my ports tree. I'd bet that building and installing from the latest ports will make it work - these guys work very hard to make sure their ports aren't broken.
Here are a couple of the extremely useful things I've learned about updating ports:
First, install cvsup-bin (go to/usr/ports/net/cvsup-bin and type make install
Next, create a cvsup file to update the ports tree. Mine looks like this:
I keep this file saved as/usr/ports/cvsup-ports but you can put it wherever.
Then type cvsup -g/usr/ports/cvsup-ports. Viola, your entire ports tree will be updated to point to the latest sources.
Now here's the tricky part. You can get a very nice list of what packages need to/can be upgraded by typing pkg_version -c. It's even in the form of a shell script that you could execute to upgrade everything. However, it does not fully take into account dependencies, so you must sort them out yourself (I imagine this will be upgraded in FreeBSD 5.0). For this task, pkg_info -r and pkg_info -R are your friends. Last time I upgraded my ports, I went through systematically, starting with the ones that didn't depend on anything else being upgraded, and going from there in order of dependencies. For example, right now I still have apache-1.3.14_1 installed. I check its dependencies (and also what depends on it). Looks good, nothing depends on it and it doesn't depend on anything else, so I can go ahead and follow the relevant lines from pkg_version:
#
# apache
# needs updating (index has 1.3.17)
#
cd/usr/ports/www/apache13
make && pkg_delete -f apache-1.3.14_1
make install
I also like to add a "make clean" at the end so my ports tree doesn't get all cluttered up with sources (and also clear out/usr/ports/distfiles when I'm done.
Hopefully that will help get you started! Unfortunately the system isn't totally automated yet, but from what I've read some people just have cron jobs that cvsup every night and rebuild anything that was updated. Personally, I'd rather check myself first, but that's just me.
That certainly explains the relative popularity of Linux versus the *BSDs.
Personally, I think licensing has little, if anything at all, to do with Linux's popularity as compared with *BSD. It's kind of ironic if you think about it - these days you go to the store and see shelves lined with various Linux distributions boxed up, but no *BSD. It's all (or mostly) GPL code in there, but the BSD license is inherently more corporate-friendly. If BSD had caught on instead of Linux - if the two were reversed in popularity, you can bet that all the companies would be loving the license. They could distribute their own value-added version of BSD without being forced to include the source code!
Instead, I think the reason Linux is so much more popular now is that it simply reached that critical mass of interested developers and users slightly before BSD did. After that it simply snowballed and people who may have been interested in BSD were attracted to Linux instead simply because they heard about it first.
Licensing issues aside, I think it's really too bad - I'd love to see Linux and BSD with more or less equal popularity. They both have their merits and advantages over the other, but the vast majority of people will never try BSD because they are comfortable with Linux. I was like this too - I used Linux exclusively for 7 years until I tried FreeBSD 2 months ago. Now I have it on my main machine and I don't see myself ever going back to Linux except on a secondary machine where I might want to keep it around to run the occasional program that won't run under FreeBSD's excellent emulation. But that's just my personal preference, having nothing to do with OS Religion.;-)
If E is too sluggish, I'd suggest trying sawfish instead. I'm using that (also installed from the tardists at freeware.sgi.com) on my O2 and find it to be far better than 4DWM. But then, ultimately that's just my personal taste.
I do basically the same thing but with a hacked together perl script and another program I found to talk to my voice modem. If caller id comes up as private or unknown, it answers immediately - usually this means after the first ring, but sometimes if the timing is just right, I don't even hear the ring. I haven't been bothered by a single telemarketer in over a year since I started using this. My friends who have caller id blocking either leave a message for me to call back or they know to dial *82 first before calling me.
I'm working on rewriting the whole thing in perl, with the voice modem stuff as an object, and a controlling script to be the answering system. When it gets to a nice usable state, I'll probably release it to the world...
I read it in the LINT kernel config file. Lot of stuff in there, a lot of stuff undocumented
Ah, so there it is. I don't remember reading that part, so I must have just added the ext2fs option without checking that section of LINT. This in particular worries me:
(and even mounting read only could result in panics.)
Converting my/home (13gig) to UFS should be no real problem - I have enough room on my 30gig mp3 drive to back it up to a tar file over there while I reformat and then restore. The problem is gonna be the mp3 drive, which is also ext2. I was planning on mounting it read-only since I rarely make changes to it (only when I get a new CD to rip), but it sounds like that's out of the question too. Hmpf. Perhaps I can live with playing audio CDs for awhile til I make sure I want to stick with FreeBSD...;-)
BTW: ext2 in 4.1 is experimental. Idunno if they
improved it greatly in 4.2, but likely also to be in that state. List it as unstable.
Wow, I hadn't seen any information stating this on the FreeBSD site or discussion groups (it's probably there somewhere, but buried). Last week I switched from Linux to FreeBSD (after 7 years of loyal Linux use) hoping to get rid of some relatively frequent crashes once and for all. In the last week I've had 1 spontaneous reboot and one hard lockup with lots of resulting ext2fs errors on my/home partition. I had pretty much decided it was a hardware problem since both Linux and FreeBSD were having trouble. But maybe there's hope - I'll try to convert my ext2 partitions to UFS and see how that goes.
It implies the need to
update all the
auto-dialing devices like alarm systems, speed dial numbers, ISP's numbers for
modems, and fax machines.
I remember reading an article in the LA times about a year and a half ago about when they attempted this in a few areas. Apparently the biggest problem was the autodialing systems in apartment complexes. For example, let's say you go to visit your friend and outside the complex you have to dial a 3-digit code which will ring his/her phone. Your friend picks up and hits a button to open the door for you to come in. These things work by translating the 3-digit code into a 7-digit phone number. All of them would have to be replaced to use 10 digits.
But apparently even more important are similar devices that allow fire and ambulance vehicles into places like this. IIRC, they tried the overlay briefly in an area west of LA and there were so many problems, they cancelled it. I wonder how other areas that made the switch dealt with these issues?
As someone else said, there are areas with 7-digit "local toll" calls. And in most locations here in southern California, parts of other area codes are considered to be in your "local calling area." I live in 909, work (about 15 minutes away) is 626, and my fiancé (10 minutes away) is in 714. All are local calls from my home. There are so many area codes here that most of my friends are also in different area codes (818, 323, 213, 949, etc, etc but not all local) and about the only number I call without 1+areacode is the local pizza delivery place. Even then, I see only 7 digits on the phone's display and subconsciously think something's wrong...
A couple years ago I got burned by the ISP thing you mentioned. My local number wasn't working so I tried an alternate number in an adjacent area code that I thought was still in my local calling area. Turns out it wasn't and the bill for those couple of weeks was pretty stiff... Now I've got DSL, so I don't care.;-)
I too noticed the Macs in the office. My question: what does a comic book collector/art dealer need with three G4s? Was it just because he was rich? Was he also a computer geek, running MacOS 9, OS X, and LinuxPPC?;-) Probably, though, they were just added as part of the scenery without much extra thought (or was it to show that he was an evil "hacker" type?).
Elijah in an 'insane asylum.' Come on. How many
villians have ended up in there -- and escaped?:)
Cool, I never thought of that angle. I loved the ending but couldn't understand why they did the cheesy captions at the very end - I was thinking that kinda killed the possibility of sequels, but maybe not.
Another thing about the ending - I couldn't understand why the critics ripped on it so much. Maybe they were just searching for anything to hate about it. Sure, it wasn't the same as 6th Sense where if you hadn't figured it out, it changed the way you looked at the whole movie up until then. But this ending fit Unbreakable perfectly, especially from the comic book point of view (and I'm not even a comic book fan). I think most of the critics totally overlooked that and needlessly compared it with 6th Sense.
Seriously, when I decided it was time to get into Linux, I just read every Slashdot article that looked like it might
spawn a discussion of distributions. From this I made my decisions, started with SuSE (I'm too contrary to pick
Red Hat..mustn't pick frontrunner) and moved to Debian just recently.
That's actually a pretty good point. I certainly wouldn't have any idea what.debs are or all the wholesome goodness that apt-get is supposed to be without reading slashdot. But I'd love to see a document that goes into the details of this stuff from the perspective of a seasoned Redhat user (or whatever distribution). One section might be common system administration tasks translated from one system to the other. For example, to list all packages installed on the system I just do a 'rpm -qa' on Redhat, but I have no idea what the equivalent on Debian is.
Yeah I know, RTFM, and ultimately experience is the best teacher, but my whole point is that I don't have the time to spend on it like I once did, so I'm not going to attempt to switch unless it can be done without a lot of time invested. I used to have time to tinker and learn the guts of the system for hours on end, but now I just want something that works and works well. Redhat does well enough for me that at this point, any benefit of Debian probably isn't worth the switch if it means hours wasted just getting back up to speed.
A well written document like this would be a great asset to the community... and who knows, maybe if more people get educated about different distributions, stupid flame wars would subside.
What I'd really love to see is a comprehensive guide/howto explaining the differences between Debian and (pick your favorite competing distribution) along with a guide to getting started with Debian assuming you know another distribution pretty well.
I've used several different distros in my time, Redhat for about the last 2-3 years, but haven't tried Debian yet. I'd like to, but I just don't have the time to muck around with another distribution and learn all of its little nuances. Plus I recently got an account on a friend's co-located box which is running Debian. It's been a little difficult trying to help him with a few system administration things since I don't know my way around Debian quite as well.
Does any such document exist for any set of distributions?
What is needed? a seperate technological court to deal with isues of hacking, copyright etc?
Interesting idea. And since such a court would probably only hear a very tiny percentage of all cases, it surely wouldn't make sense to have one in every jurisdiction. So why not make it a true technological court using the internet? The court could be physically located in some place, wherever, and would hear cases from all over the country. It could have satellite courts or "stations" around the country which would be little more than a room with a webcam and computer linked back to the main system. Hmm...
Ok, I'm 3 days late, so I doubt anybody will see this. But here's what first popped into my head when I saw this headline over in the Older Stuff section:
Bill: Duuude, I just got to Level 9 on Linux!
Ted: No waay man, I've never seen anyone get past that boss on Level 8!
Bill: Yah, and I got the screenshots to prove it!
Ted: Whoooah, cooool!
On a side note, the "ascii art" lameness filter wouldn't let me put "Linux == Game?" in the subject. Uh, whatever.
It's interesting when I started running linux they said that 8Mb of ram was good for console stuff
Heh, I remember the first machine I ran linux on, a 16MHz 386 with 2MB of memory, way back in '93. It ran fine, but you couldn't do anything without swapping. I tried compiling a kernel once and finally killed it after a couple days of swapping... When I upgraded to 4 megs (the max on that motherboard), I was in fat city. Kernel compiles took a mere 2 hours and I finally had enough memory to give my friends accounts and let them telnet in remotely.;-) Now my PC (still a bit outdated by today's standards) has 144 megs and I can always use more, especially when editing huge images in GIMP.
To keep this on topic (heh), my Mac currently has 112 megs. But I'm afraid it probably won't be able to run MacOS X since it's an old 7600 upgraded to a G3. Sounds like from Apple's requirements, it may need to be an original G3 or better for OS X to even boot. Oh well... Anyone confirm or deny my suspicions?
While I have no idea about an interferometer setup, it is quite possible to hook up a digital camera to a telescope and get some nice images of space. Check out this link (and the link referenced there) to see some.
Yep, exactly what I was thinking. What I'd really like to have along these lines is a way to integrate my digital camera on the bike. I sometimes take movies (4.6MB) while riding, so I end up holding the camera in one hand with the other hand on the handlebars. While that may work for a leisurely ride through the park, it doesn't cut it for most of my rides - I need both hands. Same with the durability of the whole thing. For it to work for me, it would have to be very shock resistant. Ideally it would have to survive huge crashes like when I broke my rib 6 months ago.;-)
The other thing I'd love is fast wireless connectivity (it's gonna be a few years before that, and a few more before it (if ever) gets on bikes) so I can upload my pictures to the website on the fly.
Well ok then, looks like I just committed my first/. faux pas (read the article first). So it seems that most companies with a presence in California do charge sales tax, this bill is just targeted as those few who don't. Gotcha.
Moderators, feel free to moderate me down into oblivion... and if you want to really have fun, moderate as many of my previous posts as you can too.;-)
This is interesting. I had always assumed that sales tax applies to wherever you happen to be at the time of purchase - ie, if you buy something while physically at a store in California, you pay sales tax, regardless of where you're from. People visiting from out of the country generally pay sales tax (and are often confused as to why they always have to pay more than the marked price on items), so I always assumed sales tax was a good way to get some revenue from outside into a local area. Especially tourist kinds of places.
Am I wrong? Is this really true? I'm curious... can someone provide more info?
Umm, don't they already do that? When I'm ordering something online and I find two (or more) similar prices, I'll always go with the one that's out of state to avoid paying sales tax.
Actually, as a side note I've read that cell phones are becoming a real problem for the forest
service, because people are now doing more challenging things than they would otherwise, just
because they know they can always call for help!
Heh, not only that, most of these people are too stupid to realize that cell coverage is spotty if not nonexistent in a lot of wilderness areas. Oh well, natural selection at work, I always say.;-)
Ah, I was under the impression that only languages installed on their contest machine were admissible. Cool, maybe I'll mention this to him next time I see him...
Slashdot Mirror
Nautilus is in the ports collection (/usr/ports/x11-fm/nautilus). I'm sure it'll be updated to 1.0 within a day or two. A lot of companies don't recognize FreeBSD (or others) since Linux is the only thing they've heard of, but if the source is available or if the Linux binaries run fine, you can bet it'll be in the ports. One of the great things about FreeBSD and the people who maintain it. ;-)
I've been using FreeBSD about 2 months longer than you (after 7 years of Linux), and it took me awhile to figure this out (hint: subscribe to the freebsd-questions mailing list for awhile and search the archives when you need to). The ports tree is kept very much up to date - the trick is updating your copy. I did an update the other day and I have Apache 1.3.17, mod_php4 4.0.4pl1, and Apache+modssl 2.8.0 all in my ports tree. I'd bet that building and installing from the latest ports will make it work - these guys work very hard to make sure their ports aren't broken.
Here are a couple of the extremely useful things I've learned about updating ports:
- First, install cvsup-bin (go to
/usr/ports/net/cvsup-bin and type make install
- Next, create a cvsup file to update the ports tree. Mine looks like this:
- I keep this file saved as
/usr/ports/cvsup-ports but you can put it wherever.
- Then type cvsup -g
/usr/ports/cvsup-ports. Viola, your entire ports tree will be updated to point to the latest sources.
- Now here's the tricky part. You can get a very nice list of what packages need to/can be upgraded by typing pkg_version -c. It's even in the form of a shell script that you could execute to upgrade everything. However, it does not fully take into account dependencies, so you must sort them out yourself (I imagine this will be upgraded in FreeBSD 5.0). For this task, pkg_info -r and pkg_info -R are your friends. Last time I upgraded my ports, I went through systematically, starting with the ones that didn't depend on anything else being upgraded, and going from there in order of dependencies. For example, right now I still have apache-1.3.14_1 installed. I check its dependencies (and also what depends on it). Looks good, nothing depends on it and it doesn't depend on anything else, so I can go ahead and follow the relevant lines from pkg_version:
I also like to add a "make clean" at the end so my ports tree doesn't get all cluttered up with sources (and also clear out
/usr/ports/distfiles when I'm done.
Hopefully that will help get you started! Unfortunately the system isn't totally automated yet, but from what I've read some people just have cron jobs that cvsup every night and rebuild anything that was updated. Personally, I'd rather check myself first, but that's just me.Personally, I think licensing has little, if anything at all, to do with Linux's popularity as compared with *BSD. It's kind of ironic if you think about it - these days you go to the store and see shelves lined with various Linux distributions boxed up, but no *BSD. It's all (or mostly) GPL code in there, but the BSD license is inherently more corporate-friendly. If BSD had caught on instead of Linux - if the two were reversed in popularity, you can bet that all the companies would be loving the license. They could distribute their own value-added version of BSD without being forced to include the source code!
Instead, I think the reason Linux is so much more popular now is that it simply reached that critical mass of interested developers and users slightly before BSD did. After that it simply snowballed and people who may have been interested in BSD were attracted to Linux instead simply because they heard about it first.
Licensing issues aside, I think it's really too bad - I'd love to see Linux and BSD with more or less equal popularity. They both have their merits and advantages over the other, but the vast majority of people will never try BSD because they are comfortable with Linux. I was like this too - I used Linux exclusively for 7 years until I tried FreeBSD 2 months ago. Now I have it on my main machine and I don't see myself ever going back to Linux except on a secondary machine where I might want to keep it around to run the occasional program that won't run under FreeBSD's excellent emulation. But that's just my personal preference, having nothing to do with OS Religion. ;-)
If E is too sluggish, I'd suggest trying sawfish instead. I'm using that (also installed from the tardists at freeware.sgi.com) on my O2 and find it to be far better than 4DWM. But then, ultimately that's just my personal taste.
I'm working on rewriting the whole thing in perl, with the voice modem stuff as an object, and a controlling script to be the answering system. When it gets to a nice usable state, I'll probably release it to the world...
Ah, so there it is. I don't remember reading that part, so I must have just added the ext2fs option without checking that section of LINT. This in particular worries me:
(and even mounting read only could result in panics.)
Converting my /home (13gig) to UFS should be no real problem - I have enough room on my 30gig mp3 drive to back it up to a tar file over there while I reformat and then restore. The problem is gonna be the mp3 drive, which is also ext2. I was planning on mounting it read-only since I rarely make changes to it (only when I get a new CD to rip), but it sounds like that's out of the question too. Hmpf. Perhaps I can live with playing audio CDs for awhile til I make sure I want to stick with FreeBSD... ;-)
Wow, I hadn't seen any information stating this on the FreeBSD site or discussion groups (it's probably there somewhere, but buried). Last week I switched from Linux to FreeBSD (after 7 years of loyal Linux use) hoping to get rid of some relatively frequent crashes once and for all. In the last week I've had 1 spontaneous reboot and one hard lockup with lots of resulting ext2fs errors on my /home partition. I had pretty much decided it was a hardware problem since both Linux and FreeBSD were having trouble. But maybe there's hope - I'll try to convert my ext2 partitions to UFS and see how that goes.
Thanks, and wish me luck! ;-)
I remember reading an article in the LA times about a year and a half ago about when they attempted this in a few areas. Apparently the biggest problem was the autodialing systems in apartment complexes. For example, let's say you go to visit your friend and outside the complex you have to dial a 3-digit code which will ring his/her phone. Your friend picks up and hits a button to open the door for you to come in. These things work by translating the 3-digit code into a 7-digit phone number. All of them would have to be replaced to use 10 digits.
But apparently even more important are similar devices that allow fire and ambulance vehicles into places like this. IIRC, they tried the overlay briefly in an area west of LA and there were so many problems, they cancelled it. I wonder how other areas that made the switch dealt with these issues?
A couple years ago I got burned by the ISP thing you mentioned. My local number wasn't working so I tried an alternate number in an adjacent area code that I thought was still in my local calling area. Turns out it wasn't and the bill for those couple of weeks was pretty stiff... Now I've got DSL, so I don't care. ;-)
Cool, I never thought of that angle. I loved the ending but couldn't understand why they did the cheesy captions at the very end - I was thinking that kinda killed the possibility of sequels, but maybe not.
Another thing about the ending - I couldn't understand why the critics ripped on it so much. Maybe they were just searching for anything to hate about it. Sure, it wasn't the same as 6th Sense where if you hadn't figured it out, it changed the way you looked at the whole movie up until then. But this ending fit Unbreakable perfectly, especially from the comic book point of view (and I'm not even a comic book fan). I think most of the critics totally overlooked that and needlessly compared it with 6th Sense.
That's actually a pretty good point. I certainly wouldn't have any idea what .debs are or all the wholesome goodness that apt-get is supposed to be without reading slashdot. But I'd love to see a document that goes into the details of this stuff from the perspective of a seasoned Redhat user (or whatever distribution). One section might be common system administration tasks translated from one system to the other. For example, to list all packages installed on the system I just do a 'rpm -qa' on Redhat, but I have no idea what the equivalent on Debian is.
Yeah I know, RTFM, and ultimately experience is the best teacher, but my whole point is that I don't have the time to spend on it like I once did, so I'm not going to attempt to switch unless it can be done without a lot of time invested. I used to have time to tinker and learn the guts of the system for hours on end, but now I just want something that works and works well. Redhat does well enough for me that at this point, any benefit of Debian probably isn't worth the switch if it means hours wasted just getting back up to speed.
A well written document like this would be a great asset to the community... and who knows, maybe if more people get educated about different distributions, stupid flame wars would subside.
Or maybe not. ;-)
I've used several different distros in my time, Redhat for about the last 2-3 years, but haven't tried Debian yet. I'd like to, but I just don't have the time to muck around with another distribution and learn all of its little nuances. Plus I recently got an account on a friend's co-located box which is running Debian. It's been a little difficult trying to help him with a few system administration things since I don't know my way around Debian quite as well.
Does any such document exist for any set of distributions?
Care to let us know which patch this is? My SMP box tends to hang every few weeks under 2.2.x (including 17). I'd love to get that patch... thanks.
Yep, it's 22,241 miles.
Interesting idea. And since such a court would probably only hear a very tiny percentage of all cases, it surely wouldn't make sense to have one in every jurisdiction. So why not make it a true technological court using the internet? The court could be physically located in some place, wherever, and would hear cases from all over the country. It could have satellite courts or "stations" around the country which would be little more than a room with a webcam and computer linked back to the main system. Hmm...
Just thinking out loud...
On a side note, the "ascii art" lameness filter wouldn't let me put "Linux == Game?" in the subject. Uh, whatever.
Heh, I remember the first machine I ran linux on, a 16MHz 386 with 2MB of memory, way back in '93. It ran fine, but you couldn't do anything without swapping. I tried compiling a kernel once and finally killed it after a couple days of swapping... When I upgraded to 4 megs (the max on that motherboard), I was in fat city. Kernel compiles took a mere 2 hours and I finally had enough memory to give my friends accounts and let them telnet in remotely. ;-) Now my PC (still a bit outdated by today's standards) has 144 megs and I can always use more, especially when editing huge images in GIMP.
To keep this on topic (heh), my Mac currently has 112 megs. But I'm afraid it probably won't be able to run MacOS X since it's an old 7600 upgraded to a G3. Sounds like from Apple's requirements, it may need to be an original G3 or better for OS X to even boot. Oh well... Anyone confirm or deny my suspicions?
(sorry, couldn't resist)
While I have no idea about an interferometer setup, it is quite possible to hook up a digital camera to a telescope and get some nice images of space. Check out this link (and the link referenced there) to see some.
The other thing I'd love is fast wireless connectivity (it's gonna be a few years before that, and a few more before it (if ever) gets on bikes) so I can upload my pictures to the website on the fly.
Moderators, feel free to moderate me down into oblivion... and if you want to really have fun, moderate as many of my previous posts as you can too. ;-)
Am I wrong? Is this really true? I'm curious... can someone provide more info?
Umm, don't they already do that? When I'm ordering something online and I find two (or more) similar prices, I'll always go with the one that's out of state to avoid paying sales tax.
Heh, not only that, most of these people are too stupid to realize that cell coverage is spotty if not nonexistent in a lot of wilderness areas. Oh well, natural selection at work, I always say. ;-)
Ah, I was under the impression that only languages installed on their contest machine were admissible. Cool, maybe I'll mention this to him next time I see him...