Re:does fbsd have good framebuffer console?
on
FreeBSD 5.3 RC2 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
> i'm using 1024x768 @75Hz (128 columns of text!) and it's a dream for coding in. i don't wanna use X, so only way i'll be happy in fbsd is if i can get big BIG console windows like this. anywhere from 128 to 132 cols is good enough for me. (i already checked fbsd web site man pages for wscons, and it looks like 800x600 with 90 cols is the max???)
First of all, you'd need man syscons, not wscons.
At any rate, I'm currently using 132x43 character mode on my console, which works fine as logn as you have a graphics card with a vesa 1.2 bios or better, and have enabled vesa support (either by compiling it into your kernel or by loading the vesa kernel module)
800x600 (with 90 text collums) seems to be the maximum for graphics mode with syscons, but for character mode it seems to rather support anythign that your vesa bios supports.
Som if all you need is a 132x43 text mode screen, then yeah, that will work fine. If you need graphics mode, checkout the manpages on vga, vgl and vesa and see if that woulf work for you.
> I can build a comperable PC for ~1/3-1/2 the price of a mac and have all these benefits....
This is all a matter of having the time to do such things.
I happen to build custom machiens for people, often with either Linux or FreeBSD installed, at times with WIndows. Usually those people want soemthign special from the machine and are prepared to pay for my time. THose machines are more targetted to their specific problem then a MAC would be, but I doubt they are much cheaper.
So why would customers buy them at all? Ease and price of replacement components is the main reason when this concerns business users. Ease of upgrading is usually what counts most for private customers.
That said, when a small business or private customer wants a general purpose machine and asks my advice, I will often tell them to go get a MAC, simply because of the no-nonsense computing it provides (unpack, connect, work). If they need Windows due to applications, we'll usually end up with a XP pro (used to be win2k, but MS makes that rather unattractive now)
When I need a new machien myself, I go shop at the local computer shops (7 of them in the street I live in, and more at walkign distance.. makes for nice competition, and so nice prices and availability of components), get me a bag full of components, go home, assemble them, and install recent versions of FreeBSD and Linux on it. All in all, that will take me an afternoon, and will cost me less then 1/2 of what Apple would charge for a similarely equiped and performing machine.
When you have the time and skills to put together a decent machine then it is a viable and fun option. If time is at a premium and you need somethign that just works, Apple is the place to go imho.
This does leave a lot of room I think for the ones who put together a no-nonsense Linux distribution for preloading it on standard pc hardware....
HE asked for proof of it being the most popular. You proclaimign it the fastest card on the market is nto exactly proof of popularity (rgardless of your claim being true)
As noted before by others, drivers are the more important part here, and ATI's Linux drivers suck. NVIDIA may not have the fastest offering, but their stuff works, plain and simple. Also, their Linux drivers make ATI look like they hired a bunch of kindergarden level programmers to write their Linux drivers. At least on WIndows the performance of ATI drivers makes them kindof acceptable despite the many stability issues, but beyond that? they are simply laughable.
> Now isn't that cool, built-in LAN interfaces in a home computer in the mid-80ies! PCs got that 15 years later.
Definitely cool. Just wanted to say that Atari was kindof 5 years late with it, Commodore's IEC bus allowed the same, with the added advantage that floppy drives and printers conencted to it directly.
(On the other hand.. I still have a ST doing something usefull here, while the C64 I also have is mostly gatherign dust except for the few times I want to play Traz)
> As far as money ruling the law.... thats what happens without campaign finance reform that means something. Having only two major parties also doesnt help.
> You sort of miss the point here - in the US legal system, the court will provide a defense lawyer at taxpayer cost. OJ decided to spend his own money for a team with more legal power. Guilt or innocence is not a consideration here - at least not monetarily. The perception of people has nothing to do with it.
Maybe not, but I think you are missing the point really. It is simple, you accuse someone falsely, and cause them inconvinience and (optionally) having to pay for defense. It is no more the logical that you incur the cost of that when your accusations are false.
Not arranging for that simply results in those with money being able to have the law enforced selectively.
> Oh yeah, I can just imagine the uproar when OJ bills the government for his legal defence.
If he'd be truely innocent, I don't see why he should pay for his legal defense.
THe simple reason for this is that the way it is now, you are almost always being off better with pleedign guilty even when innocent unless the accusation s very serious and can put you behind bars for a long time or get you the death penalty.
The simple cost of fighting it, and being put out of that money no matter what, is an extremely powerfull toy in the hands of government and large corporations alike, and causes injustice as a result.
The problem with the example you give is that many believe he was guilty. If he indeed was then the prosecuter did a bad job, and you peoiple should go address that instead of keeping upo a way of applying the law that causes widespread gross injustice.
> a nation run by a radical-religious war criminal
Opinions on that differ.. matter of fact is that he is not a convicted war criminal. There was a time however when he sould nto have visited parts of Euroe due to there being a suspicion and complaints together with evidence of him being one.
> that has nukes in violation of the non-proliferation treaty.
If only it would be that simple. Israel is not a party to that treaty, and cannot be in violation of it as a result.
It would be more interesting to look at how such a situation would be dealt with if t would concern any other country then Israel.
> a country who's treatment of arabs on it's land is even worse than the treatment of blacks in apartheid South Africa.
Interestingly enough, you will find the person you just called a war criminal in agreement with you on this one.
I do know Israel and the USA have a simple to define problem in common, failing to apply their own rules in a consistent way to others.
For the rest I won't comment, anything involving Israel is bound to be extremely biassed no matter rom which side you come, and both sides seem to have made too many mistakes and violated the rights of eachother too many times to point out a curlpit.
> Somehow I doubt that the operator of this toy store is the biggest criminal left for them to investigate.
This of course is absolutely true. The point of going for the reseller also is not that they are personally the biggest problem, but because destroying the market oppertunity for counterfet products is rather important.
A system which thinks it is completely acceptable to turn people into an example when it comes to enforcing the law can expect such things to happen. Heavy handed measures make for examples that get remembered.
I do wonder how valid a trademark on the appearance of the product is... but I guess that issue got settled a logn time ago(and I don't know, but would bet it had to do with the appearance of coca cola bottles)
At any rate, I'd say that at best the appearance is aan expression and coudl be copyrightable.
> You're missing the point. Not if my ISP is blocking it. My employer is quite happy to let me use their SMTP server from home. Thats the preferred method. My ISP is not. A lot of ISPs block all outgoing port 25 these days. Yes, I might be able to SMTP over another port, but my employer is not going to play games to get around wierd ISPs- with all the little ISPs running around with their own rules, that would be a full time job. Nor should they have to. But blocking outgoing port 25 was another "wonderful" anti-spam idea that utterly failed.
First of all, I agree completely with regards to your opinion on blockign port 25 by isps (mine doesn't, but then, they have rather nice 'rules' anyway).
However, I suggest takign a peek in/etc/services (if you are on a unix/linux machine), you will find the following line there:
submission 587/tcp
This port is specifically intended for submitting (authenticated) mail that the smtp server should relay for roaming users. Any relatively modern mta supports this and many enable it by default.
So,I think I was quite getting the point, but you didn't know enough about smtp.
> And if you don't have control of your DNS server?
I am aware of that, part of the point of spf and similar solutions is to give the domain owner (which supposedly does control the dns, or can instruct the person/organisation that controls it) control over which servers can send mail on behalf of that domain.
If you don't own the domain, you obviously don't have that control either.
> The vast majority of people don't.
Not over domains they do not own indeed.
> If my ISP blocks everything but their server and I want to put my work address on an email, do you think I can really get my employer in an 80K employee company to add my ISPs mail server?
Nope, your employer is unlikely to do that, not just ebcause it would be kinda silly and a lot of work, but because there is a better solution.
If your employer wants you to be able to do that, then he/she/they can setup an smtp server that allows authenticated mail submission. You point your mail client at it, and it will serve as mail relay for you for mail that has a from address in the domain of your employer. Your employer will then relay the mail to its destination through the proper smtp relay (which is mentioned in spf)
This does give your employer control over who can send mail on their behalf. That may not be what you like, but hinestly, it is their domain, and they should have that control.
The real difference is that you can engotiate conditions and even component sources with your local clone builder, while Dell will sell you whatever they happen to haev in stock with little or no negotiation possible.
I do build clones for some companies here. Usually they buy approx 30% more machines then they need (while still ending up with a lower price then Dell and similar would offer). This negates the replacement problem for quite soem time, and when those machiens are written off, we make a new deal for the next series.
THe real problems arrise when they find out they need more machines halfway the write-off time. In that case, we do have to test them specifically for their situation, and at times make changes to their images.
Carefull selection of component sources makes this problem a lot smaller, but is something you may end up paying fr because you also have less choice. (ie, I can opt to only use nvidia graphics cards, and have a decent guarantee that I can at least make a ghost image that will support almost every card I used in the last 5 years. Wont negate the 'make a new image' issue, but the enw image will be usable on all machiens they bought, solving the 'which image do I need now?' issue)
Well, this has been thought up and tried quite a few times over the last 15 years.
Anyone remember IBMs thin client machines from the early 90s? Corell's Office software entirely written in JAVA?
The problems are not just techincal (those are solvable anyway, and at least in part are solved already)
The real issue is about where your data goes. Peopel do accept the model for mobile phones since: 1. The bit of 'critical' data they have is still stored on their device and can eb backed up to a PC 2. The whole application is non critical.
> Are you trying to say with a straight face that there isn't a large technical population that immediately discounts everything Microsoft does just because it's Microsoft that's doing it?
I'd think that those are not the people taking decisions however.
> Come back when you know how SMTP works. I can set any domain in the from address when I connect to your SMTP server. You have three options: use the SPF records of that domain to block or tag the email, or do nothing.
So, you can block mail that comes from a 'not authorized to send' smtp server, you can tag it (for exampel for usage by a spam filter later on) or do nothing..
In none of those cases you tag spam, in 2 of those cases you deal with the forged sender issue, and in the 3rd you do nothing.
Yeah... came to the same conclusion after reading through their docs. It would be progress, but not somethign I'd be able to undertake on my own I'm afraid.
Ah well, I like the technical ideas behind it, too bad it seems kinda stuck in this 'not far enough to be really usable, and hence not attracting enough people to get further' issue.
Hmm, it seems to build... but not work very well here.
On one system it causes problems with usb hubs conencted to a 2.0 controller (on a pci card), while the same hubs work on the same machine with the same kernel but connected to the onboard 1.1 controller. My other FreeBSD machine simply crashes while detaching/reattaching for a 2.0 device during boot of the kernel.
Maybe the later might be fixable by using modules for usb devices instead of having themn in the kernel tho.
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> i'm using 1024x768 @75Hz (128 columns of text!) and it's a dream for coding in. i don't wanna use X, so only way i'll be happy in fbsd is if i can get big BIG console windows like this. anywhere from 128 to 132 cols is good enough for me.
(i already checked fbsd web site man pages for wscons, and it looks like 800x600 with 90 cols is the max???)
First of all, you'd need man syscons, not wscons.
At any rate, I'm currently using 132x43 character mode on my console, which works fine as logn as you have a graphics card with a vesa 1.2 bios or better, and have enabled vesa support (either by compiling it into your kernel or by loading the vesa kernel module)
800x600 (with 90 text collums) seems to be the maximum for graphics mode with syscons, but for character mode it seems to rather support anythign that your vesa bios supports.
Som if all you need is a 132x43 text mode screen, then yeah, that will work fine. If you need graphics mode, checkout the manpages on vga, vgl and vesa and see if that woulf work for you.
> I can build a comperable PC for ~1/3-1/2 the price of a mac and have all these benefits....
This is all a matter of having the time to do such things.
I happen to build custom machiens for people, often with either Linux or FreeBSD installed, at times with WIndows. Usually those people want soemthign special from the machine and are prepared to pay for my time. THose machines are more targetted to their specific problem then a MAC would be, but I doubt they are much cheaper.
So why would customers buy them at all?
Ease and price of replacement components is the main reason when this concerns business users. Ease of upgrading is usually what counts most for private customers.
That said, when a small business or private customer wants a general purpose machine and asks my advice, I will often tell them to go get a MAC, simply because of the no-nonsense computing it provides (unpack, connect, work). If they need Windows due to applications, we'll usually end up with a XP pro (used to be win2k, but MS makes that rather unattractive now)
When I need a new machien myself, I go shop at the local computer shops (7 of them in the street I live in, and more at walkign distance.. makes for nice competition, and so nice prices and availability of components), get me a bag full of components, go home, assemble them, and install recent versions of FreeBSD and Linux on it. All in all, that will take me an afternoon, and will cost me less then 1/2 of what Apple would charge for a similarely equiped and performing machine.
When you have the time and skills to put together a decent machine then it is a viable and fun option. If time is at a premium and you need somethign that just works, Apple is the place to go imho.
This does leave a lot of room I think for the ones who put together a no-nonsense Linux distribution for preloading it on standard pc hardware....
Take a peek at Enemy Territory maybe (if you like online shooters that is)
HE asked for proof of it being the most popular. You proclaimign it the fastest card on the market is nto exactly proof of popularity (rgardless of your claim being true)
As noted before by others, drivers are the more important part here, and ATI's Linux drivers suck. NVIDIA may not have the fastest offering, but their stuff works, plain and simple. Also, their Linux drivers make ATI look like they hired a bunch of kindergarden level programmers to write their Linux drivers. At least on WIndows the performance of ATI drivers makes them kindof acceptable despite the many stability issues, but beyond that? they are simply laughable.
> Now isn't that cool, built-in LAN interfaces in a home computer in the mid-80ies! PCs got that 15 years later.
Definitely cool. Just wanted to say that Atari was kindof 5 years late with it, Commodore's IEC bus allowed the same, with the added advantage that floppy drives and printers conencted to it directly.
(On the other hand.. I still have a ST doing something usefull here, while the C64 I also have is mostly gatherign dust except for the few times I want to play Traz)
> As far as money ruling the law .... thats what happens without campaign finance reform that means something. Having only two major parties also doesnt help.
Agree completely there.
> You sort of miss the point here - in the US legal system, the court will provide a defense lawyer at taxpayer cost. OJ decided to spend his own money for a team with more legal power. Guilt or innocence is not a consideration here - at least not monetarily. The perception of people has nothing to do with it.
Maybe not, but I think you are missing the point really. It is simple, you accuse someone falsely, and cause them inconvinience and (optionally) having to pay for defense. It is no more the logical that you incur the cost of that when your accusations are false.
Not arranging for that simply results in those with money being able to have the law enforced selectively.
> Oh yeah, I can just imagine the uproar when OJ bills the government for his legal defence.
If he'd be truely innocent, I don't see why he should pay for his legal defense.
THe simple reason for this is that the way it is now, you are almost always being off better with pleedign guilty even when innocent unless the accusation s very serious and can put you behind bars for a long time or get you the death penalty.
The simple cost of fighting it, and being put out of that money no matter what, is an extremely powerfull toy in the hands of government and large corporations alike, and causes injustice as a result.
The problem with the example you give is that many believe he was guilty. If he indeed was then the prosecuter did a bad job, and you peoiple should go address that instead of keeping upo a way of applying the law that causes widespread gross injustice.
> a nation run by a radical-religious war criminal
Opinions on that differ.. matter of fact is that he is not a convicted war criminal. There was a time however when he sould nto have visited parts of Euroe due to there being a suspicion and complaints together with evidence of him being one.
> that has nukes in violation of the non-proliferation treaty.
If only it would be that simple. Israel is not a party to that treaty, and cannot be in violation of it as a result.
It would be more interesting to look at how such a situation would be dealt with if t would concern any other country then Israel.
> a country who's treatment of arabs on it's land is even worse than the treatment of blacks in apartheid South Africa.
Interestingly enough, you will find the person you just called a war criminal in agreement with you on this one.
I do know Israel and the USA have a simple to define problem in common, failing to apply their own rules in a consistent way to others.
For the rest I won't comment, anything involving Israel is bound to be extremely biassed no matter rom which side you come, and both sides seem to have made too many mistakes and violated the rights of eachother too many times to point out a curlpit.
> Somehow I doubt that the operator of this toy store is the biggest criminal left for them to investigate.
This of course is absolutely true. The point of going for the reseller also is not that they are personally the biggest problem, but because destroying the market oppertunity for counterfet products is rather important.
A system which thinks it is completely acceptable to turn people into an example when it comes to enforcing the law can expect such things to happen. Heavy handed measures make for examples that get remembered.
Well...
Japan attacked the USA because the USA was standing in the way of their plans, building a pacific empire.
That the USA did not keep to a deal with Japan was a nice pretext for justifing it maybe, but not the reason for the attack.
I do see 2 basic problems with foreign policy of the USA however:
1. When it doesn't involve american citizens or soil, all those nice 'American' standards that are so strongly defended in word don't apply anymore.
2. (and this may be an internal problem as well) money rules the law instead of the other way around.
WMD: Weapons of Mass Destruction. Please tell me how such a chemical warfare agent qualifies for that.
> Let's say you win (I have done this). You will be made to pay court costs
Easily solved, loser pays (in this case the government or agency).
THis is seriously needed in the justice system there anyway.
I do wonder how valid a trademark on the appearance of the product is... but I guess that issue got settled a logn time ago(and I don't know, but would bet it had to do with the appearance of coca cola bottles)
At any rate, I'd say that at best the appearance is aan expression and coudl be copyrightable.
> You're missing the point. Not if my ISP is blocking it. My employer is quite happy to let me use their SMTP server from home. Thats the preferred method. My ISP is not. A lot of ISPs block all outgoing port 25 these days. Yes, I might be able to SMTP over another port, but my employer is not going to play games to get around wierd ISPs- with all the little ISPs running around with their own rules, that would be a full time job. Nor should they have to. But blocking outgoing port 25 was another "wonderful" anti-spam idea that utterly failed.
/etc/services (if you are on a unix/linux machine), you will find the following line there:
First of all, I agree completely with regards to your opinion on blockign port 25 by isps (mine doesn't, but then, they have rather nice 'rules' anyway).
However, I suggest takign a peek in
submission 587/tcp
This port is specifically intended for submitting (authenticated) mail that the smtp server should relay for roaming users. Any relatively modern mta supports this and many enable it by default.
So,I think I was quite getting the point, but you didn't know enough about smtp.
> And if you don't have control of your DNS server?
I am aware of that, part of the point of spf and similar solutions is to give the domain owner (which supposedly does control the dns, or can instruct the person/organisation that controls it) control over which servers can send mail on behalf of that domain.
If you don't own the domain, you obviously don't have that control either.
> The vast majority of people don't.
Not over domains they do not own indeed.
> If my ISP blocks everything but their server and I want to put my work address on an email, do you think I can really get my employer in an 80K employee company to add my ISPs mail server?
Nope, your employer is unlikely to do that, not just ebcause it would be kinda silly and a lot of work, but because there is a better solution.
If your employer wants you to be able to do that, then he/she/they can setup an smtp server that allows authenticated mail submission. You point your mail client at it, and it will serve as mail relay for you for mail that has a from address in the domain of your employer. Your employer will then relay the mail to its destination through the proper smtp relay (which is mentioned in spf)
This does give your employer control over who can send mail on their behalf. That may not be what you like, but hinestly, it is their domain, and they should have that control.
Other then throwing even more servers and bandwidth at it? no.
The real difference is that you can engotiate conditions and even component sources with your local clone builder, while Dell will sell you whatever they happen to haev in stock with little or no negotiation possible.
I do build clones for some companies here. Usually they buy approx 30% more machines then they need (while still ending up with a lower price then Dell and similar would offer). This negates the replacement problem for quite soem time, and when those machiens are written off, we make a new deal for the next series.
THe real problems arrise when they find out they need more machines halfway the write-off time. In that case, we do have to test them specifically for their situation, and at times make changes to their images.
Carefull selection of component sources makes this problem a lot smaller, but is something you may end up paying fr because you also have less choice. (ie, I can opt to only use nvidia graphics cards, and have a decent guarantee that I can at least make a ghost image that will support almost every card I used in the last 5 years. Wont negate the 'make a new image' issue, but the enw image will be usable on all machiens they bought, solving the 'which image do I need now?' issue)
Well, this has been thought up and tried quite a few times over the last 15 years.
Anyone remember IBMs thin client machines from the early 90s? Corell's Office software entirely written in JAVA?
The problems are not just techincal (those are solvable anyway, and at least in part are solved already)
The real issue is about where your data goes. Peopel do accept the model for mobile phones since:
1. The bit of 'critical' data they have is still stored on their device and can eb backed up to a PC
2. The whole application is non critical.
> Are you trying to say with a straight face that there isn't a large technical population that immediately discounts everything Microsoft does just because it's Microsoft that's doing it?
I'd think that those are not the people taking decisions however.
You add those smtp servers to your spf records and you are all set. Alltho, I wouldn't want to have yahoo in there, btu that is just personal I guess.
> Come back when you know how SMTP works. I can set any domain in the from address when I connect to your SMTP server. You have three options: use the SPF records of that domain to block or tag the email, or do nothing.
So, you can block mail that comes from a 'not authorized to send' smtp server, you can tag it (for exampel for usage by a spam filter later on) or do nothing..
In none of those cases you tag spam, in 2 of those cases you deal with the forged sender issue, and in the 3rd you do nothing.
What again was your argument?
Yeah... came to the same conclusion after reading through their docs. It would be progress, but not somethign I'd be able to undertake on my own I'm afraid.
Ah well, I like the technical ideas behind it, too bad it seems kinda stuck in this 'not far enough to be really usable, and hence not attracting enough people to get further' issue.
Heh, the post actually made me ponder if I should go over and look if I could get it to run on one of my sparcserver 20s.
Hmm, it seems to build... but not work very well here.
On one system it causes problems with usb hubs conencted to a 2.0 controller (on a pci card), while the same hubs work on the same machine with the same kernel but connected to the onboard 1.1 controller. My other FreeBSD machine simply crashes while detaching/reattaching for a 2.0 device during boot of the kernel.
Maybe the later might be fixable by using modules for usb devices instead of having themn in the kernel tho.