Nobel Peace Prize 2007

Can you believe it? Al Gore! That'll release a bunch more CO₂!

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

FreeBSD again

Figured it's been awhile since my last post...

FreeBSD occupied a wee 45 minutes of my time this afternoon - I did a bit of brute force hacking to get X up and running - that required identifying my core pointer (/dev/ums0) and then killing the moused process that caused X to report my core pointer as "busy." Of course I got none other than the famous twm for a window manager, so I ran over to /usr/ports and built fluxbox from x11-wm. That went ok, so I fired up X again and then launched fluxbox from one of the terminals provided. That didn't go so well, and I had to go to class... I'll update this post when I actually make some more progress.

(update 2007-09-20 18:30 PDT)
Well, I have concluded, after a bit more tinkering, that it is probably more worthwhile to just wipe that installation and begin again. One thing that triggered this thought is that the slices seem to have become corrupted - they are not fixed by a reboot, which itself does not even complete properly... then they do not mount properly when I bring the system up again.

I would like to run FreeBSD or PC-BSD simply for greater exposure to "alternative" operating systems (or perhaps the OS's that should be primary ones but are just obscured by that giant in Washington). Also, I would like to become familiar with administration of those systems, and to see for myself the beauty of BSD, as so many fans claim. In my experience, BSD has the aura of being a server-oriented OS, for speed and security.

Another comment to make, after having used BSD from the command-line only, is that certain utilities, like top, take different command-line parameters than their Linux counterparts. Just something to note...

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

rsync speedup

I was curious about this number that is given after an rsync operation completes. Looking online yielded no results, so I hope to be a result that people can refer to here. When rsync runs on a directory, it goes through and builds the file list, then transfers the difference. That's what makes it so brilliant. Because it built the file list of the entire directory, recursively, it knows the entire size of that directory and it also keeps track of how much data it actually transfers. The report may look something like this:

sent 4013337 bytes received 76 bytes 39934.46 bytes/sec
total size is 5171204259 speedup is 1288.48

rsync is telling you that it actually transferred 4013337 bytes (~4MB) from the local machine to the remote machine, and 76 bytes in the other direction. It gives you an average transfer rate, and then the big number, the size of the directory that was just synchronized - 5171204259 (~5GB). The speedup number represents the Total size divided by the total data transferred in both directions (TOTAL SIZE / (SENT + RECEIVED)) = SPEEDUP. This is better termed the "advantage" of using rsync, but the developers chose "speedup" and that's what we got. You could think of it as a ratio/multiplier, since a speedup of 1 would mean that you basically transferred the whole thing with no speedup, as opposed to that example operation, which transferred 1/1288 of the total data to make up the difference.

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

Slackware, revisited, again

In response to a post on linuxquestions.org, in which the writer expressed some concerns about the direction of Slackware based upon experiences with his particular hardware configuration and the new concepts introduced in version 12.0, I posted the following response. You probably have heard similar things before, but here we go again:

I had a difficult time installing 12.0 myself - having to do with the display driver and a couple other things. Having used 11 for so long, I simply reverted and couldn't be happier (well, a few things still leave me booting into Vista for more than patching security holes and updating AV software).

Good point about distro flavors; I don't know how concerned Patrick is about losing users to the Ubuntu/OpenSUSE/Fedora empire, but I like slackware precisely because of the lack of overhead that those distros incur with all of their SELinux and hal/automated hardware tools, not to mention the package managers. Having used Slackware alongside Ubuntu and OpenSUSE for some time, for development purposes as well as routine web browsing and office use, I really appreciate the stability, predictability, and efficiency of Slackware. It boots in half the time, and runs twice the apps, twice as fast. Not to mention that server configuration is a nightmare on the others, and Ubuntu's desktop of choice is Gnome - even with Fedora, starting with Gnome immediately shows some of the dispositions of the distro - KDE is so much more customizable and comes with so many apps. Gnome is a very nice desktop environment and I think the GTK concept has spread in a wider sense than KDE's equivalent. Maybe I'm just predisposed to KDE because Mandrake ran it (my first distro) and Slackware has come exclusively with KDE.

In short, hackers like Slackware for its hackability, and dislike the "black box" (no pun intended) method of other distros. Having not ventured into Gentoo (but a few steps) , I cannot speak for the other distro that appeals to hackers, and Debian never caught my eye for any period of time.

Finally, Slackware is my distro of choice, even if I will practically have my own slackware distro after all the mods.

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)

FreeBSD

Try another distro, or a cousin for that matter!

FreeBSD - I had the disks for 6.2 from a while back. That time, I had little anxious luck with post-install config and just decided to let it go for awhile. Last weekend I sat through the installation. The quirky things were mouse and NIC setup. Both worked out ok, but definitely different from Linux; they all have weird names, not tied to a functional use but a physical or even "firm" layer... my nVidia NIC is called nve0 rather than eth0; my mouse is called ums0 rather than /dev/mouse or input0 or even BSD's sysmouse

Of course, you don't get graphical out of the box, and I even had to download my beloved vim. I am in the process of compiling KDE after about 6 hours... the ports system is really a masterpiece, though. It downloads the source, configures it, builds it, resolving dependencies along the way. You can fully customize things, and it will prompt with text-based menus for optional components or add-ons. If the download fails, or your connection times out, just kill the process and begin again - it will zoom ahead to where you were, and even resume your download from precisely where you left off. Nice stats are given, such as percentage complete, file size, speed, and estimated time remaining, so that you can determine exactly what is going on.

I was able to install fluxbox and run my X server, so the graphical side works fine. I will attempt to bring this BSD to the state of productivity of my Slackware box, eventually. It was awesome to compile the BSD kernel... I had my dual-core system compiling the kernel and building a port. Another virtual terminal ran the top monitoring program and I perused some docs on a fourth! A lovely afternoon

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)