On 10/25/10 20:11, Brandon Gooch wrote:
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Henry Olyer<henry.ol...@gmail.com> wrote:
The problem here is that it shouldn't take so much effort to get this
going. But I know it does. And I don't blame the FreeBSD team.
I do blame the organizational infra-structure that exists. ie., we should
have scripts that describe every aspect of a computer, so that such scripts
can be mechanically read and a configuration built.
We do ./configure for software we install. Same thing, but for all aspects
of the hardware. The present "configure" logic covers the OS and the
installed software, we need to do this for hardware.
I notice that freeBSD download's and installs trails Linux. That's okay.
FreeBSD is so much better, and in so many ways, too.
Nothing I've seen in Linux lands comes close to the "sysinstall" command or
the plainly superior organization of FreeBSD. What I'm trying to encourage
is that we, as a group, work on our infra-structures, like strengthing the
already high level of organization we have in sysinstall.
How about a query program that examines a machine. Is this practical?
Something like the automated X-install process that makes it unnecessary to
set the horizontal and vertical frequencies ourselves (which we used to have
to do.) But not for X, for the sound card, for as much as possible.
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Michael D. Norwick<mnorw...@centurytel.net
wrote:
Good Day;
It is with some pleasure that I have finally succeeded in building an
operative workstation with a custom kernel and world, Xorg 1.7.5,
KDE4-4.5.2 from ports, most common network applications as well as Firefox3,
and Thunderbird 3.1.5. The machine is an older Dell GX270 P4 2.4 GHz PC
with 3G of ram and an ATI Radeon video adapter.
This install has not been without it's trials.
4 weeks ago I backed up all my data and reformatted from Debian 'lenny' to
GPT/ZFS/8.1-RELEASE. The next two weeks did not go so well. While I tried
hard to get ZFS formatted drives to work reliably, intermittent unexplained
core dumps with reboots gave me cause for concern. I finally reinstalled
msdos boot records and formatted the drives UFS. That install has lasted 2
more weeks. I liked ZFS v14 and would like to try it again when I get more
current hardware with more ram and SATA drives.
My next challenge was building KDE4, Firefox, and Thunderbird from ports.
KDE4 and friends (QT4) took days on this machine to build, install and
setup. I initially installed the ports tree using portsnap but was having
so much trouble building the mozilla stuff from ports I moved to cvsup and
portupgrade. This is also what I used to install the kernel and base source
tree. Several iterations of make - clean and deinstall/reinstall along with
cvsup'ing ports a couple of times finally got me to a working browser and
mail client.
I have had a time getting Flash working with Firefox. I have not yet got
the plugin working in Firefox but Opera, using linux-f10 allows my kids view
their on-line home school lessons. Audio was somewhat of a challenge to get
sound from an AC97 on-board audio chipset. snd_hda was the module that
eventually provided the needed audio driver for this chipset. I think I
forgot what configuring this stuff was like during my 'hamm', 'bo', and
'slink', debian days.
My thanks to the entire FreeBSD/KDE development team on allowing me to
experience the fruit of their efforts. I still like turning the knobs
myself. I'll keep reading the manuals. :)
Michael
Have either of you had a look at PC-BSD?
http://www.pcbsd.org/
It's getting better with each release...oh, and it's based on FreeBSD too :)
-Brandon
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I spoke a little too soon. I was UPGRADING to KDE4 4.5.2 as I was
typing the message. 'portupgrade kde4' was @ approx. 38% when it
error'd out on something about 'kdelibs4-4.4.5' too old. Going to
/usr/ports/kdelibs4 and 'make clean', 'make', borked also. I do not
have much time tonight for fiddling so, I deleted my ports tree and
cvsup'd /usr/ports again. I'll try again tomorrow evening if the winds
we are currently experiencing here in western wisconsin don't blow all
our buildings away and kill my horses.
I have not looked at PC-BSD because I thought the BSD's were all
somewhat similar (powerful, stable, and secure). I only moved off of
Debian due to feature bloat and the 'Fedoraizing' it (debian) is
experiencing. Richard Bejtlich talks so highly of FreeBSD in his "TAO
of Network Security Monitoring" book. Anyway, please forgive me for not
providing more information on the above build issue. I should have been
more patient.
I have NetBSD 5.0.2 running on an old X-less backup and file server.
The learning curve wasn't too steep!! I require a G.U.I. workstation to
run Flash enabled web apps and kdeedu. Now, if I spend one more night
configuring a PC, my wife has threatened to leave me and throw all my
memsticks in the firepit! :)
Michael
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