Category: Computers

Compiling on FreeBSD

So I decided with my recent praise of Eric Raymond’s writings and my praise of FreeBSD that I ought to submerge myself more into using the operating system as a desktop … All machines don’t have a GUI installed, and I figured the AMD Sempron that I recently assembled would be a good machine to run this sort of environment on … I decided I would go with the Gnome desktop since that was what Brian Behlendorf said that he preferred … So I do a refresh of the ports tree to get all the latest and greatest ports and switch to the /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 directory and give it the ol’ make install clean … Well wouldn’t you know it, it failed? So then I tried from packages; pkg_add -r gnome2 and that seemed to work, but it didn’t … So what to do?

I then decided gnome sucked … What did Brian know anyway? and installed KDE from ports … Maybe I would have better luck there? Well, yes, after about 12 hours of compiling! I started it a little after 6pm last night, and it didn’t finish until around 7am the next morning … I don’t know exactly when, but that was when I woke up from my cat nap … There was a nice prompt sitting there indicating that we had finished …

I had been reading Eric Raymond’s online version of The Art of Unix Programming off and on during the compile … reading makes me tired … Eric also has a great text called How to Become a Hacker … Which reminded me of the Halloween Micro$oft Documents exposed to him and his making them public, and the reasons which OSI thought should remain on Eric’s own web site here … So yes, much compile time allowed for much more research into Unix Wars and the origins of computing as we know it today … I am still angry that I was playing with mainframes at the time … One of the things they mention in the Revolution OS movie is the ability to have a system like the one you work on at work, at home … I did have that, I was the only one to own a 80386 at the time and I was writing C programs on it … Thing is, it was a DOS environment, but I know now that it could have been a Unix environment … I could have learned all of this stuff much sooner … I am now playing catch up … Then again, I certainly have a much better product to work with now than I would have back then … I should also mention that HBO’s movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley influenced me as well …

So anyway, then came the latest X server from X.org … I fired it up and lo and behold I now had a KDE environment … I suited to taste and then decided I would install Firefox … 30 megs of source there and took about 30-45 minutes to compile … But there were inconsistencies … I had seen this in the gnome-session startup as well … So, something got screwed up when I went from trying to install gnome from ports and then from packages … dependent versions were out of synch, and this just wreaked havoc on the other programs that needed these libraries … So, I decided I should probably fix this, especially if I wanted to run Firefox … So, the gnome page over at FreeBSD had mentioned something about a gnome_update.sh script that would upgrade gnome properly … I got hold of that and have been playing with it ever since … Having it fail a couple times only to fix why it failed and fire it up again … It’s a very powerful script, of that there is no doubt … Finally getting through all the dependencies and having the script get through its first 3 stages, we are now on:

Stage 4 of 5: Rebuilding all GNOME applications, and everything that relies upon them. (The Big Update)
Note: this will take a LONG time (a bit longer than it took to build it all the first time …). If you’ve been planning a day trip, now would be a great time to take it.

So I think we’re in for another 12 hour compile? I think we’ve learned a valuable lesson here … Install it from the CD when you install FreeBSD, it’s much faster … Although, I could have blown away the machine and done that, I wouldn’t have the latest and greatest from ports, and I would have had to upgrade it eventually anyhow …

Incidentally, these compiles are running on the same machine that this site sits on running Apache … I have noticed no slow down in this site’s performance as a result of this machine compiling the crap out of these two huge applications … FreeBSD is the poop …

P25-S526 PN: PSP20U-5091HV

That’s the model/number of my Toshiba laptop … I just spent a bunch of useless time Googling for a problem I have been having … Didn’t find a resolution … Oh well … The problem is, the screen saving features sometimes result in the machine becoming unusable … The screen saver starts after 10 minutes … Then the screen shuts off after 20 minutes … The machine still works and everything … It is running, etc … but when I move the mouse (run my finger over the touchpad) or strike a key, the screen does not turn on … This isn’t all the time either, this is intermittent … What I used to do was hold down the power button, but I found closing the lid was better … When you close the lid it “hibernates” so all I need do is wait for the hibernate, power it back on and resume … It’s a hassle, but it works … I just changed the power off of the monitor to an hour … I figure if I leave the laptop that long, it ought to shut the monitor off anyway … So much for Google …

New Server

I just moved this site to a new server I assembled … It is an AMD Sempron 2500+ with 512M of DDR RAM (I think it’s DDR, whatever the really really fast stuff is … SDDR?) … I had been loading various things on it for a while, and I decided just to leave it as my development server … The server where I will throw all the sites I design and manage … In the process I upgraded this blog software as well … ‘Two birds’ is it? Another reason is this site is my default home page, and I was getting tired of the wait … I need things lightning fast, don’t you? This is my first AMD in a while … I used to be really big on them until I started hosting … Figured I needed to be all Intel and Microsoft … I have found that the monetary amount doesn’t reflect the production of the product … It’s a FreeBSD 5.3 Server … Command line all the way baby … Took me a while to get PHP fired up and working right … They port it different in the 5.x versions of BSD … But I’m still on Apache 1 and PHP 4 … I figure I could try to go to Apache 2 sometime later … With all the people saying it’s fine, there are plenty that say it isn’t … and when I initially brought it up, I installed Apache 2 and PHP 5 and things didn’t work immediately … So I bagged it and went back to what I was used to, enough to up the op/sys … this guy has a 160G drive in it … I have gotten the emails from Charlie and the drive has 0% used … too funny … I bought the 160 cause the game server’s HD took a dive … Instead of throwing the 160 in there, I put the 40 I was using messing with this Sempron … So the Sempron has the 160G drive and FreeBSD 5.3 and that’s where it will stay …

All this free time working with Octane has given me the opportunity to do these upgrades … plus I am making better money that I can put out for hardware and such things … Getting to be back like the old days … I even finished HL2 and have been playing Counter-Strike again … Ah, to feel like a person again … The drone of the house system was good, but way too life sucking …

New Laptop … Again

So I took the HP back to CircuitCity and picked up the Toshiba … They even matched CompUSA’s price on it and I got money back! I also avoided the 15% re-stocking fee … I have always praised shopping online, but in this instance, I am so glad I didn’t … I would have gone through a nightmare returning the Pavilion through an online company I’m sure … The Toshiba is bigger and runs hotter although it’s lighter … I spent last night loading it up and checking things out … I will know more in a couple days whether it is a decent machine … It would suck if it wasn’t … It’s a very large investment into my computing career … The HP was a fine unit … too bad there are so many reported problems with it and it’s not a stereo device … Maybe they will make better models in the future?

Returning Laptop

Looks like I have finally been dissatisfied enough to take this laptop back … I am now installing the XP Home that came with the machine and all of its drivers, etc … If the Toshiba’s Line-In isn’t in stereo, oh well, but the headphone port is certainly identified as stereo in every description I’ve read about it … The other determining factor is that I have searched the Internet, and it appears that HP laptops are shutting off unexpectedly the world over in all sorts of scenarios … It seems I bought into a bad line of laptop so I am getting out while the getting is good (within the 14 day return policy) … The Toshiba has done me fine the last 3 years, so I expect the same reliability fom a new one … I have decided to go with the one linked below since it has a line in as well as a 17″ screen … oh, and that stereo thing … How can HP release (sell) a laptop that doesn’t have a stereo headphone jack? Isn’t that just wrong? … and how much money could that possibly save in the production? Oh well …

Return the laptop?

I am so torn between whether to return the laptop or hang onto it. The reasons to hang on to it are the laptop and features itself including the full size keyboard that allows me to put in ALT sequences easily and type IP addresses faster … The downside is that HP and Adobe don’t seem to get along for HT technology … The HP will just shut off like a breaker has been tripped while working in the image editor … The other thing that upsets me about it is that it is not stereo … The headphone port and the mic/line in port while they support stereo, everything is in mono … So, do I take it back? I have until the end of the month … Purchased on the 17th, I have 14 days to decide … I could buy an external sound card for $99, but do I want to do that? I read the reviews on it, and they’re mixed … Way I figure it, I don’t want to carry around another USB device cause the laptop didn’t come in stereo like it should have … I am still torn …. HELP!

Virus

So I got a new laptop yesterday … A HP Pavilion zd7160us … It comes with XP Home, and, well, who the heck wants to run that? So, I blow away the heavily overloaded full featured system and wouldn’t you know it … While installing the new system, I am hit by an exploit … Once I had the machine semi-configured where I would use it, I notice that it’s trying to contact all these other machines on port 445 … So, even after installing firewalls and all the Windows Update stuff, it’s still doing it, and on boot, it’s trying to access port 445 on a local machine on the network here that it has no business trying to connect to … At times the machine would hang, etc … So, I go to Symantec, and lo and behold, there it is; W32.Korgo.L is a variant of W32.Korgo.I. This worm attempts to propagate by exploiting the Microsoft Windows LSASS Buffer Overrun Vulnerability (described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-011) on TCP port 445. It also listens on TCP ports 113, 3067, and other random ports (256-8191). Found YESTERDAY! I read the removal instructions, etc … and to me that’s a hassle … What if I miss something? What if it doesn’t completely remove stuff and since I updated with the thing active, maybe other symptoms will come of it … No! I want a clean system fully patched and ready to go to hit the ‘net … So I pop in the install disk and begin again, although this time I unplugged the network cable … I’ll get a firewall going before I connect the cable … This has never happened to me before … getting pounced on before I got a chance t put all the protection in place … It sure is frustrating, or … disheartening that this goes on …

Bugcheck diagnosed!

With the help of the Microsoft Dude the bugcheck boots have been diagnosed! Finally, after all this time the cause of this has finally been determined and now I can take steps to fix it … It’s a pretty important piece of the puzzle over here, so I have to make it all play nice and still work … I am being vague because I have to …

ESR Email

Well, I sent off an email to Eric Raymond asking a couple questions that I was wondering about … I tried not to be too long in that I usually type very long email messages … I have been doing research on those people who talked in the Revolution OS movie … I am realizing a history that went on while I was doing other things like playing with IBM Mainframes and Minis … eventually to the Micros and the rest is history for me … So, now I choose to get into the Linux/FreeBSD world … and I am not only realizing the benefits of the models, I am also realizing the philosophy behind them … We’ll see if he replies … and we’ll see if I can share that with anyone … Eric reminds me a lot of my brother Bill … Bill certainly was in this league of distinguished gentlemen and I’m certain could have accomplished the same if not more … but he like myself worked on IBM Mainframes … But, when I inherited his PCs from his New York apartment, one of them had and old Red Hat version on it … We never talked about Linux … only C and Assembler …

More New Stuff

So, I go to return the card, and figure I would just get the 9600 … welp, the 9200 worked in a P2 he had there, so it’s my computer that didn’t like the card … So I figure, well .. how much to upgrade the motherboard? Got one for a P3? Laugh! So, got me a motherboard that supports my old SDRAM and a used P4 1.8 … It will be faster than my P3 1.0 and it will support the 9600 AGP 8x card … Now, will the operating system complain when I do this switching? Well, it’s Windows, right? Bah! BTW, this is it for a while … this was the culmination of my tip money … It has been depleted …