Mac at Work (was FreeBSD on Dell C400, and other stuff)

I installed FreeBSD 6.1 on an IBM Thinkpad T30 today. I then installed Windows XP afterwards. Of course, Windows overwrote the boot sector so I could not get to FreeBSD. Thanks to a blog entry found at http://techheadaches.blogspot.com/2006/07/bootini-file-in-windows-2000-xp-server.html , I was able to add FreeBSD to the Windows boot menu. All I did was copy boot/boot1 from the FreeBSD CD to c:\freebsd. Then I added the following line at the end of C:\BOOT.INI c:\freebsd="FreeBSD 6.1" That did the trick!

I really like the terminus font at 12 point (x-11/terminus-font), but I was not happy with the lack of bold for this font at the smallest size. I understand why the author did not include one. His whole purpose is to maximize readability, and the bold at this size reduces readability somewhat. Nevertheless, I wanted bold. So I made my own bold version of the 12-point terminus font. You can get it here .

Before I transferred everything to the new harddrive, Java was working on this computer with Opera 9. I am not sure what happened, but it was not working anymore. I made sure Java was installed and validated the path in Opera, but still no go. Finally, I remembered about the java plugin, so I copied the plugins from the plugin directory of Java to my plugins directory and that took care of it. I copied both the ns4 and the ns610 versions. I still don't know exactly which one Opera is using, but I really don't care as long as it works and I don't have any conflicts. I will update this when I figure out which one it is. Just for the record, I am using sun-jdk14. I could update to 1.5, but everthing works so far.

Add the following lines to /etc/usbd.conf: device "Canon Digital Camera" devname "ugen[0-9]+" attach "/usr/local/bin/camera_attach" Save the following script as /usr/local/bin/camera_attach: #!/bin/sh /sbin/devfs ruleset 10 /sbin/devfs rule add path 'ugen*' mode 666 /sbin/devfs rule applyset Make the script executable by executing the following command as root: chmod +x /usr/local/bin/camera_attach Make sure the following line appears in /etc/rc.d usbd_enable="YES" restart usbd by issuing the following two commands as root: /etc/rc.d/usbd stop /etc/rc.d/usbd start Now you should be able to connect the camera and start downloading pictures with gtkam or gphoto2!

I am taking an OpenGL course and have to generate reports about the programs I write for assignments. I wrote a shell script to automatically generate reports based on the source code for the program. It is called make_report.sh . It is available for anyone to use.

The hard drive in my laptop was showing signs of failing, so I decided to replace it. I took the opportunity to upgrade from a 30GB/4200 rpm drive to a 60GB/5400 rpm drive. I am looking forward to seeing if there is a significant performance boost from the faster drive. There are many howtos out there that talk about transferring FreeBSD to another system, but the ones I found where all on desktop machines where they could just hook up both drives at the same time. In my case, I have a laptop. Therefore, I can only hook up one drive at a time without purchasing new equipment so this guide is for all those who are in my situation. The basic idea is to use tar to compress the various partitions, somehow copy the archives somewhere, replace the drive, install the base system, copy the archives onto the new drive and decompress them to restore the original file system. I decided on this approach because I can change partition sizes without any problem. To transfer the archives, I u

My preferred environment is FreeBSD with the Ion3 window manager; however, for my job I need to run MS Windows so I installed vmware3 from ports and made a WinXP Pro virtual machine. If you have used vmware on FreeBSD before, you may have had trouble getting it to work full-screen. There may be a solution, but I have not looked hard enough to find it yet. I came up with a workaround, though. Use rdesktop to connect through the virtual network interface and a run a full-screen RDP session! I got the inspiration from doing the same thing with my office computer. Then I thought, why not connect to the virtual machine the same way? So I tried "rdesktop -a 24 -g 1280x1024 -D -K vmhostname" and it worked! Of course, I had to add an entry in my hosts file to map vmhostname to the I.P. address of the virtual machine and turn on Remote Desktop in Windows. If you are not familiar with rdesktop, you can install it using ports. It is found at net/rdesktop. The "-a 24"

Installing FreeBSD was a rather painless procedure. I first used a Knoppix disk to resize my windows partition to make some space for FreeBSD, then I booted from the FreeBSD 6.0 installer disk. Installation is fairly painless if you pick the standard installation because it goes step-by-step. BSD uses one slice (what we normally think of as partitions) for it everything. It then divides that slice into sub-units that it calls partitions (they would be sub-partitions in a linux or windows paradigm). Choosing how much space to give to /, /usr/, etc really depends on what you want to use your system for, so you will have to divide up your slice. There are many good resources including the FreeBSD handbook that can help with that. I will note that I reserved 1GB for swap because I plan to upgrade my RAM later. If you plan to optimize your system, I highly recommend you install the sources for everything during the installation routine. You can get the latest sources over the inter

The purpose of this blog is to document my adventures with FreeBSD on my Dell Latitude C400 laptop and other machines. It will serve as a knowledge base for myself, and I hope it is useful for others who have similar systems. I am new to the blog scene, so it may take a while for me to figure out how everything works. One word of caution to those who post comments. Profanity or derogatory remarks will deleted as soon as I notice them. I am the sole judge of what constitutes profanity and derogatory remarks. It is hard to know where to start. I guess a short introduction is in order. I am a civil engineer graduated from Brigham Young University. My current employment is with at the Engineering Research and Development Center of the Army Corps of Engineers. I work with hydraulic and hydrologic computer models. I have a wife and one son who is almost two years old now. I grew up fixing computers with my dad. I have been running *nix for about 4 years now. I would not call mys