Category: BSD

  • Review: openSolaris 2008.11

    At work they were asking us to get familiar with openSolaris for a potential future project.  I’d played with it a few years ago, so I decided to check out the latest version I had.  On of my LXF discs had openSolaris 2008.11 and I figured that while I was checking it out I’d review…

  • Loss of my first Linux box

    About a month ago my wife asked me to get rid of the extra POS Linux and BSD computers I was using for my renderfarm.  They quite a bit of an eyesore and so I agreed.  Unfortunately, in the the group of computers I got rid of was my first ever Linux computer.  It ran…

  • Review: PC-BSD 7.0.1

    Today’s distro has been described as the Ubuntu of the BSD world. PC-BSD is an easy to use version of FreeBSD. FreeBSD is the behemoth in the BSD world and would probably have a much larger desktop presence if the BSDs hadn’t run into copyright and other proprietary problems right around when most of the…

  • FreeBSD 7.0 is out!

    It’s been a little delayed and it’s long in coming, but FreeBSD 7.0 is out now! They’ve made a LOT of updates over the 6.0 series; most importantly they’ve done a lot of work on the SMP kernel. SMP is what you use if you have more than one processor in your computer or if…

  • Compiling

    Recently I wanted to install VMWare on Danielle’s computer.  I’ve installed Kubuntu on her Linux machine (Toad) and I wanted to get a clone over her Windows computer onto there in VMWare player.  I used VMWare Converter to create the VMWare clone of her Windows  computer and then put it into the Kubuntu box.  But…

  • Upgrading to the latest Dr Queue Render Manager

    Since I don’t have any animation needing to be rendered for a few months, I decided it was a great time to upgrade Dr Queue to the latest version.  I’d heard that a lot of improvements had been added since version 0.60.  So let’s see how the upgrade process goes: On Mario, my Fedora 8…

  • bulletbill is up now

    After literally a week of cleaning and compiling, I FINALLY have a working copy of Blender on my bulletbill box. This is the one I was most excited about because, while it’s a Pentium II, it has 2 processors! So it should be able to do two Blender frames at once when I’m rendering via…

  • The Linux Half-Truth

    With Windows Vista requiring a computer more powerful than the majority of computer users have, many have touted Linux as the savior of these PCs. Do not throw away your PC because you must upgrade to Vista. Get all the graphical goodness and latest software with Linux. It has modest hardware requirements and will even…

  • Windows Tax – you don’t need to pay it anymore!

    Dell has introduced (or, if it’s been around for a while, it was just recently brought to public attention) the nSeries Desktops. These are computers that have no installed operating system – so you don’t have to pay for windows. It comes with a Freedos disk. So you can install Linux, *BSD, or whatever you…

  • Presenting…..xmessage!

    As I was reading the latest Linux Format Magazine, they had a great tip for a low tech way to remind yourself of different time-sensitive events. The best part is that it works under any window manager! (ie it doesn’t matter if you’re in Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, or any other) The trick is to…

  • A fun quick customization

    tired of a terminal session that looks like user@computer> pretty boring right? So just a little command called PS1=”message” can liven things up. The man page intro suggests: PS1=”What’s next, master?”

  • The new server is up!

    This server is now running on a FreeBSD box instead of Fedora Core 1. It’s also 1 GHz instead of 300Mhz. Man, I have gone from being scared to install anything that wasn’t an RPM package a few years ago to where yesterday I compiled a custom kernel for the first time ever!! That is…

  • Setting up the FreeBSD server

    Well, I’ll tell you one thing – FreeBSD does NOT hold your hand like Linux does. This has had both frustrating and enlightening effects. On the one hand, it’s been very annoying to have to deal with all manner of config files I never had to deal with before. Apache and MySQL didn’t just work…

  • FreeBSD is here!

    I now have a FreeBSD 6.1 computer which will eventually take over the job of the server. It could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get everything set up correctly, but I’ll be sure to make a post when it’s ready.

  • Upgrade?

    Danielle’s job is getting rid of some old computers – all of which are way, way better than my current server. My current server is a P II 333 Hz computer!!! And it only has a 4 GB hard drive, most of which is full! By contrast, the cheapest computer they’re selling at Danielle’s work…