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 GNU toolset was complete and Linus was releasing the Linux kernel. At least, that’s what most people claim. However, given the animosity (although that’s almost too strong a word) between the Free Software Foundation and the supporters of the BSD license.

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 you have a Dual or Quard Core Processor. So they’ve made a huge step to continue FreeBSD’s place in modern hardware. The release announcement contains a lot of info and the release notes contain even more!

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 machine, I had to install scons first as it’s now used to buld dr queue.  I also had to build it on my FreeBSD machines, starting with KingKoopa, the render master.  This also required python to be installed.  For Mario, it was very easy, I just ran the install script and it wrote over the old stuff and appears to work.  I’ll probably need to copy the new directories over to the common hard drive.  Peach and BulletBill already had python installed so they didn’t need scons installed.

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 drqueue! Finally! I’m excited!