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![[FSF Associate Member]](http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/fsf.png)
djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Feb
28
FreeBSD 7.0 is out!
Category: BSD | 
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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!
I can’t wait to upgrade my systems (including, perhaps, this server), but it’ll probably have to wait until this weekend.
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Dec
10
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 then there was a bit of a problem: the Ubuntu repositories did not have VMWare Player. I went to VMWare’s site and they only had rpms and the source code. I was hesitant to compile VMWare Player from source. I was sure it would be a monstrous mess. After all, I’d had problems with much less complicated programs.
Installing VMWare Player from source was actually quite pleasant - for a source installation. A perl script is provided which queries you on all of the options and then creates the configure options for you without having to go through all the trouble of figuring it out on your own. It was actually installed after a few minutes and working very well. I was very happy with it. I have come to the conclusion that a program with a well configure script can actually be very easy to install. In fact, between FreeBSD and this VMWare experience, the sting of installing from source is pretty much gone.
In fact, since Cinelerra is in the freshrpms repo, but I need the livna repo, I’ve decided to compile from the sourece so that I can compile it against livna sources. And last weekend, in order to get my remote to work with MythTv, I compiled the lirc daemon from source.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Compiling, Compilation, VMWare, VMWare Player, Cinelrra, MythTv, lirc
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Dec
2
Upgrading to the latest Dr Queue Render Manager
Category: BSD, Linux, computer animation | Leave a Comment
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.
I tried running the scons on FreeBSD, but it didn’t work right away. Apparently he wasn’t checking for it in the SConstruct file so I edited that.
I was unable to get it working so I’m going to send an email to the mailing list. I’ll let you know what the fix was.
Blogged with Flock
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Jul
25
bulletbill is up now
Category: BSD, Blender | Leave a Comment
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!
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Apr
18
The Linux Half-Truth
Category: BSD, Linux, M$ | Leave a Comment
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 ressurrect Windows 98 PCs. Then they talk about Compiz/Beryl, the 3D desktop. All of this is true, but I think it’s a bit of a half-truth.
The extent to which you can resurrect old computers with Linux (or any other *nix) is largely dependent upon what you wish to do and how state of the art the computer originally was. If your computer ran Windows XP then it will indeed run any of the main distros such as Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSe just fine. If your computer ran Windows 98 and was a top of the line computer, it may run in Xubuntu, FeatherLinux, or other light-weight distros. You’ll still be able to have a graphical interface, but no cubes and flaming window decorations for you. You’ll probably run Linux faster than Windows ran, but don’t expect miracles. And if your computer was behind back when Windows 98 came out - you can run Linux, but it will need to either be extra-light-weight for a graphical interface or only command line.
However, if you don’t mind the command line, there are many things you can still do with your computer. You can talk to your AIM buddies via nAIM. MP3s and OGGs can be listened to with mpg123 and ogg123, respectively. Programs such as BitchX will allow you to chat via IRC. You can also use with with Emacs and Vi as a programming machine as most programs probably won’t take too long to compile.
As an example, I installed freeBSD in command line mode on a Pentium II with 333 Hz CPU and mutt took around 20 minutes to compile and download all the sources it needed. The installation also only took somewhere in the 30 minute range. So there is a lot you can do with your old computers. I just feel sometimes that people tend to exagerate the magic of Linux. I want to tone it down a little because it’s worse to be dissapointed that you don’t have the 3D cube on your Pentium II or III, than to be amazed at all of the other things you CAN do with it.
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Feb
2
Windows Tax - you don’t need to pay it anymore!
Category: BSD, Computers, Linux, M$ | 4 Comments
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 want onto that clean machine - without having to first get rid of windows!
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Sep
4
Presenting…..xmessage!
Category: BSD, Geek Love, Linux | Leave a Comment
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 use xmessage and at. at is cron’s little brother, for scheduling things that will happen in the future, but not be a recurring event. xmessage presents a little dialogue box with whatever message you give it. Here’s a screenshot with an example!
at five minutes today
then hit enter and you will get
at>
type xmessage “it’s five minutes later!” Then hit control-d to escape at. And you’re done! In five minutes, x will pop up a dialogue box to remind you of the passing of five minutes. For a similar technique for those of you who hate GUIs, just use wall in place of xmessage and, as I described in a previous post, it will notify you to all terminals and virtual terminals! Enjoy and happy hacking!
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Aug
18
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?”
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Aug
6
The new server is up!
Category: BSD, Linux, Site | Leave a Comment
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 a right of passage all free and open source hackers go through on their way to fully grokking the OS. It always sounded a bit scary and risky to me - recompiling the one program that determines how EVERYTHING on your computer talks to the hardware. But I did it after just two tries! This whole experience has been a lot of fun and now we FINALLY have enough space on the server to allow the members to post all they need to and I can post more screenshots, pictures, and civ4 save files!
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Aug
5
Setting up the FreeBSD server
Category: BSD, Linux, Site | Leave a Comment
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 as soon as I compiled them. Apache needed me to change the server’s name to an name actually resolvable and MySQL needed me to chown the directory it had installed to. Webalizer wasn’t automatically installed and I had to manually configure it.
On the other hand, all of this configuration file editing has given me a deeper understanding of my www software as well as a much finer degree of control. I had no idea webalizer was so configurable! I thought I had to stick to the defaults they had given me! So this is turning out to be both a very fun and a very frustrating process. However, it continues to move along - so that’s good!
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Aug
2
FreeBSD is here!
Category: BSD, Site | Leave a Comment
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.
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