Where are all these daemons coming from?

It's been a while since I updated this particular blog. I've been a bit busy installing new hardware, and playing with different operating systems, such as Solaris 3/05, Solaris 1/06, and the three BSD. First, my notes about the BSDs - I installed NetBSD on fatty, mainly because for some unknown reason, FreeBSD wouldn't install... or at least the version I had at the time wouldn't install. As I only got what was on the NetBSD CD (base, comp, X, etc) I had to download a few more packages to make a decent install.

A few weeks later, I installed FreeBSD-6.1_RELEASE off two CDs that were available, and installed just about everything bar the kitchen sink. The only thing left to get is other packages available from ports/packages. Then, I went and sliced up the drive a bit further, dumped the first FreeBSD install, and made a partition available for OpenBSD, then reinstalled FreeBSD to the now smaller partition, then installed OpenBSD. Again, like NetBSD, I only had what I'd downloaded (base, comp and so on), and had to add a few more bits. Things seem to be working okay in all three BSDs, though I have a hard drive issue with OpenBSD that necessitates me starting up in Linux first, so that the Linux kernel turns off the "Host Protected Area" of the drive. Once that's done, then OpenBSD can "see" the whole of the drive, and is happy to boot.

I still hate the way NetBSD do their package management, so I have been doing the downloading manually, checking out what whining it does when I try installing the package, then grabbing the complaint packages. I much prefer FreeBSD's package management in this regard. What THEY have is a fat INDEX file, which the user downloads, perhaps through sysinstall, and browses the entries he wishes to install. Then sysinstall goes and gets those, along with their dependencies in a nice tidy manner. I've also checked out how OpenBSD does the same thing, and even it seems to be somewhat saner about dependency handling.

For Night-Hawk building, especially for Gray Light, I'm going to need GLUT, so I found that and installed it in all three cases. NightHawk is available as a package in FreeBSD and in NetBSD, but not in OpenBSD. I'm going to see if it compiles and runs under OpenBSD, then find out how I create a package.

Now, onto Solaris. Frankly I'm surprised. It could be my machine, but I'm not sure. 3/05 worked slow, but fine. So I went and really did something insane. I purchased 1/06 on DVD, all eight DVDs. I installed it, and got to it. It works, BUT it doesn't see any serial ports, meaning one of two things. Either I go and find a 10GB drive, and install it on fatty, so that I can at least have network access for the poor thing, or any time I want to grab stuff for Solaris, I'll have to download it to fatty first, then start up Solaris, and pull the data off fatty. sigh.

For the moment, I'll have to see what will happen with Solaris, go browse website or stuff.

And my final complaint... Windows. The two pieces of hardware I installed were:

1. A multi-function card, containing four USB 2.0 ports, and three FireWire ports. Came from Dick Smith Electronics, and came with a CD with its own driver.
2. A NVidia MX4400 (though this may not stay).

If I try and start up Windows XP, it flatly doesn't get started. Shows the logo screen, scrolls the little blue bar a bit, then stops. Dead. If I haul out that card, then Windows will boot. At least until it decides to go find out what other video cards exist. When it finds the NVidia, then things get .... interesting again. So far, I haven't had a successful boot of my Windows XP system since I got these two cards. I got the first card so that I had more plug-n-play options, and the speed increase that USB 2.0 gives. However, the driver makes Windows have blue fits. I'm not sure exactly WHAT the issue is for the Nvidia card. Again, I suspect I'll have to do some surfing.

Well, that's all from me for the moment. I'll get this posted, tidy up the fonts, and go screaming mad.

Playing with chips, bits, and wires.

I’ve been playing a bit with my machine. I’ve found a blogging client I like better than BloGTK. Drivel seems to support the things I want to do, though it behaves a bit strangely too. BloGTK didn’t even let me set a title for the posts I was making, so I was having to go back into the Blogger web interface to correct this. I’m seeing what Drivel provides for a Blogger blog like this one, and I’m repeating this post (hopefully) in my personal WordPress blog. It seems that Drivel also doesn’t support setting a title - is that something to do with the API or something? I don’t know, as I haven’t looked up what the API is all about, or what I can do from a web interface.

Ubuntu seems to work a little faster than Mandriva does, but I’m not sure why that is. I get start times of about 15 - 30 seconds for Firefox as opposed to 1m52 seconds on Mandriva. My Mandriva machine seems to be too slow, but I have no idea why. Anyhow, I’ll have to reinstall from a clean Mandriva install medium just to see if that corrects things.

Hard(ware) changes

I've been playing around a bit with the webcam (the Logitech QuickCam Express), and I managed to get this picture out of it, which made me quite happy. The colours are all (relatively) natural, and everything except the picture size is exactly how I want it. I've also been playing around with my own blogging software (Wordpress), and so far I've been doing okay. I don't find it too heavy (yet). This post is actually a clone (almost) of a posting I made in WordPress, but I thought I'd let you lot know about it too. I got a present today. It was a box from Canada, and it contained (before I emptied it) a DVD-writer, a 256 MB stick of memory, some blanks, Mandriva 2006.0 (x86_64 version, so no good to me), Slackware 10.0, and Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger), which I'll use to upgrade zoombuggy's machine. The owner even sent me a DVD-RAM pre-blanked, along with a few blank CD-R, a CD-RW, and a few DVD-R media. The memory stick replaced one of my existing 128MB sticks, taking my machine up to 512MB, and, once I got the order of sticks sorted, almost eliminating the memory errors I had. I have also stuck the spare 128MB memory stick from my machine (brick) into zoom, bringing it up to 256MB. Seems to work, along with putting the old 32 speed CDROM into there too. The new drive is interesting, it’s a LG GMA 4020B DVD writer, and is reviewed here, and also here at CDRLabs.com. Both reviews say that the drive is slow, but that it also supports all major single-layer media formats: CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and even DVD-RAM. Now I rather wish I had the CD that came with the drive. Now I'm going to try and watch a DVD. (Later) - hrm, after fighting with the machine, I've come to the conclusion that my machine isn't actually fast enough to play a DVD properly without actually jumping. That's a pity, as I wanted to watch Laurence Olivier featuring in the famous Shakespeare play Richard III. Never mind. At least I was able to burn a CD without creating more than one coaster in the process. I.E. two burns, one CD successful. I can only go up from here.

Slim pickings for Linux blogging software

New blogging software (BloGTK) on trial here, though I don't know how well it'll work. I guess we'll find out. I got a little sick of gnome-blog-poster not actually setting the title, instead, what I set as title ended up being the first line of the body instead. (Later) It turns out that BloGTK won't even LET me set the title for a blog, although it seems to be a very nice client otherwise. I found that the main advantage to gnome-blog-poster was that it could be reached by a gtk panel applet, popping up a window below the panel. You then filled in the fields and sent it on. Nice. There's no real difference with BloGTK, except that there isn't a panel applet to reach it by. Someone cheekily said for blogging software, that I should use the browser. Umm, this particular generation of the browser seems to be really slow. As a result, it's not speedy to use, which halts the "flow of ideas" that blogging software is supposed to help with. And emailing the posting has its own limitations, though several blogging sites allow that now. I've created a WordPress blog on my own machine that's been fun to work with, though currently I'm using the browser to reach that too. I did find a really nice theme that I like lots, so I suspect I'll stick with that for a while. I'm still looking for "decent" free blogging software, so wish me luck.

Show up those RFC documents

I've got a little further along on my current pet project, rfcshow. It does pretty much what it says, downloading RFC documents you want if you don't have them, providing a really simple search facility through the index, and displaying them in a small variety of formats.

What I was thinking of, was to do a graphical user interface that's different from the one I use currently, and for that, I'd have to learn more C and gtk2+. At the moment, I don't have that knowledge, though apparently it's not difficult to learn. So you could be seeing a gtk version, perhaps even with embedded hyperlinks.

Anyone vaguely interested in viewing RFC documents on their own computer can take a look at http://flying-brick.caverock.net.nz/rfcshow, though it's still a work in progress, it does nearly all that I want for an RFC program. I built this because I wanted a way of calling up any document, and I added searching because I needed it. Another project, "rfc" is written in perl, and is where I 'flogged' the search routines from. The only reason I didn't customise that version further was because it wasn't my own work to begin with. Not only that, but there were features about my program that I preferred; for example rfc uses lynx to fetch the documents from the rfc site, and displays them, but doesn't store them locally for later use (unless there's a caching function I didn't find). Rfcshow downloads documents if you don't already have them, and stores them in compressed form on the hard disk for later retrieval. It uses a dialog client to draw pretty boxes filled with content to the screen. About the only thing I haven't managed to do yet is to have a document with embedded links so that you can click merrily from document to document.. I also don't have a "table of contents", as such.

Requirements to run rfcshow are as follows: bash (2.05 or greater), a dialog client (cdialog, Xdialog, or zenity will do, kdialog may not), bzip2/gzip, perl, tcl (not mandatory) and ncftp-utils or curl. You'll also need a place to store about 120MB of downloaded documents if you choose to install them all. Requirements for PDF versions or PS versions may be higher.

Incidentally, I managed to get this working under FreeBSD without any real hassles aside from modifying the line at the top of the file that looks for bash. I even got it to run under Cygwin, though for this I had to go and find a dialog client. It can be found, as I used google to find it.

Enjoy! And do let me know what you think of it. I'm still working ot bits of it, like how to download a large number of documents at once.