I totally read it on Some Guy’s Blog

The joys of holiday technical support!

1: Number of flawless hard drive replacements on the Dimension 4100

3: Trips to Dell’s support site for drivers and manuals

21: Viruses detected on the old hard drive

15: Different kinds of viruses

More than 20: installations of America Online, ranging from the 5.x to the 9.x series.

0: Ethernet cards installed in the computer

Around 750: Doo-wop songs saved from the bit bucket

3,000 songs x 4MB song x 1 Hour per MB / 24 hours per day: Someone is either very committed or is finding people to bootleg MP3 cd’s from.

About 12: Off-color pictures saved

But the most important number is

2: Non-administrator accounts created

Wait! I mean…

2: Happy future in-laws.

Happy holidays, everybody. I have some good posts left this year, so don’t hold this one against me.

I know, only like two of you care about all this geekery.

In general, my life is going well. Megan and I are having a lot of fun, as always. We’re gearing up to send invitations out for our holiday party on the 30th. (Save the date, if you’re reading…)

My job at ALTERThought has been a challenge, but not in the ways that I expected. I do feel, thought, that I am beginning to settle there. I enjoy the people I work with there more than I have since college, so that’s a big plus. The job itself still has a lot of unexpected facets, so as I’m more fully settled, you’ll hear more from me here.

With the way I’ve been feeling, that’s been enough to pretty much fill my day. I got my mom a flat-panel monitor for Christmas and her birthday. She badly needed it for desk control.

I’m getting my dad something a little different. I want to get him blogging since he has a lot of great ideas he’d love to share, and he’s looking for a job. My Mom and Dad have always been very with it, and I want to help bring him up to the cutting edge of the job search sphere.

(Mom set up her own IMAP and SMTP client once. Beat that, other moms!)

Before We Begin

The point of this lesson is to get you on your feet in an X environment; the basis of any workstation. You’ll get an introduction to the ports system and see what it’s like to use it. I include a couple of tips for ordering your port installation and a few examples of ports that I’ve installed at the end.

Ports, Explained

In the last lesson, we covered installing the ports system using CVSUP. Ports is the package management system for FreeBSD. It’s highly dependent on source code compilation, so it’s not for the impatient. However, the ports system has high standard for a “non-broken” port, and the maintainers of any given port are given continuous feedback for circumstances that “break” the port. As a result, you can use ports without being that comfortable with many of the major compilation issues and strategies; odds are that it will just work.

Using the ports system.

The first step I took with my newly installed system was to log in as root and…

# cd /usr/ports/x11-servers/xorg-server/
# make install clean

That’s it. Let that run, and eventually you will have an X server running. The ports system itself will walk the necessary dependency chains, installing other ports as needed.

Interlude: configuration and rehash

After the above command has completed, issue the rehash command. Essentially, this tells FreeBSD to go back and re-evaluate your PATH, giving you access to any newly installed programs. In this case, you’ve picked up xorgconfig, which you should now run.

Getting a bit tricky

Ports evaluate dependency chains as best it can, but it’s not a perfect system. For example, if we were to…

# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/gnome2

we could make install clean immediately, but let’s say we were going to sleep after issuing that command. During the middle of the night, this command would end up blocking on configuration choices for the ghostscript port.

So you don’t wake up to yummy Gnome! The answer, in this case, is to install the print/ghostscript-gpl port first (which doesn’t take very long) then start gnome.

(KDE, by the way, blocks on at least a half-dozen dependencies. artswrapper, postgres-client (?!?), openslp, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdepim, and boost-python)

There are ways to have these preferences taken into account without having them come up directly in the make process, but I’m still experimenting with the alternatives and trying to figure out how some of the tricky stuff works. I’ll be happy to leave an update when I crack the case.

Recommended Ports

• Firefox (www/firefox)
• OpenOffice.Org v.2 (editors/openoffice-2.0)
  Gnome (x11-wm/gnome2)
  (although gnome2-lite looks interesting…)
• lighttpd (www/lighttpd)
• Ruby (devel/ruby18)
• Subversion (devel/subversion)
• tsclient (net/tsclient) This program handles RDP connections to Windows machines and VNC connections to others. Beats both gdesktop and kdesktop.
• Trac (www/trac)
• Gimp (graphics/gimp)
• Gaim (net-im/gaim)

What’s Next?

The Java ports. FreeBSD’s support for Java might seem intimidating, but it’s not so bad, as long as you can live with 1.4. You can still run Eclipse, and a lot of Java programs on the 1.4 JDK.

Before We Get Started

First, the documentation for FreeBSD is absolutely fabulous. If you are Googling something about FreeBSD, your heart will sing when one of the links is from the handbook, because the answer will soon be in your grasp.

Second, Dru Lavigne’s FreeBSD series is another fantastic resources. I highly recommend reading those articles, as they’ve been very informative during my adoption process.

Third, I decided to track FreeBSD-STABLE based on the criteria for choosing between STABLE and CURRENT. You don’t have to do either—you can simply install from binaries. But this is a learning exercize for me, and I think it would be a great learning experience to be able to contribute to FreeBSD somehow. That’s much more likely from STABLE at least.

Step 1: Obtaining the Install CDs

FreeBSD 6.0 is the latest release of FreeBSD. Download both ISO files, as you’ll need at least one port off the second CD. FreeBSD offers several methods for acquiring the CD’s or ISO images. Assuming that you have space on your hard drive available you can stick the CD in your drive and get going.

Step 2: Beginning the Installation

Don’t blink an eye during the boot process. Note that the F12 key is the one to go for during the now lightning-fast BIOS/POST process on Dell machines. It will give the the option to boot once from the CD, or to go to the BIOS menu to permanently move the CD option above the HD for booting purposes.

When the FreeBSD installer loads, don’t blink here either. It’s very likely that you’ll need to choose option 7 to boot with USB keyboard support. From there, you should get into the installation itself.

Step 3: Preparing a minimal install.

Go through the installation procedure. You won’t need a walkthrough for every step, but here are some tips. If you are going to want any Java elements on your system, enable Linux binary compatability when asked. I recommend not configuring inetd, but enabling ssh. Don’t look to me for advice on your bootloader, but FreeBSD’s is the bare minimum and don’t count on its flexibility.

When installing, you only want to choose one port: cvsup-without-gui One of the strengths of FreeBSD is the ports collection which is the FreeBSD analog to package administration, if you’re familiar with Linux system administration. The ports system works in a fundamentally different way than package management, however. We’ll cover that here in time, but Dru’s resources contain quite a bit of information about the ports system to get you started.

We’ll be using CVSUP to track FreeBSD’s CVS repository for ports and kernel code, as well. Since we’ll be getting these crucial elements shortly, and they are easy to retrieve form the command line (provided you have a very basic grasp of vi—which I personally loathe), so that’s why we’re going with a minimum install.

Step 4: CVSUP

CVSUP is a special CVS bound to the FreeBSD source repositories. I set up the binding for my machine by copying /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile to /root/supfile. I used vi to assign a hostname and to indicate that in addition to src-all (which downloads the kernel source) I would also like ports-all tag=.. (Ports are tagged differently than kernel source—you can read more in the comments.)

After that, cvsup -L 2 /root/supfile kicks off the download process. When that’s complete, you’ll have everything you need to configure a kernel, and/or get started installing any number of programs. Hooray!

What’s Next:

I choose to set up some userland programs so I can start using my machine again after a long downtime period.

that you cannot e-mail an AOL member if you run your own mailserver?

It doesn’t even go to the bit bucket, it generates a bounce e-mail! Unbelievable. I thought the walled garden was already dead?

java.sql.SQLException: No suitable driver

Before you drive yourself batty, double check your JDBC URL if you are trying to use Hibernate. I would have spent another day trying to debug this one if I hadn’t spent a similar day last year.

First, I’ve obviously upgraded to a new theme. Hopefully your collective memory of the unfortunate notepad theme will now be duly erased.

Second, I’ve transfered the account that I run the blog off of at TextDrive. Service may be interrupted at some point as the DNS records update, although I have to admit, I don’t have a full mental model of what to expect during that process.

Anyway, I’ll try to be on top of that when or if that happens.