Dramashack!

Welcome! OSCON 2010

BSD at OSCON 2010, Linux beware!

FreeBSD / PC-BSD @ OSCON 2010

Familiar faces

Hello Malaysia!

Rafe and Ritz from MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference

LinuxFund After-Party

Our friends from BSD/LinuxFund had an after-party at Barracuda complete with VIP for their sponsors iXsystems, Rackspace, and MindTouch.

Denise, Jakob, and Me

We hung out with Jakob from Drupal / LinuxFest NW and drank for free (as in beer), thanks iX! The DJ was spinning all night everyone had a great time!

iXsystems Everywhere!

Too Much Metal for BSD

We hung out with Seth Fulton of the OpenBSD Project and had some beerz and champagne.  Rumor has it there may be Blowfish sightings at LISA this year, too…

BryanBSD

This BSD fanatic always had Beastie close to his heart!

Clever advertising...

It’s what you don’t say that counts.

iXsystems Donation Server

BSD/LinuxFund raffled the iXsystems server and Paul Ebersman of ISC won it!   Congratulations!!

Wow, it’s been awhile… Good thing I have my twitter account posting weekly digests here!  I may change it to monthly digests. I don’t use twitter to post incremental updates about the texture, color, and smell of my poo.  Maybe I should.

I hear we’re a few days away from the next release of PC-BSD, Hubble Edition.  Hubble will be the release name for everything in the 8.x series instead of giving every dot release it’s own name, theme, and brand.  For those FreeBSD users out there wondering wtf PC-BSD was doing with dual localbases will be happy to hear that we ditched this method for a ports jail (or what we call the Ports Console).  New users can run into problems when installing ports on their base system, the Ports Console allows a user to install and run X apps (with sound too!) from the port jail. Yesterday, I used the port console to install the Mozilla Weave port, then copied the generated XPI to my home directory and installed it using the PBI version of FireFox.  In the future, I would love to see PBI’s of all FireFox plugins found in ports.

I am attending SCaLE this weekend, which despite popular belief, does not stand for Southern California alternative (to) Linux Expo.  I’ll be hanging out at the FreeBSD Booth with several friends and co-workers, so come by for a demo!  Also, freebsdgirl will be answering questions about sysinstall in regards to what it does better than the new PC-BSD installer.  Why? Because PC-BSD’s installer can be used for automated vanilla freebsd installs, too.  In fact, I don’t know why anyone would use sysinstall (the 90′s called, they want their installer back!) OUCH!  But in all seriousness, use our installer. Seriously.

Now time for some photo-fillerz!

Don't mistake this as a "friendly" game of ping pong, they are out for BLOOD.

One of our production lines featuring JoJo hard at work!

This is where the real problem solving occurs.

Custom BSD Artwork found in the iXsystems conference room. Left to right: FreeBSD Bobble, Beastie, and the PC-BSD Flame.

That’s all for now, I may post another blog after the tradeshow, or not! lol jk jk…

Well, looks like this is my first post of the year… Happy 2010!! I bricked my Android phone about 2 months ago. I know, pretty lame. But all the custom Android builds needed testing, so I thought I’d take a chance. My first attempt was successful, which lead me to believe that rooting the Android was trivial. After a few JF roms, I decided to give Cyanogen a try. The feature I was craving was Apps2SD. It seemed silly that I couldn’t install apps to my SD card. I ended up bricking the phone while flashing hboot to a newer version. After this I lost the recovery console and the bootloader. Thankfully, Randi (freebsdgirl) had an extra G1 around while I wait for my replacement to ship. Thanks Randi!!

The monthly Bay Area FreeBSD User Group was at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View last night. We talked about why a user should run ZFS (thanks Xin Li), installing vanilla FreeBSD with the PC-BSD installer, and why sysinstall should die (thanks again Randi! lol jkjk!!!). Overall, it was an entertaining and informative evening.

I am going to Camp KDE in San Diego tonight and staying til Monday afternoon. Kris Moore will be presenting “KDE4 on PC-BSD: Creating a User-Friendly Desktop”. The schedule is posted here: http://camp.kde.org/schedule.html. I’ll be rocking the Lenovo S10-2 with PC-BSD 8.0 Beta. In fact, I am getting it loaded with PBI’s right now.

If I can keep the battery charged, I plan on using my Android to post some live video blogs to http://qik.com/jnixon. You can also watch the live stream or archived videos on this blog.

Recently, I traveled overseas to a tiny island about 5,000 miles East of California. I know, long flight. We landed in London, took two trains, a cab, and arrived at our destination: Cambridge University.

College town?! Sweet, that means college chicks, college parties, and kegstands!

We attended EuroBSDCon 2009 to volunteer at the FreeBSD Booth and demonstrate PC-BSD in all its glory! It was great to see the European BSD community’s interest in PC-BSD. I love seeing developers gather ’round the FreeBSD booth asking questions about PC-BSD. Kris Moore sat down with the port maintainer of firefox and worked out the printing problems, apparently CUPS support wasn’t enabled, oops! Now enabled, the iXsystems offices rejoice and printing has never been better….

PC-BSD Hubble Edition 8.0 is coming out soon, possibly by the end of the year or early 2010. I am pretty excited for the new integrated software updater/installer which installs programs from pbidir.com in 1 click. Also, we no longer have 2 localbases separating system packages with user-installed ones; the new solution is having a ports tree contained within a jail. This should be fun! I’ll die a happy man not having to remember to type in ‘runports’ ever again.

Download the latest alpha here: ftp://ftp.pcbsd.org/pub/alpha-iso/x32,

Join the testing list here: http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo.

Please complain!

Here’s a few pictures from Cambridge and London. I’ll have these organized in an album later

The eighth European BSD conference is a great opportunity to present new ideas to the community and to meet some of the developers behind the different BSDs. — http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/

EuroBSDCon is being held at Cambridge University from September 18-20th.  I can’t wait, it will be my first time to the UK.  Kris Moore will be speaking on “Making FreeBSD on the Desktop a mainstream reality”, which I’ve experienced firsthand while using PC-BSD.  I’m also interested in hearing about “Long Distance Wireless” at Sam Leffler’s talk and Rui Paulo’s talk on “Wireless Mesh Networks”.   For a complete and more detailed list of talks, go to http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/talks/.

I will be giving PC-BSD demos on the iXsystems Invincibook, an incredibly resilient and James-friendly laptop.  I’m not sure the laptop can handle the Steam Game demos I normally do, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve to keep things interesting.