Welcome! OSCON 2010

BSD at OSCON 2010, Linux beware!

FreeBSD / PC-BSD @ OSCON 2010

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.

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!!

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.