Something that used to irritate me about using Firefox in KDE is that I cannot open files in the download manager by double-clicking them.  Turns out it’s really simple to do.  I should make it clear that I am using PC-BSD Hubble Edition 8.0 which is built on FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p2 with KDE 4.3.5, and Firefox 3.5.7 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100106 Firefox/3.5.7) .  If you’re using Firefox 2, this won’t work.

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!!

I have been running alpha versions of PC-BSD Hubble Edition for the last few weeks as iXsystems transitioned into a brand new production facility.  It’s been a pretty amazing process thus far.   It’s great to be a part of something as it’s growing, especially when the team feels more like a family than anything.  For a sneak peak of our new place, check out this video:

We implemented a django-based serial tracking system built on FreeBSD.  Systems and components will be scanned in at the assembly line (pictured below).  After a new order is placed, all systems in that order are scanned in, then each component is scanned in for each system so that we can easily locate one bad hard drive in an order (amongst several other things).  There are several stages to each build that are also tracked dynamically throughout the build process.  Obviously I can’t leak all the sexy details, though…

The workstations in production are running the PC-BSD operating system.  At the moment, we’re testing PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha on the Eee Box.  Our requirements were minimal: does the barcode scanner work? Yes. Does konqueror load the web app? Yes. Great! It’s production ready! I was going to use PC-BSD 7.1.1 instead of 8.0 because we would normally never put an alpha in a production environment.  In this case, the nic was too new and didn’t work properly in FreeBSD 7.2-PRERELEASE so I had to use FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 (PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha).

Here’s the latest screenshot I have of PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha running on my desktop at work.

That’s all for now. I’ll post more screenshots as I take them. Thanks for stopping by!

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.