Category: it could be called work

This time from around 07/Jul/2002:06:05:58 to 07/Jul/2002:10:53:20. Apologies to anyone who stopped by and found nothing. Initially, it was a network (ie, AT&T Broadband) problem, but I took advantage of the downtime to upgrade from FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE to 4.6-RELEASE. That process may have made things a little slow (the machine was pulling a load average of 4+).

Service was restored at reboot but the process of building and installing the world had the box pretty well utilized. I didn’t realize the reboot to load the new kernel had restored service: ideally, buildworld and installworld are supposed to be done at the quiescent single-user mode.

Something was unhappy with the network interface (the xl/3Com Etherlink XL and Fast Etherlink XL driver) and the cable interface. This happened before, at least something symptomatically similar: that time I reset the cable interface by removing the power for awhile. Hmm, almost exactly a month ago, too.

That will be the last upgrade until 5.0 comes out.

The Tao Of Programming

Not sure of the benefits of reading this while trying to figure what I was thinking when I coded what I’m working on.

Through a strange series of events, I discovered that someone I knew from my publishing days in Atlanta had simultaneously worked her way up the ranks to become an associate publisher and (though she would demur) had been key in making the firm as strong as it is today.

I had some childrens’ stories I had written for my own amusement and that of my young’uns, and since I made the above discovery while looking for information on submitting them, I ended up sending the stuff off a few weeks ago. I just received some really helpful feedback this morning.

Now I know where to go next. Thanks, Kathy.

At my last job, there was some discussion about how best to handle team-building and other extra-curricular activities. The rank and file hate what management comes up with, and management doesn’t trust the other ranks to come up with something reasonable.

So I came up with the VP of Fun. The idea was simple. A job that gets staffed by a new person every three months, and that person has to plan three events. They get a budget, some basic guidelines, a box business cards that have their exciting new title on them, and they go have fun with it.

Like so many of my ideas, it met with an enthusiastic response and was then ignored. I offer it gratis for anyone else to use.

The most succinct result I can give is: horsepower helps. It’s amazingly simple to do stuff like titles, music tracks, transitions, but boy, is it CPU-intensive. I am doing all this on a 500 MHz iMac DV, and I have run into multi-hour render and export jobs. Rendering titles is very well-done: the renderer takes a long time but it doesn’t bog down the machine at all. Exporting is just brutal. I am pulling a load of 6-8, with no other processes running.

The only feature I can think of to add is an estimate of disk space as well as of time to complete. If you’re trying to scale something to fit on a CD, it would help.

For example, I have a 19 minute project that takes about 140 minutes to export as a quicktime movie: it would help to know how big it will be so I can see if I’m wasting my time or not. If it’s too big for a single CD, I’ll need to work on it some more.

Update: The movie came in at 460 Mb or so, so it was fine for a CD.

The camera worked fine, though I think it came with a flaky firewire cable: I swapped one of my own in and it seemed to work better. The symptom was dropouts and extra clips: I had to extract the video a couple of times and would get different numbers of clips.

Firewire itself is very nice: I love a standard that more than one company supports. You drive the camera from the computer as soon as it’s detected, so you never need to touch it after that.

I solved my problems with sound by installing the xmms-arts plugin for xmms: this allows xmms to use the KDE sound subsystem instead of talking to the sound device itself. Of course, I lost one of my favorite stations today, so this is less valuable than it was.

And I can suspend and resume the laptop by simply shutting down the network interface and closing the lid. Open the lid, type ‘ifconfig an0 up’ and we’re off to the races. Instantly.

Nicest of the Damned

Frank Steele has been watching his OS X machines thrash around.

So have I.

Compare that with a pure FreeBSD machine.

Or better still, a Darwin machine.

I agree it’s the Aqua stuff: I suppose to test it, I should log out and shutdown all the Aqua stuff and see how it goes from there.

This is a lot faster than either linux or NetBSD were: even running resource-intensive stuff like KDE doesn’t seem to phase it.

Things load *much* faster, and I have yet to run into a situation where the system is swapping so much, it’s unresponsive.

Still wrestling with sound, and I may have a better understanding of suspend/resume and how I can make it work.

I have found very little comprehensive information about running *BSD on a laptop: Linux has its linux on a laptop site, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent for FreeBSD or NetBSD.

The additional links below may help address that.

It’s a ThinkPad A20m/2628:
CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (597.41-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = “GenuineIntel” Id = 0x683 Stepping = 3
Features=0x383f9ff
real memory = 134152192 (131008K bytes)

Things that don’t quite work: sound and apm, but a new kernel (building now) may resolve those.
Continue reading “FreeBSD on a laptop”

FreeBSD Mail Archives

I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE, the very latest release on the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch.

Now that this is out, I can get off the STABLE train and get back to a release. Nothing wrong with tracking -STABLE per se, but I have felt some trepidation each time I have been through an upgrade. It’s so much more involved than Linux kernel upgrades, since *BSD is a complete OS, with a kernel and userland to sync up.

I’m thinking now that I have a CD burner, I’ll pull down the ISOs and do it that way. Net installs are fine, but given AT&T’s performance and the surge of demand, CDs make more sense.