clarification: emulation vs syscall mapping

Martin Cracauer’s FreeBSD Page

[ . . . . ] in the FreeBSD/Linux case the base OS is very similar and the emulation layer doesn’t provide a full emulated system, but is a very thin layer to map the difference of the Linux and FreeBSD API. Since both are UNIX derivates, these differences are very small. No hardware emulation is required.

I was trolling through my referrals and found this page: very interesting overview of FreeBSD, both relative to Linux and in its own right.

According to this, calling FreeBSD’s Linux ABI an emulation layer is not accurate.

It clarifies some of what I have already learned, and supplies more detail (the stuff on how the ports collection works is interesting), and in general praises the FreeBSD team and their methods. Using the ftp archive at cdrom.com as a proving ground is interesting but I had no idea it was a single box. That’s walking the walk . . .

The bottomline is that FreeBSD is a complete system and through either a Net connection or media, you can update and support your system(s) without the headaches of any of the other packaging systems. NetBSD’s pkgsrc collection is similar: I thought it was joy to work with as well.

feh. those automounter docs need work

I followed the instructions, added the missing amd.conf file, and it looks like it works. But it doesn’t. Something like the cdrom device gets mounted, but nope. There’s nothing there.

The author replied to me that he would amend his article to include a reference to amd.conf, but I think it needs more than that.

Following bad information doesn’t cost anything but time, in a sense, but it devalues the good stuff.

permalinks

UserLand.Com: What is a permalink?

News sites, or weblogs, begat the need for a concept that would make sense for newspaper websites too — the permalink.
[ . . . ]
Sometimes the time of the post is linked to the permalink.

This is how MovableType handles it, though I confess, it seemed non-obvious to me at first.

Why permalink? do we need a new pseudo word for this? Why not just “link?” As in “where’s the link to this entry?” Sometimes a thing doesn’t seem real unless it has its own jargon. I’m not trying to hold back the creativity of language, but some of it just seems needless.

And as the lads at http://winerlog.inspiredsites.net have noted, permanent isn’t, necessarily.

test before publication, please

Daemon News : Fun With Automounting on FreeBSD

Now you have almost all of the info to duplicate my solution to that big noisy hard drive mentioned in the introduction.

This looked like a really helpful article, except the author left out any mention of the amd.conf file, without which amd won’t run.

I’m sure that’s not what he meant by “almost.”

A slightly edited version of the one in the amd.conf man page will work: just adjust the maps at the bottom.

I still haven’t figured out how to make it work for NFS mounts.

Topography viewing tools

LizardTech, Inc. Downloads

View MrSID images on your personal computer Save view as TIFF with TFW for import into other applications

While browsing the topography I mentioned a couple of entries ago, I discovered the EPS files they supply are not too useful, but they also offered a SID format file. Turns out there’s a free viewer, runs on all the popular architectures, and it’s pretty interesting. You get full color images to pan, zoom, and otherwise inspect, and the viewer exports to many of the popular file formats.

Here’s a sample image.

Might be worth looking into what other maps they have. Like I need more reasons to stare at a map . . . .

According filext.com, there are two filetypes that use .SID as their identifying extension:

.SID Commodore64 Music File [Player] MIME type: audio/prs.sid
LizardTech MrSID Photo [Free plug-in viewer]