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reddragdivaIf you are on BT and are finding websites only load for you one try in five or six, it's because their DNS server appears to have had the dick. (Don't expect clue from their tech support.) We have set our DNS to 199.5.157.128, which is aslan.open-rsc.org, an alternate DNS run by crackpots activists. But it works less worse than BT for now.
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redcountess has been agitating for some time for her FreeBSD box to be brought back to life, because Windows continues to suck. But dhclient in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE has occasional problems with just not bloody working. (What this means is that it can't grab an address from your DSL modem or the network, so you have to set all the network configuration by hand.) The workaround appears to be to use an older version. I downloaded the ancient version 2 and it's working like a charm. Crusty and probably not 100% secure, but should be relatively safe behind the NAT.
So as to keep this box upgradable via ports, I have installed only the base system and am doing EVERYTHING else from ports. I expect to be compiling Xorg, KDE and so forth for the next few days. I'm not completely insane — OpenOffice.org is going to be installed from a binary package. Or just run from a Linux binary. Of course, I just tried installing the text browser links and the fucking thing pulled in Xorg. The pr0ts system does partake of considerable crack on occasions.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 06:10 pm (UTC)Why would using packages mean the machine not be upgradable with ports ? They're the same system and should upgrade just fine.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 06:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 06:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 06:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 06:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 07:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 11:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 06:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-08 02:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-08 04:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-08 04:33 pm (UTC)http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_for_FreeBSD
(comment note: tongue is slightly in cheek)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-08 04:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-08 06:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-09 12:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-09 01:07 am (UTC)I just discovered what failed to let the KDE3 port build: the raft of unspeakably crufty code in gimp-print. (A dep of imagemagick, which is a dep of something, which is a dep of something, which is a dep of the full KDE.) I think that code must have been part of a competition to see who could generate the most compiler warnings without crashing out. But someone cut it a little close.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-08 06:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-08 06:09 pm (UTC)Configuration options (eg. such as do you want X support in elinks, or gnome support on xmms) are pre-set before building anything, including dependancies, and you can view the options on sub-builds too. This includes cases where you might have build a dependancy already, but without a required option - it'll know that it needs to rebuild it to add the option and this is indicated.
The way portage gets around building on slow PCs is twofold:
1) You can compile on another system to create a binary package. (but i don't)
2) You can peer up your PCs to form a compile-farm. It uses distcc, but it's completely integrated into portage. So you emerge something on your slow PC, and the 4ghz server in the corner does most of the heavy lifting.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-09 09:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 07:23 pm (UTC)Not helped by my Belkin er, router, (allegedly) being SHITE.
And constant anti-Safari behaviour of websites. LJ's text input window has gone all slow-motion on me!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-07 09:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 08:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 09:25 pm (UTC)It's like someone walking over your typewriter.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 09:36 pm (UTC)i do bt business broadband tech support;
Date: 2005-02-07 12:31 pm (UTC)Re: i do bt business broadband tech support;
Date: 2005-02-07 12:33 pm (UTC)How do you not kill your fellow techs?
ports preview
Date: 2005-02-08 02:39 pm (UTC)Is there a way to get ports to give you a listing of the work it is about to perform, in regards to dependancies, upgrades, and so on, before you do it?
I didn't manage to find a (simple) way myself, but then again, according to one of your readers I am a weenie, so maybe I just never found it despite reading the manual?
Re: ports preview
Date: 2005-02-08 04:09 pm (UTC)There are some worryingly stupid bugs that have been in FreeBSD 5.x for a year without the (easy) fixes having been applied. The two I've run into:
If you have a FAT16/FAT32 disk attached and give the file type as msdos rather than msdosfs in /etc/fstab (msdos being valid and working), the system startup tries running the nonexistent fsck_msdos instead of fsck_msdosfs, gets upset and drops into single-user mode to fix the "problem." The maintainer of fsck.c closed the ticket with something like "well, the user should get it right in /etc/fstab, not my problem, punted and closed."
The linux-pango (I think) port won't build without a tweak I forget to the makefile. This means no Linux binary using pango (I think it caught me with Thunderbird) can possibly work properly until you do this; that one's been in the bug system with a patch, unfixed since last February.
I should probably write this to the mailing list, actually.
Re: ports preview
Date: 2005-02-08 04:36 pm (UTC)The latter definately still happens on Gentoo; however the Portage tree maintains several revisions of any given package, with a revision only being marked "stable" after it has, well, become so. Or at least compiles and installs on lots of users' systems without complaints.
I've had to fix experimental ebuilds more than once though.
Re: ports preview
Date: 2005-02-08 04:54 pm (UTC)This sort of thing distresses me because the reason FreeBSD is the free Unix of choice for me is because it's usually aware of and does the Right Thing.
The corporate push would come from Apple, who do feed their changes back for the most part. fsck probably wouldn't be in there, though, since they just pull in the userland. (The workaround, by the way, is of course ln -s /sbin/fsck_msdosfs /sbin/msdos.) Nor would i386 Linux binary compatibility.
Re: ports preview
Date: 2005-02-08 04:57 pm (UTC)I suspect the problem is more them having time to review patches rather than any desire to not accept them though? I hope?