King Ink feels like a bug and he hates his rotten shell.

[reddragdiva]

If 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.

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.

Comments

[pir.livejournal.com]

I tend to install the current rev of the isc-dhcp-client package, the one that comes with the OS can be a bit flaky at times but I've never had problems with the port version.

Why would using packages mean the machine not be upgradable with ports ? They're the same system and should upgrade just fine.

[reddragdiva]

You would think so, but I discovered otherwise when I tried to install Xorg-6.7.0 then the GLX emulator for 6.7.0. Doesn't Fucking Work.

[pir.livejournal.com]

Then something is broken and you should report the details to the ports list or file a pr. I've never had that problem.

[reddragdiva]

I'll be gathering a list of what's reproducible.

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

BT have more DNS problems than any provider i've ever had. they are *really* shite in most ways.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I think my favorite was when I installed xmms from ports, and wound up with a fully functional Gnome install.

[edwards.livejournal.com]

Their DNS server has performed fellatio on oreanmos americanus for as long as I can remember.

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!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I've ever relied on a consumer ISP's name server; for that matter even at work I only touch the company's name servers for internal names.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You know, it's a very odd feeling when you see something in a piece on the web and think 'Gosh, that chap's got his head screwed on right' ... And then follow the link to discover that you wrote it in the first place.

It's like someone walking over your typewriter.

[reddragdiva]

I thought you'd enjoy it :-) It really did state the problem admirably. You're on my user page as well.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Gentoo's Portage system certainly does have a number of advantages over the ports system at times.

i do bt business broadband tech support;

[mirukux.livejournal.com]

hehe, our dns servers really do suck. all 8 of them.

Re: i do bt business broadband tech support;

[reddragdiva]

And STILL SUCKING THIS MORNING!!

How do you not kill your fellow techs?

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Weanie. :-P

[redcountess]

We have an Alcatel/Thompson 510 v.4.0 which is pretty robust.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Heh, have you actually tried using it, or are you knocking something based upon your presumptions?

ports preview

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

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.

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

[reddragdiva]

Probably. Not one that springs to mind, though. I'm not so thoroughly conversant with the pr0ts system as that.

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.

[reddragdiva]

3v3ryth1ng l33gnuX is for w33n13s! (never mind if it built on the previous work in a sensible fashion)

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

You don't *have* to use the Linux kernel & GNU libc, if you really have a problem with fast, good, posix threads support, a range of decent fast journalled filesystems, swappable optimised IO schedulers, decent hardware support, and users with less of an attitude problem than BSDers:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_for_FreeBSD


(comment note: tongue is slightly in cheek)

Re: ports preview

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

The former is kind of annoying - but such cases of "well the users are dumb, not my problem" seem to happen on Linux too. However generally someone else comes along (probably an employee of ibm or redshat or whatever) and fixes the problem instead. I guess maybe that's just a case of having more developers working on Linux distros than freebsd though?

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

[reddragdiva]

This could be the Easy Way to get a patch written by MY MASSIVE EGO into the operating system I use! If I work out the precise right place to push. But that's a geek social problem, and I seem not too bad at those.

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

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

I know some guys with write access to the freebsd cvs, too, if it helps?

I suspect the problem is more them having time to review patches rather than any desire to not accept them though? I hope?

[reddragdiva]

I disliked Linux (the kernel; the GNU stuff is lovely) from those occasions when I had to administer it casually; I despise it now that my job description includes Red Hat. It's robust, versatile, portable, powerful, industrial-strength and really shows its roots as a student project with added overcaffeinated crackmonkeys when you have to do deep-down stuff. I respect it, but I certainly don't have to like it!

[reddragdiva]

Oh - one thing that REALLY pisses me off is when you're installing a port requiring days of compilation (e.g. KDE onto a minimal system - Qt alone takes 12 hours on Liz's underpowered PIII-450 with 192MB) and it pauses to ask questions in the middle. Fucksake! Has Gentoo added smart ways around that? I suppose it would require a request for initial configuration from all dependencies.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

I have never seen Portage stop and ask you questions.
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.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

If "it" = "linux", yes I have used "it". I agree with reddragdiva, the GNU stuff is nice, but "linux" meaning the kernel just blows.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

No, by "it" I meant Portage. You know, the thing I originally mentioned which caused your initial comment.

[reddragdiva]

15 l33gnUx. must b3 suxx0r!

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.

[reddragdiva]

As far as I can tell, the part asking questions interactively is actually ./configure . FreeBSD does try to mess with the original tarball as little as possible. Grah!