duckland.org news (30DayChallenge)

FreeBSD Challenge II, End Report

Don Harper — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 12:43:32 GMT

And, again, I hit something which is causing massive disk performance issues. That, and suspend/resume does not work on either laptop.

I would try to debug the issues, but that means learning a whole new set of tools, and I will not have time for a while. Next week, I am in week long meetings which will run late every day, and then I have to finish writing and present a training class the last week of the month. The hour or two I can spare will be far better spent for me by backup, re-installing ArchLinux than by starting to learn the tools. Yes, a bit of a cop-out, but I need the machines to do what I need to do. I will keep the servers FreeBSD, however, as it works great there.

I will revisit the issue of FreeBSD on the laptops when I either get new kit, or support for my models gets better.

FreeBSD Challenge II, Day 30 Update

Don Harper — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 21:38:32 GMT

As the month draws to a close, I am further into the switch. I have rebuilt my main laptop to PCBSD. I am still setting a few things up, but it seems to be going well.

Two things I need to fix:

Skype: While there is not a native client, there are lots of folks who report success with the Linux client. I will need to do some research.
Nikola: The software I use for my blogs. It throws a python error when I run it, so I cannot update things. Again, I think I just need to do some more research.

Now, the fun of the weekend is here, so I am off!

FreeBSD Challenge II, Day 14

Don Harper — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 05:51:48 GMT

Today is day 14 (pushing day 15 at this hour), and things are looking very good. Today, I got word from the PCBSD Project that a patch which I submitted to fix the issue with the WiFi NIC. Well, I got notice today that PCBSD Bug #7330 has been resolved, and I tested on the R810. It works!

Now, I just need to get a few things configured here first, like snapshots, backups, and porting my SDCARD reading scripts over to FreeBSD, and I should be good.

Then, fun things like configure & use IPv6. I have two FreeBSD VSP servers to test with...it will be fun!

Update on revisiting FreeBSD Challenge

Don Harper — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 04:35:04 GMT

It is the 10th day of the month, and I am 10 days in trying to use FreeBSD as my daily non-work driver. How is it going?

Well, for the most part, well. I can spend most of my personal work-flow on the FreeBSD laptop with no issues. There are a couple of things I have not moved over yet, and those relate to my photo work-flow. The main application, AfterShotPro is installed and working (see my previous desciption of installing in), however, I have not moved over the scripts I use in the flow. I believe they will just come over, but I have not had a chance to test them.

I was using Chromium, but any Flash site did not work. I need to revisit this at some point, but for now I went back to Firefox, and it is working create.

The only major thing right now I need to figure out is how FreeBSD deals with sound. I can hear things from the speakers just fine, but I need to figure out how to enable and use an USB headset. Not the biggest, but still. I also need to either install & configure Skype, or find a replacement video chat to use with the wife while traveling that works under FreeBSD. I like the second option better, but I have not really had the time to do the research.

And, the new site generating suite I am using works under FreeBSD. I wrote and posted this from the FreeBSD laptop.

More updates soon.

Goodbye 2014!

Don Harper — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 05:44:55 GMT

As 2014 draws to a close, I look back at the year.

Overall, it was a good year. The family staid reasonably health (just a case of the flu which every one of us caught).

Work slowed down a bit after only three trips, and the last one was in June, but I did get to spend two weeks in London which was cool. While the work has been not what I really want to be doing, it has been interesting, and next year promises to be very interesting. I have no clue if travel is in the cards or not, but I will keep the camera handy.

In the coming year, I plan to focus on health, photography, and technology. I want to get back to taking photos every day, and to bring the quality back up to art level over the snapshots and historical documentation that I have been doing.

Also, I want to revisit the 30 Day FreeBSD challenge again in January. I have the old HP R810 running PCBSD 10.1 already set up that I have been using for a couple of days working the kinks out of it, so I think I can do it this time. Normal caveat applies...I have a work laptop which dual boots Windows 8.1 and Fedora 21 for my work stuff. The home stuff should work nicely on the laptop.

Just to prove things, this post was written under FreeBSD.

I also need to fix up my virtual host farm. I have one too many, and do not need it, but of course, it is the one with the main mail and other services, so I need to hurry up and migrate things off of it.

I hope your 2015 is a great year.

FreeBSD Switch

Don Harper — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 09:07:42 GMT

I just noticed I have not updated this in a few weeks. Sorry about that.

I have my R810 running PCBSD 10.0.2, and I just patched and configured WiFi on it. I need to figure out how to submit a patch to see if I can get the Centrino supported in the main-line kernel so I do not have to compile a custom kernel just for that.

I almost have this working where I can switch to it full time. I need to deal with getting my killer apps installed and working. I had most (all?) of them working before, so I know I can do it again.

Currently, FireFox is not working for me for some reason, but Chromium is, so I will use that for now.

I have started a wiki to keep some notes for myself on this (what SA has not done that?), so I hope this process will be easier this time.

peace.

Back to FreeBSD (maybe back to the challenge)

Don Harper — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 20:06:09 GMT

So, I had a bit of time over the weekend, and spent it doing a bit of hacking around.

I had re-installed PC-BSD on my HP EliteBook R810. I used 10.0.2, and everything but the wireless looked good. I decided to try to get the wireless working with the internal WNIC. Previously, I used an external dongle to get WiFi working, but it was a pain to remember to pull it out, so I decided to try again.

I updated the base OS to 10-CURRENT, and then 'patched' the source tree using the info I found in this forum post. Once I rebooted, and used the PC-BSD tools to enable the device, things worked! Since this was only last night, I need to test it a bit to make sure it stands up to load.

There is a PR, and support has been added to HEAD. I am going try to write a patch to get this added before then. I will need to see if I can figure out how to do that. :)

Since my work laptop uses the same WNIC, I am one step closer to being able to install it on the work machine.

I am going to see about trying to use dragon as my non-work daily driver and shake out what I need to do, so I may be restarting the 30 Day Challenge again, but a lot of that depends on how work goes.

FreeBSD Challenge final (for now)

Don Harper — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 03:04:17 GMT

Well, Something broke on the main computer. The speed when trying to run a few terminal apps, firefox, and thunderbird at the same time was appalling. I never had that sort of performance issues under ArchLinix on the same kit. I would love to take the time to debug it, but I am almost four weeks behind in dealing with my photos, including those from my trip to England, and I am getting ready to do run some training courses for work which will suck up all my free time.

I am re-installing Arch on the two laptops. I should have restored working configs in a day or two, and then I can start working on my backlog of photo and other projects.

Also, since my laptops are not supported under 10-RELEASE, I want to wait until 10.1 to see if my WLAN NICs are supported.

I still need to rebuild my server which has a failing drive (backed up the data already, just need time). I may go ahead and put 10-RELEASE on it since the NICs are fully supported.

FreeBSD Challenge, Day 17

Don Harper — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 09:04:52 GMT

Today, I got my new laptop dragon up on wireless with a little Edimax EW-7811Un 150 Mbps Wireless 11n Nano Size USB Adapter. Now, setup begins in ernest. I have disabled the on-board wireless NIC in the BIOS, and started to set up shop on it.

Next major task. Configure X. :)

FreeBSD Challenge, Update

Don Harper — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 21:04:26 GMT

Hey, Sorry about the lack of updates over the last two weeks, but my job sent me out of country for two weeks, and I had no time to work on this project. Once I unbury myself, I will return to this with a vengence. I am planning on upgrading my two servers to FreeBSD10 from Linux. One will involve a major disk reworking as one of the disks is about dead.

Stay tuned, and thanks for coming back!