I'm in the very early stages of bringing FreeBSD/mips on the Alchemy Au1550. Plat'Home was kind enough to put an OpenMicroServer into my hands for the port. After months of sitting idle, I've started putting the board to use again. I test booted my first kernel tonight. It is still early days, but I thought I'd mention that I'd committed the very preliminary code to the project/mips tree in svn.
As an aside, the FreeBSD/mips main development has moved from the so-called "mips2" tree in perforce to the projects/mips tree in svn. This move allows us to more easily share the work in progress mips ports that people have been asking for in the past. We'll see how well this works out and see if theory matches reality or not.
Finally I got my hands on new and shiny Lenovo Thinkpad T400. What can I say? It's cool. My only complaint about T60 was its somewhat dim display (yes, I tried to save some money on this vital part and got punished). This time I ordered model with LED backlight and it's worth every dime spent :)
My configuration also included Atheros wifi, built-in bluetooth, Intel GMA X4500 graphics (I'm not in games, really). Unfortunately 7.1 was able to run wifi. Newer HAL did the trick though and here I am: eating my own dog food - running -CURRENT on a workhorse.
Intel graphics was kind of disappointment. I expected no problems with this integrated chipset but there were a lot. "Ghost" video output (or companion display) that was causing mplayer not to run in fullscreen mode (fixed with xrandr). With SWCursor option off text console is garbled when switching to it from X. mplayer is somewhat laggish in full screen mode :( I hope intel driver will be updated soon, meanwhile I'll refrain from watching movies (it should boost my productivity :))
UPD: It seems that Intel Video artifacts is due to unsymmetrical memory layout (I have 2G + 1G). Windows 7 is affected as well.
Finally, I have updated freepascal ports to 2.2.2 and lazarus RAD to 0.9.26 into FreeBSD port tree. There is around of 70 ports updated and  some known fpc ports as unit.
The freepascal units added to our programs some functionalities like mathematical, graphic and sound manipulate functions, access to databases, and much more. If you want to know about freepascal and lazarus, you can visit their websites at:
The first lecture from Kirk McKusick's full length FreeBSD Kernel Internals course has been posted to the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube. It's been about 10 years since I first took a shortened version of this course at FreeBSDCon 1999, and only a few years since I took the follow up kernel code reading course in Berkeley, and I highly recommend this unique resource to others.
This makes the 24th video uploaded to the BSD Conferences channel since I created it just over a month ago. Thanks to Julian Elisher, Jason Dixon, Tomasz Dudzisz, and Kirk McKusick for uploading the conference videos and for contributing to our growing page of tips about video production and publishing on the FreeBSD Wiki. As of this writing we have 644 unique subscribers to the channel and approximately 400 daily views of these videos. To date the most popular videos have been Kris Kennaway speaking about the New features in FreeBSD 7 at MeetBSD 2007, and Jason Dixon's tongue-in-cheek BSD is Dying talk at NYCBSDCon 2006. Note to conference organizers: high level talks about the new features, or talks by speakers as entertaining as Jason Dixon are likely to be well received. The YouTube analytics to the right show the top 10 most popular videos from the channel as well as some demographic information.
It just came to my attention that Eric Anderson setup a FreeBSD feed on twitter. There you can find updates from the FreeBSD website, from the blogs aggregated at FreeBSD Planet, and other FreeBSD related RSS feeds published as 140 character tweets with tinyurl links to the full posts. I've been using twitter for a while now for two quite separate purposes. Primarily, I enjoy following people like Tim O'Reilly to get an endless stream of interesting tech links, ideas, and thoughts throughout the day. The updates are 140 characters or less and I only click through to those that I have time for so I find it less of a time sink than logging into my feedreader (Google Reader) and really digging into the news I'm interested in. I also find it quite useful for arranging social engagements. I use it as an SMS broadcast medium to make plans and arrange to meetup with friends for dinner, drinks, movies, or whatever after work. For the latter purpose Twitter works best in conjunction with a GPS-enabled smartphone and something like Loopt.
Following Eric's lead I setup a couple of more specific FreeBSD related twitter accounts using Twitter Feed to automatically publish the updates from RSS. The first account freebsdannounce consists of all the RSS feeds from the main www.freebsd.org website (most of which I added almost exactly one year ago). The second account freebsdblogs consists of the FreeBSD Planet combined RSS feed. If you want everything subscribe to Eric's main FreeBSD feed, but if you want only a subset of that content subscribe to one of my two more specific feeds.
Finally, I couldn't find a way to make simple updates to twitter from the base FreeBSD system command line so I created a patch for very basic HTTP POST support for fetch. Apply this patch, rebuild and reinstall libfetch(3) and fetch(1) and then you can update twitter from the command line (or send a simple POST request to other web services) with :
$ fetch -x status='Experimenting with Twitter API.' http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
fetch(1) will then prompt you for the HTTP authentication credentials of your twitter account.
I'm not sure how useful other people find HTTP POST support in fetch. If you would find this useful let me know and maybe I'll clean up the patch above and send it out for review.
Published on January 9, 2009 in Uncategorized. Closed
The FreeBSD GNOME team is proud to announce the release of
GNOME 2.24.2 for FreeBSD. The official release notes can be
found at
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.24/
. On the FreeBSD front, this release introduces Fuse support
in HAL, adds multi-CPU support to libgtop, WebKit updates,
and fixes some long-standing seahorse and gnome-keyring
bugs.This release features commits by adamw, ahze, kwm, mezz,
and myself. It would not have been possible without are
contributors and testers: Alexander Loginov, Craig Butler,
Dmitry Marakasov, Eric L. Chen, Joseph S. Atkinson, Kris
Moore, Lapo Luchini, Nikos Ntarmos, Pawel Worach, Romain
Tartiere, TAOKA Fumiyoshi, Romain Tartiere, Yasuda Keisuke,
Zyl aZ, bf, Florent Thoumie, Peter Wemm, and pluknet.
Published on January 4, 2009 in Uncategorized. Closed
Don't forget to visit DCBSDCon.org and register for the conference. Registration has been open for a while, and speakers are being announced on the blog.
Interview with Justin Sherrill of the DragonFlyBSD Digest, which can be found at http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/
