Category Archives: Operating Systems

itsyBSD

Well, I’ve decided on a name for my tiny FreeBSD LiveCD project: itsyBSD, pronouced “itsybitsy”. 🙂 I haven’t got any files to download yet, but if you click the link you’ll end up at a wiki which will hold my documentation for the project. Hopefully in the next week I’ll have an iso you can download.

Towards my own LiveCD…

Well, I’ve bit the bullet. I’ve decided that I have a couple of projects that could benefit from my own ability to produce a customized version of Unix that can boot from a CD (or alternatively, a flash memory device), so I’ve embarked upon trying to follow the path of others who have gone before and produce one.

I’ve thought about using Linux and following in the fine tradition of DSL or Knoppix, but I really am more comfortable with FreeBSD, so I thought I would give it a go. I went into /usr/ports/sysutils/freesbie and installed the scripts there, and then tried to figure out what they were all about. They put a bunch of files in /usr/local/share/freesbie including a directory called miniBSD. Ahah! I’ve seen mention of this project before, where someone produced a small version of BSD ready to run on some small Soekris boxes. I thought I might start there.

Well, there are a few problems. The kernel config file that it uses (MINIBSD.5) isn’t really set up for booting from CD, so if you use their scripts to build an ISO and burn it on a CD, it really won’t work. I know, because I made four coasters playing with it last night before I stumbled upon the idea of using a system emulator. I compiled the one I knew about, bochs, but it died while running the emulated boot loader in a way that my real system wasn’t. Now I’ve got qemu compiled and running, and it gets through the boot all the way to running init, which it thinks dies with a signal 6. That’s just what the real CD does currently, so I’m happy I won’t need to make so many coasters to debug this thing.

After that, I had to go to bed.

I’ll keep you posted when I get it to work. This .iso image won’t be much bigger than a typical podcast. 🙂

Compressed Filesystems

While investigating the creation of my own Knoppix distribution, I encountered a reference to the FreeSBIE project, which is a LiveCD version of my personal favorite OS, FreeBSD. With minor digging, it appeared that FreeSBIE takes a similar approach to Knoppix, and uses a compressed ISO image. This requires using 5.X and the new GEOM disk subsystem, and the details are here. Nifty! Basically, you can mount a compressed ISO file system just like any other device using the geom_ugz kernel module.

Damn Small Linux: Two Thumbs Up

I’ve been playing with various Linux distributions. I usually keep a Knoppix CD in my laptop bag so that I can use computers in a particular computer lab I frequent (normally running Win2k, and password protected, but they are still able to boot from a CD 🙂 ). The problem with Knoppix is simply that it’s too damned big. The answer: Damn Small Linux. A mere 50 megabytes of Linux goodness. You can even install it on a USB stick and if your computer can boot from it, voila. (Haven’t tried that yet, probably will soon). If you have infrequent need of Linux, or just like to carry a rescue CD around, you could do a lot worse.

Why Try To Improve on Perfection?

Beastie on the way out?Slashdot is running an article which suggests that the FreeBSD core team is running a contest to design a new logo to supplant the ubiquitous BSD daemon that has long symbolized Berkeley Unix and its derivatives. Some people don’t seem to understand it, and now the world must seemingly work to accomodate these knuckle-draggers.

Sigh.

How can you argue with a mascot that was designed by John Lasseter?

Dell turns on too pricey Red Hat | The Register

The Register is reporting on Dell business director’s comments that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is too expensive for a variety of Dell customers.

Actually, I’ve begun to wonder the same thing. Isn’t Redhat Enterprise every it as expensive (in real dollars to purchase, not in any cost of ownership sense) as similar Microsoft solutions?

Yes, yes, open software is more than just bucks to purchase, but I have seen a trend toward greater expense in Linux distributions, and I wonder what’s behind it.

Dragonfly BSD 1.0 released

DragonFly BSDAs of July 12, 2004, the 1.0 milestone has been reached by the DragonFly Team. DragonFly BSD is a derivative of the FreeBSD 4.x tree, and represents a different idea about the logical extension of FreeBSD. I haven’t got a spare machine to try it out at the moment, but I think I’ll be able to clear one in the near future and give it a whirl.

I am reminded that I vowed once never to use version 1.0 software again. I must be crazy.

Holy Crap! My scanner works!

coinsI have a Canon LIDE 20 scanner, a super cheap LED flatbed scanner. I figured there was no way that it would possibly be supported under Linux. After all, none of my other scanners ever was, largely because I am so cheap I never buy SCSI scanners. But remarkably, it does work, and right out of the box with Fedora Core 2. I typed scanimage -L and land of mercy, it found my scanner. Then a simple scanimage --resolution 300 --mode Gray | cjpeg > foo.jpg, and voila! It works! A bit of GIMP work, and you can get the image on the right.

I also scanned an image of an ordinary quarter as a test. At 600dpi, considerable detail, some of it nearly microscopic is clearly evident.

Fedora Core, or can a FreeBSD fan find Linux Nirvana?

FedoraI’ve been a FreeBSD user since the days of FreeBSD 1.1.5.1. I cut my teeth old older BSD systems, and the desire to have a similar system for my home machine made it the obvious choice. I also prefer the ideology of the BSD licensing scheme more than the GPL, but that’s a different rant.

Still, I haven’t installed any different operating systems lately, and I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of running MythTV, so I decided to install RedHat on my old FV24 box. This box hasn’t been powered on since I got my Mini-ITX system going, so I booted it up, checked to make sure that nothing valuable was installed on it (there wasn’t), and then set off to download the RedHat distribution.

Except that Redhat isn’t really Redhat anymore. The free version to download is now called Fedora Core. Hmmm. Things have changed a bit. I went ahead and downloaded the four CDs full of stuff (took less than two hours, courtesy of improved download speeds from Comcast) and booted.

I must admit: their installation is dead slick. I can install FreeBSD in my sleep, but Fedora is even easier. Just a couple of clicks to reformat my drive, a couple more to select the distribution, and voila, a nice desktop version of X installed and booting. I was shocked at how quickly it went. Easier than FreeBSD, easier than Windows, just plain easy.

I picked the Desktop profile, which installed relatively few servers (I am keeping FreeBSD for all that stuff anyway) but did include good stuff like Mozilla, OpenOffice, CD burners and players, and a bunch of games. They look great, they work, the menus are all wired up, and it was completely natural. Much kudos.

The only problem that I have isn’t really a fault of Fedora: it’s a problem with software licensing. They have chosen not to include items which have patents or other licensing problems hanging over them. This includes (somewhat tragically) mp3 decoders and the ever problematic DVD playing software like xine or mplayer. I need media players that work on my system, and it’s kind of annoying that further works needs to be done to get them. I don’t blame Fedora/Redhat, that’s just another annoyance of software patents.

Luckily, I stumbled accross this discussion of things a new Fedora user should do to customize his system right after install. I’ll let you know how it goes tonight when I can give it a try.

Overall though, Fedora seems very nice, at least at the 24 hour point. I’ll have to try it some more. My plans to make a MythTV receiver are on temporary hold though, I don’t have an extra video capture card at the moment (perhaps an Hauppauge PVR-350 is in my future, it would be nice to have a card with real MPEG2 encoding). Till then, I obviously need to gain some more Linux experience, and my little Shuttle cube should be a good way to experiment with it.

Andy Tanenbaum on ‘Who Wrote Linux’

It’s fascinating the degree to which Microsoft/SCO backed front companies are trying to create FUD around the use and authorship of the Linux operating system. In a Slashdot article today, they link to an article by Andy Tanenabaum about Ken Brown’s claims that Linux Torvards is not the author of Linux. Brown’s argument seems to center around the notion that it’s impossible for an individual to write an entire operating system by themselves.

This would seem to be a curious idea to come away with after talking to Andy Tanenbaum, since that’s precisely what Andy himself did. Continue reading →