Well, I finally caught Eminem’s “Ass Like That” video. It didn’t exceed expectations, but it was funny.
I wouldn’t have even mentioned it, but given the nature of the last few posts this blog is in serious need of some street cred.
FreeBSD loves me again; it was a disk geometry problem that was prohibiting the installer from writing at the correct “zero” position for the MBR. Just a little BIOS ATA tweak, and I’m up and running.
Webmin doesn’t look beautiful (…by default – its skinning engine and options are quite robust), but it works like nothing else. If you install the servers from the ports and then put on webmin and virtualmin, essentially the five hours per install of work I was doing to get virtual hosting ready is done with a shell script and some tweaks through a web interface. It’s almost embarrassing how much work you have to put in without it.
There’s an online book about the software (300+ pages), and I’m trying to plug my way through it. It’s not that complicated, but getting it to where your users can login and maintain their websites independently is something that should be studied extensively (for security purposes).
But mostly, it works.
In other news, Fedora finally open sourced their Fedora Directory Server, which may hopefully kill off the necessity of OpenLDAP for good. One thing I can’t see from the website and the announcements is whether or not the little GUI configurator is attached to the server itself, or if it’s modular. It’s kind of amazing that I’ve developed to the point that I feel like GUI configurators for servers are for pansies. Maybe there’s a ./configure—no-gui option or something.
At this point, I see no reason to install X when you’re running a server. Why give up the memory and the security? I’m running FreeBSD on pure console. Plus, when you have webmin going you can do 99.9% of your administrative tasks from anywhere, SSL encrypted.
It’s just flat out awesome.
Can I get a V-CHIP to block out tampon commercials?
Sayeth the Dauffenbach, “My God!”
BSD’s don’t like Zach. NetBSD 2.1 kernel locked on CD boot, and FreeBSD 6.0 and 5.4 don’t get along with my IDE controller (arcane DMA errors; Linux, anyone?).
Blah. Debian? What else is good for a server in Linux? Slack is only good for servers if Pat has your packages (he doesn’t for my rig). Otherwise, you might as well run Gentoo because you’re going source-based.
I don’t wanna use Debian. I guess I’ll wait around to try a decent motherboard on FreeBSD with an HT Pentium 4 to make sure it’s not an across-the-board problem or something specific to the drive.
So, I just installed Kubuntu this morning while I was getting ready. I did it to check the integrity of the boot sector on a cruddy old WD drive I borrowed from Steve. It worked, and I hadn’t used it too much before, so I went ahead and issued an “apt-get upgrade” and brought the “Hoary Hedgehog” (old) release up to date. That worked smoothly, so I did some research and changed my sources.list config file to “breezy” (the new version).
I typed “apt-get update” and “apt-get dist-upgrade”. It’s downloading some ungodly amount of upgrades right now, but the point is, it’s actually moving me to a new version. Gentoo-licious.
I’m not supposed to be liking Linux now. I’m a BSD dork now. CLI BSD.
The other thing I notice is the commented-out “universe” entries in the sources.list file. I also see from unofficial documentation that there is a “multiverse” repository that has sexy things like libdvdcss and other maybe-not-so-legal-but-essential-for-college-desktop goodies. Four uncommented and four added lines is not too shabby for Linux, and I think there is a .deb package you can grab that does this automatically.
I’m deeply impressed by Ubuntu/Kubuntu. And, with KDE 3.5 out today, I’m hoping to be even more impressed with Kubuntu. KDE is really coming along. People say it’s bloated, and it may be, but Slackware 10.1 with Dropline GNOME and Fedora Core with GNOME will both not run on our oldest box at home (P-II 400MHz), and KDE will run. So, the better of the two worlds?
And, no, XFCE is not a WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) / Grandma-Test compatible solution. Not enough stuff. At least the last time I checked.
Also, a good XFCE setup takes a week or so to get going. I did it one time. I don’t plan on doing it again.
I am happy to be probably one of the first 1000 bloggers in the world to report that Konqueror actually now passes Acid2. I have verified this personally.
KDE 3.5 rocks. Kubuntu is great. I still can’t believe I went from hoary to breezy and then to KDE 3.5 in less than an hour. I couldn’t have downloaded, burned, and installed the new OS clean in that time!
Oh, and Firefox 1.5 is out today. It works great and my beloved Optimoz Mouse Gestures still work. It’s much faster than previous versions, and if I’m not mistaken it is the first production release to support hot updating.
OOo 2.0 works great on Linux, too.
Oh, and Konq has an automatic spellchecker associated with the scrollbox widget on websites, so all non-dictionary words within this post are showing up in red for me.
I can’t believe I’m going to wipe this to put on FreeBSD. Yeeouch.
I honestly don’t know where to put this, so the camcorder I like is the Canon Optura 400. I don’t want it, but I like it.
So there.
This is pretty interesting. Good analysis.
This post is coming from a well-cooled, high-performing Zach. I didn’t even have to touch two bare wires together to turn it on.
This is deeply relieving. It proves the point that, no matter how formidable the adversity, throwing money at a problem will always eventually suffice.
I can see his squatty butt laughing at me now, though, because I can no longer justify the purchase of my drippingly nasty dual core AMD box that has been sitting in an XLS on my desktop for a week. By extracting hard-earned (okay, easily-earned) cash from my pocket, this little midget has assured his own longevity.
I thought I would have learned something about sunk costs by now from this ritzy business education, but I am only human. Money input still creates commitment, even when costs are irrecoverable.
I’m about to exact some revenge by wiping the hard drive and installing FreeBSD for holiday screwing around purposes. This is hard to justify, of course, because the dang thing just started working. What I’d like to do is just locate (steal or whatever, ha ha) a hard drive and swap it out as primary master. It’s not beautiful, but it’s better than reinstalling Media Center (including the lovely post-SP2 Prescott hack I am required to perform).
I really want PCI-X graphics for a media center. Too bad it has to wait. The on-board graphics on this Shuttle box (ATI-based, bane of my life) are really disappointing. You’d think they could handle the window compositing they need to do to run Media Center. Especially after handing it an extra 96 MB of system memory to hold data.
Funny I choose to name a machine after a tax collector, and then the machine becomes a severe cash draw for me. Maybe I should have thought about that.
Top-running candidate name for next machine: Solomon.
What would you call it when you dress fly in a geeky way?
Ping ping?
You’d definitely get some ACK’s from your SYN’s on this one.
W00t.