Rubénerd!

Merlin Mann from 42 + 1 folders once suggested in a podcast that if you want to apply yourself too some creative writing you should start typing and refuse to use the backspace key; just pretend it's not there. I'm far to obsessive compulsive to follow this advice verbatim because typos freak me out like breakfast cereal without soy milk, but that compulsion aside I'm going to give it a try.

As this evening comes to a close I'm left with a weird feeling of reflection and uncertainty, despite potentially having some direction and purpose. I'm close to finishing my exams, I only have two outstanding assignment issues and the real estate agent in charge of managing my landlord's property finally got around to inspecting the house prior to the open day on Sunday. The landlord wants to sell.

I've got FreeBSD 8.0 gleefully installing on my ThinkPad X40 next to me, my MacBook Pro is frantically compressing a bunch of disc images so I can scrape up some spare gigabytes of hard drive space, the rain outside has stopped but you can still smell it, the ceiling lights are off so the monitors are casting an almost spooky glow and long shadows across the table and down the hall, my bottle of water is empty but I'm still a little thirsty, I'm shaking a little but that's normal, and because my sister went back to Singapore before me, some pretty, quiet piano playing through the speakers and a quiet hum of computer cooling fans are the only sounds other than the cicadas I can hear.

I still find it infinitely fascinating that on some days I blog a lot, talk to people on Skype and Twitter messages like there's no tomorrow; on other days despite not having more or less work to do than the day when I was posting five hundred blog entries I can barely bring myself to write one, and when I do get around to posting that lone entry it's a rambling post with little substance, value or purpose. Hey, like this one.

Well it's been really nice talking to you, but I'd best be off to bed. I'll go ahead and sprinkle some hyperlinks through this post, then I'll hop into bed and distract worrying thoughts by weighing in the pros and cons of using the Xfce verses Gnome-Light ports.

Night.

I just started downloading the all new FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from the FreeBSD bittorrent tracker and so should you! I'm more excited by this release than Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard from a few months back!

Don't get me wrong, all this talk about Fedora lately hasn't swayed me from my true calling. Heck, even this very website is running on FreeBSD ^_^.

I've used a lot of terminal emulators over the years trying to find the best one for my needs. Lately I became lazy and just started using the default Gnome and Xfce terminals but as of today I've started using LilyTerm and am kicking myself that I didn't switch sooner.

LilyTerm is a lightweight, fast terminal emulator with an attractive and very usable GTK user interface that blends in well with Gnome and Xfce, and if you your window manager supports composting LilyTerm supports true transparency. It's a really polished app.

Instead of a menu bar that takes up screen real estate or narly xterm or rxvt .Xdefaults text files, you configure LilyTerm through a simple right click menu that shows you the results of your changes as you make them, and allows you to save them for future sessions.

A table without a tablecloth

To show why LilyTerm is Win, I constructed an entirely subjective comparison table showing the other terminal emulators I've used in a productive capacity over the last few years. The difference in performance between xterm and rxvt is noticable on older hardware, but not on my current ThinkPad.

	xterm	rxvt	mrxvt	urxvt	aterm	LilyTerm
Fast, light	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Unicode	–	–	future	yes	yes	yes
Tabs	–	–	yes	–	materm	yes
Transparency	–	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Composting	–	–	–	–	–	yes
Pretty	–	–	–	–	yes	yes

Build it and give it a try :).

Given I didn't have any exams today, I took a break from studying for a couple of hours and installed the final release of Fedora 12 that was released yesterday. So far so good, I torrented the i386 DVD image and installed it on my ThinkPad with no problems at all.

Fedora's default Gnome desktop has been tweaked a bit since version 11 and while I still had to rearrange it a bit to get it the way I use it on other systems, it's very usable. I've found that with much of the Fedora experience; its configured in a different way to what I'd like, has some software I don't want and some software missing, but they're all easy to fix and when I do, it works great.

As I discussed last week Fedora comes with Mono which is kinda creepy (to use technical McGee NCIS jargon) which I hastily uninstalled, but I'm really pleased to see Gnote is now included by default instead of Tomboy. Red Hat and the Fedora team should be applauded for this move, and other Linux distributions and BSDs should follow suit. The official Gnome project team should also take notice that a major distribution has ignored an official package and replaced it with a less encumbered, faster, lighter, equally capable alternative.

Seal of The Approval

Of all the commercially backed Linux distributions, I think Fedora is by far the most polished and usable. If given the choice I'd still prefer to run FreeBSD because I've been spoilt by jails, security levels, ZFS, rc.conf, make world and The Handbook, and I still have a little desktop in Singapore running Slack, but Fedora will probably be the one I use when I have to use Linux, or on notebook hardware that FreeBSD traditionally has more trouble with.

Now I just have to learn not to accidentally try and run portsnap ;).

Here's something to try if you find yourself at home on a Friday night and you want some excitement. For legal purposes, I must state you should not attempt this.

Open a Terminal or shell in Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris or your other *nix of choice and navigate to the root directory by entering the following commands:

% cd /
% echo "Grilled cheese sandwiches with pickle"

Now keeping in mind that root is the highest you can navigate to in a file system, attempt to navigate one directory further by entering this command while smacking yourself repeatedly on the head with a breadboard:

% cd ..

You should see a number of stars flashing across your eyes before you head hits the table. Last time I tried I saw William H. Macy and Alan Alda. Brilliant!

UPDATE: I've got this working, so despite this post being a day old it should be considered hysterical. I mean, historical. Freudian slip.

I'll post in more detail as soon as I'm finished.

After staying back with FreeBSD 6.x on my ThinkPad X40 because of a [reported] problem with hardware acceleration in 7.0, I decided to throw in the towel today and try getting it running. Alas, there's a quirk in the secondary IDE controller in some ThinkPad hardware that causes FreeBSD to hang on booting, and I still haven't figured out a way around it!

ACHTUNG: don't read this post if you're not a boring nerd with spare time!

According to various newsgroups, the workaround is to disable the secondary IDE controller in the ThinkPad BIOS. This supposedly has no practical impact because there's only one drive bay internally and external optical drives rely on a different controller. No worries.

Here's the rub though: at the time IBM classified such tinkering as too advanced and removed access to it from the BIOS configuration screen. The only way you can change such settings is by running PS2.EXE which is their Configuration Utility (referred to as the CU from now on) from a crusty DOS boot disk.

Extraction fail

So here's what I did: I went to the Lenovo website and downloaded the CU. Rather than just giving me the required files in a simple archive, they were contained in a nasty DOS self extracting executable called UTTPFDOS.EXE. To make matters worse, you can't just extract the files into a folder, you must provide the extractor with a blank floppy disk for it to use.

Neither my ThinkPad or my MacBook Pro have a floppy drive, so I booted Windows 2000 in VMware Fusion on my Mac, created a virtual blank floppy disk image for it to use and ran the self extracting executable thingy. I then copied the files from the virtual drive A: to a WinImage disk, then created a bootable ISO.

Booting fail

After burning the bootable ISO I attempted to boot the ThinkPad with it, but it completely ignored the disc after spinning for a few seconds. I burned another CD-R just to make sure, but got the same result.

I got to thinking: perhaps this CU wasn't itself bootable but needs to be run from a bootable DOS disk. So I downloaded a copy of the excellent FreeDOS OS, edited the ISO to include the config utility and burned another CD-R. FreeDOS started booting off the disk on the ThinkPad, but hung before it finished booting. D'oh!

Never fear though! Back in 2002 I got a copy of Connectix Virtual PC which came with a fully licenced ISO copy of IBM's PC DOS 2000 which to this day I've been using to get various things working. So I opened the ISO and added the CU to it, then burned another CD-R.

Running fail

This disc booted beautifully on the ThinkPad and I was presented with a DOS prompt. Not only that, I was able to see the CU on the disc and run it, which I did. Schweet, right?

This application cannot be run on this system

At this point it was 3am, I had a stack of useless coasters and was no closer to disabling the secondary IDE controller on this ThinkPad. I have studying to do and family matters to take care of, and I already wasted 20 minutes typing up this blog post in angst, but I'm not giving up!

Anyone have ThinkPad hardware and have been able to successfully run the PS2.EXE file from the UTTPFDOS.EXE archive?

Update

Trying out this version of the Configuration Utility. Will let you know how it goes.

Presumably the agency Kaspersky Labs hired to plaster their advertising everywhere didn't bother to do a user agent lookup when they presented me with this graphic. Unless they have a FreeBSD anti virus solution of which I'm not presently nor currently aware that I'd want to "Say G'Day to". I guess one could release such a product for users of Wine and Mono ;-).

I need to install AdBlock Plus in Firefox in this VM, or set up some Opera filters!

When I finally got around to installing the new VMware Fusion 3.0 update I downloaded yesterday I expected to get a slight performance improvement for my FreeBSD guests, but not as much as I would have got had I been running a Windows guest. The VMware Mac team have made it clear in their advertising they consider Fusion to be a product to run Windows on your Mac, and while other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux are supported, they're not a priority. I'm really pleased and relieved to say I was wrong!

Aside from one minor glitch which I'll describe below, the improvements for FreeBSD guests under VMware Fusion 3.0 have been huge. Given I imagine the market for people running this OS in their product must be tiny I really appreciate them putting in this effort.

First of all, its faster. Not "OMG I Just Got A New Computer!" faster, but extracting archives such as a portsnap image and booting the machine in the first place takes less time.

The biggest usability change though is more seamless X11 integration. As you could with Windows guests (and perhaps Linux ones, not sure) before, you can capture and release control of your mouse pointer between the FreeBSD guest and Mac host as if the VM was just a regular Mac window. This means you don't need to enter a key combination to "break out" which makes it infinitely more usable.

The only one downside that still lingers from VMWare Fusion 2.x is the software's continued reliance on the compat6x port if you want to run the latest stable version of FreeBSD which is currently 7.2. There's probably an architectural reason why this is, but it'd be nice if I didn't need to install a compatibility layer and set of libraries for a legacy earlier version of my OS to get the Fusion Additions. That said, once this is installed the Additions perform flawlessly.

To sum up, the performance difference combined with the vastly improved and seamless experience with X11 means I can run FreeBSD in full screen on my MacBook Pro for my studies and general messing around without having to reboot my machine and use Boot Camp. I believe the term I'm looking for is: awesome!

Thank you VMware guys, you've made me a really happy camper :).

For all of you operating system enthusiasts, VMware Fusion 3.0 was just released for the Mac.

I bought a licence for Fusion 1.0 as soon as it came out in 2007 (Just bought VMWare Fusion) because at the time I was testing various different flavours of BSD and the later builds of Parallels Desktop weren't playing nicely with them. By contrast, despite being heavily advertised as a way to run Windows, Fusion also had additions for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Given I got Fusion 2.0 as a free upgrade, being told I'd have to shell out AU$49.00 for 3.0 was a bit of a kick in the stomach, but if after using the trial for 30 days the performance is noticeably better I'll upgrade.

One of the banes of my existence now that I'm predominately a notebook computer user is external hard drives. I can't afford to shell out a small fortune for an integrated solution such as a Drobo, so (to shamelessly borrow a phrase I've already used here!) I have to make do with a veritable Stonehenge of external hard drives, each with their own space on the desk, individual data and power cables and a huge padded bag to carry them in when I go back to Singapore, Adelaide and so on.

This tangled spaghetti mess that will probably morph into an intelligent being and take over the world one day isn't the main problem for me though.

I think the problem stems with the way contemporary operating systems deal with them in two tiny yet painfully irritating ways that I think are the result of historically not having so many drives attached to a single personal computer. This happens on Windows and Mac OS X, but curiously not on my FreeBSD machines.

When I go to save or open a file with a application's modal dialog box, the OS insists on powering up and checking each external drive before it will let me do anything. This means every time I open a dialog box like this it can take upwards of 30 seconds before I can do anything! Leaving aside the issue of sleeping hard drives entirely (a possible future post topic) I just can't understand why a 2009 operating system can't determine that by opening a dialog box focused on an internal drive that I don't want to use the external ones, and even if I did I would only be saving a file to ONE of them not to all six!

As an addendum, why must external hard drives be awoken from sleep one at a time? Surely a modern, multi tasking operating system has the ability to process a few status check threads for separate hardware devices concurrently. I can understand the idea of minimising peak loads when we're dealing with server farms with hundreds of drives, but I just need my six to wake up in a reasonable time, and combined they'd still only draw a fraction of the power that, say, a refrigerator or grilled cheese sandwich iron would.

I'm a computer science student not a engineer so perhaps there are reasonable, logical reasons for why hardware like this behaves in this manner, but as it stands I can't see why the logic can't follow the second diagram above instead of the first. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, in fact I encourage it!