Rubenerd

Do you have an older generation machine that can't boot from a CD-ROM and you would like to create a set of boot disks using your Mac OS X machine with a USB floppy drive? I did, and to spare you the trouble (and to help myself remember for future reference!) here's how to do it.

Firstly go grab yourself copies of the .flp floppy disk images from the FreeBSD FTP server.

Obviously you plug in your 1.44MB USB floppy drive in, then stick in a blank disk. Even if you're pretty sure the disk is blank it's a good idea to format it anyway to help detect bad sectors which can really screw up a FreeBSD installation (which can be really fun if you have other partitions with data on it!).

So to format your disk:

1. Fire up Disk Utility in /Applications/Utilities/.
2. Click your USB floppy drive in the devices column (should have a pretty little orange icon)
3. Click the Mount/Unmount button to unmount the disk
4. Click the Erase tab in the main window area, followed by the Erase push button

All good so far. If you get any errors during the process, most likely you have a dud disk. Just replace it and try again.

Now to make the disks. Basically you can follow the instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook, but instead of pointing to the "/dev/fd0" BSD device, point it to "disk1".

The drawn out steps:

1. Go to your trusty Terminal also in /Applications/Utilities/.
2. Use the cd command to navigate to the directory where you downloaded the .flp disk images, such as $ cd ~/Desktop/
3. Punch in dd if=DISKIMAGE.flp of=/dev/disk1, replacing DISKIMAGE with the image you’re using.

If all goes well, you should get output similar to this:

rubenerd@vertias-r-mbp ~/Desktop$ sudo dd if=boot.flp of=/dev/disk1
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes transferred in 203.249017 secs (7255 bytes/sec)
rubenerd@vertias-r-mbp ~/Desktop$

Good luck! Don't forget to also read up on the section in the FreeBSD handbook: 2.3.7 Prepare the Boot Media.

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10:00 – Going to the Petaling Street night markets in Kuala Lumpur (Ringgit exchange rate, crafts, roasting chestnuts, shoes… DVDs…), site housekeeping (Rudebox, Konqeuror), why I love KDE, and going where the weather suits my clothes!

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

I'm becoming increasingly worried about my mum. Physically she's coping well with the chemo (well as well as you can expect her to be coping considering she's been having it for over a decade now) but mentally I'm really scared that it's another story entirely.

Almost her whole life now is spent either in bed or in her chair up in her bedroom and her sense of humour is fading. I really seem to rub her the wrong way and get into her bad books with her a lot more now which is really hard to get used to. I keep telling myself it's just the drugs and chemo that's talking not her, but it's still unnerving.

I'm worried as well that she's losing hope too; and it's not surprising. The fact she almost never has any energy would be maddening. I talk of course from the point of view of someone who has never had chemo before and cannot even begin to comprehend what it would be like.

I think part of it as well stems from the press being all over people like Kylie Minogue who had to endure chemo for just over 6 months, a drop in the bucket compared to what my mum has had. Of course I'm not trying to dismiss what poor Kylie would have gone through, but you can understand my mum's perspective.

This has been going on for more than a decade, and I think we are all just fed up. I just really hope that being fed up and frustrated doesn't translate into giving up. From what my dad has told me she has tried to several times in the past, but has always chosen to soldier on. I love my mum as a mum but also as one of my best friends.

Given the type of cancer she has, she'll be having chemo on and off for the rest of her life until they come up with a cure. It's for this reason above all else that I get so amazinly angry with people like George W. Bush and John Howard when they would much rather blow people up than help fund vital medical research. I don't remember who said it, but I remember reading a quote that went somewhere along the lines of "all money that is spent on weapons is robbery from the poor and sick".

I'm waffling and talking politics again, so I'll stop here. As Spike Milligan said: "the end of [the blog post] is the best place to stop writing".

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10:00 – Merdeka 2007, why 211 is 211, scary overcast days in Kuala Lumpur that are scary, working in the Petronas Twin Towers, computer hardware review (Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000), and Ruben embarrassing himself!

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

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10:00 – Recorded at 0230hrs! Vibrating BlackBerry phones (with disastrous results!), the dreaded Motorola V3 RAZR refusing to charge problem, preliminary review of the Apple iPhone and Steve Jobs on inventing stuff!

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Today was pretty amazing. Why? I ate a small mango after brushing my teeth and was not bothered by the nauseating spearmint infused citrus flavour.

Actually something big did happen for me today and it's something that I've been wanting to do for ages. I installed from scratch FreeBSD on several PCs and without looking at any of the documentation for the first time. I'm dangerous!

 

In a manner similar to how DarkMirror in Singapore talks about learning Japanese, my knowledge of FreeBSD didn't consciously happen, it evolved and eventually clicked. Like most people starting out in the FOSS world after living on Mac OS X and… heaven forbid… Windows, I was somewhat confused by the more intricate details of compiling kernels with optimisation flags and updating port trees with CVS; but after a week of informal study I pulled my old 200MHz Pentium MMX machine out and installed FreeBSD without looking at any documentation. Without realising it until after I finished, the process of installing and configuring has become second nature.

I really am impressed with the quality of the BSDs and the open source community's efforts. Xorg + KDE 3.5 or Xfce 4.2 on a FreeBSD 6.1 box with the correct optimisations works flawlessly even on hardware that would struggle with Windows 98! Suddenly all the old machines that litter my expat family's house have uses. Heck I'm even looking at my old Amiga in a funny way now…

I feel such an overwhelming sense of power now than I did before in a way that proprietary operating systems never really allow. Open source rocks! If I don't like my X window manager, my desktop environment, my CLI text editor, my shell, my file browsers, my titlebar widgets or even my daemon services that manage SQL or the web, I can just change them or swap them for something else. A company doesn't dictate what software has to be installed, I do. And if something doesn't exist or I need to do something mundane, a quick keyboard lashing session later I've got Perl doing it for me.

 

Now I could have continued my exploration of Linux or just continued to hack away at Mac OS X, but I really do appreciate the strict conventions that the BSDs follow and the unwritten mantra that "if something works it's good" should actually be "if it's good it will work". FreeBSD, NetBSD (and from what I can tell from my currently limited experience, OpenBSD) are elegant, fast, very well documented and extremely robust.

It's got to the stage now where I'm even considering dual booting my MacBook Pro with FreeBSD and Mac OS X just to be able to use this stuff more and more in my day to day life.

For posterity (and because I think they're cool) I've posted some screenshots of some of the boxes I have happily running now. You can see the Mac OS X influence in my thinking with both the KDE and Xfce panels set up to look like the Dock and the permanent menu bar ;).

Here's Haruhi happily living in KDE 3.5/FreeBSD on my old HP box, (with the cursor unfortunately positioned on her face!!):

And here she is again in Xfce/FreeBSD on my 200MHz (with MMX… wow!) 1997 Sim Lim Square box:

I've also configured an old 133MHz Pentium box I picked up for peanuts to run as a dedicated firewall and local intranet webserver to serve up the Schade family wiki, kinda like a digital refrigerator door! Of course I couldn't put Haruhi on this because I don't want or need X on this machine. Ah well, can't win them all!

My next weekend project is to create a Perl script to download portsnap updates so they're residing on a local hard drive, then configure portsnap on each machine to look up the local server instead of retrieving the same image from the interent four times! Unless anyone knows of a port that already does something similar to this?

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15:00 – Spooky. The significance of 209 in the New Time Radio world (fellow NTR show The Overnighscape), the significance of 209 in the New Time Radio world (fellow NTR show The Overnighscape), and non dairy cream dealers!

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

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10:00 – Featuring the Rubenerd sister Elke Schade. Whole Wheat Radio (a Web 2.0 award, metal sheet roofing, Jim is the king of rants!), large nasals, food review (addictive Marks and Spencer wheat bacon rashers) and random Wiggle matching!

Recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Probably the last thing you want to read is another Apple iPhone analysis, but I see something quite big happening here.

Microsoft is already struggling with getting the Zune name as unbiquodous as iPod. They've been going around to different university campuses in the United States, they've been shamelessly astroturfing to give the illusion they have more support than they actually have, and still the vast majoraty of people still don't even know what the Zune is or have even heard of it before.

Now you can't readily compare the new Apple iPhone to the Zune, they're two different devices aimed at capturing two different markets, but they're both an example of where Apple and Microsoft are going.

It's no secret to anyone that the Zune is ugly. People on television are saying so, newspapers are writing about it, bloggers are, and even though it was a brand new device the older iPod still outsold it by leaps and bounds during the 2006 holiday season. In comparison, the very first iPhone just looks swish. In reality the iPhone shares very little with the iPod line, they run a differrent operating system and preliminary reports suggest they run on vastly different hardware as well, so in reality Apple have laregly created a version 1.0 device as well.

So Microsoft and Apple seem to be going in opposide directions: Apple had a music player, now they have a phone/PDA. Microsoft have provided PDA software for years, now they have a dedicated music player. The difference? Apple makes devices people want! I haven't heard anyone here in Asia who have returned from holidaying in the US saying anything good about the Zune. Asian girls in particular seem horrified by the design and readily tell me they wouldn't put those things anywhere near their handbags! The iPhone on the other hand? I don't think I need to explain the response ;).

I think this whole saga exposes the difference between Apple and Microsoft. From what I can tell Microsoft seems to be a company thesedays based on reaction rather than innovation; Apple shamelessly copies from others as well (Konfabulator anyone?) but the result is much more well executed.

I'm dissapointed over the lack of Java support in the iPhone though.

Am I biased? Probably. But I think Microsoft should just stop making copies of handheld consumer products and just focus on Windows and Office. I know my dad who is forced by Shell to use both daily would just appreciate improvements in stability and speed rather than the useless "features" Vista is stocked with or silly office ribbons. Last time I checked he's still running Windows 2000 Professional with Office 97 Standard.

I'm an Aussie by birth and given both of our countries were once British we still have those Union Jack thingys on our flags.

Apparently the redesigned New Zealand flag though still retains the Union Jack, but includes something 100% Pure New Zealand!:

Okay okay, I'm an Aussie and I couldn't help myself :D.