FreeSBIE 2.0 on a MacBook Pro

I decided I would take the new FreeSBIE version for a spin, based on 6.2 it was supposed to have support for booting on the new Intel Mac's that don't have legacy hardware support anymore (PS/2 and whatnot). FreesBIE started booting, and that is when I lost all keyboard control. I left my MacBook Pro sit for a good 15 minutes, after which I heard the CD spin down, disappointed I saw that the FreeSBIE logo was still sitting over top of the screen.

Not expecting much, I hit the space bar on my laptops keyboard, and away it went. I was sitting at the console logged in as the FreeSBIE user. My initial thought was dmesg. By accident I typed this on my Bluetooth enabled keyboard, and it really surprised me that it even worked. It had detected my Bluetooth keyboard, and connected to it somehow so it could be used with my MacBook Pro!

After the dmesg I grabbed a USB mouse and plugged it in (using X11 without a right click button is just about as hard as in Windows), as it had not connected to my Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. Upon plugging my mouse in, it recognized it, however it did not start a moused for it. So I had to start it myself:

moused -t auto -p /dev/ums3

Then to make sure it worked, I enabled the console based mouse pointer:

vidcontrol -m on

And moved the mouse around. Sweet it worked.

I then proceeded to try Xorg, with startx as the FreeSBIE user, and it worked. I had a fully working XFCE desktop sitting in front of me. The MacBook Pro is mighty fast running XFCE, I opened up FireFox which took a while to load from the CD, however once in Cache, opening FireFox took merely seconds, which is faster than when running it in Mac OS X where it will sit in the Dock and bounce a few times before opening, then again, FreeBSD had 1.8 GB of ram left over after starting XFCE, Mac OS X takes up at least 700 Mb with all the stuff I normally have running, so that could make the difference.

Everything worked great, two minor things that did not work: Wireless and Wired internet. Just minor :P. That is the reason that right now you are not also looking at screen shots. I don't actually own any USB flash drives, since I transfer all files over the network, and I lose the damn things all the time. According to Mac OS X it is an Atheros based 5424 card, which also supports N. The older model MacBook Pro's with the Core Duo's did have their Wireless card supported, so I am unsure why it is failing, maybe it is because the chipset has changed, the ath_hal does not support it yet. The wired card is not working either, and that is probably since the if_sk driver has not been updated yet. There is an experimental driver in -CURRENT which has better support for the Marvell chipset for the GigBit-E cards, which will be awesome.

I am looking forward to more improvements in FreeBSD to run on the newer hardware, and soon I might be triple booting my MacBook Pro with Mac OS X, Windows, and FreeBSD. It might sound weird, but Mac OS X does not have the same interfaces available in terms of being able to develop for it as Mac OS X, so it makes sense to have it on my main laptop as well.

FreeSBIE has changed a lot since it's 2.0 inception, and certainly still has places it can go, however for what they have packed onto one CD it is very impressive.

It was an experience, and it was a shame wireless did not work, otherwise it would have made it much easier for me to decide to go with it, and do it. We shall see what the future holds for me, and my MacBook Pro.

Remember the tree?

So not too long ago we had a tree online that one could change the lights from on to off, and other such fun items, well here are some stats for the 20 days that it was monitored with Google Analytics:

Average: 4.76 P/V Visits: 4,323 Pageviews: 20,577

That is twentythousand hits on an embedded system!

Sick thoughts :P

So, I was just thinking, what if I had two 80 GB HD's and a 160 GB HD? I could then gstripe the 80 GB's, and then on top of that stripe those with the 160 GB. Then I'd have around 320 GB or so, I could then gstripe that with a 320 GB HD.

Ohhh the possibilities. By that time, I'd probably just use some sort of gvinum, since apparently it can do raid 5 over hard drives that are not the same size. Something i'd like to eventually do as a way to keep my data safe and a secure.

Sick hackery -- FreeBSD's GEOM is awesome

I was really bored. Which normally results in some destructive thing happening to something I am playing with. This time it was Some of the hard drives in my FreeBSD box. Just a little back-story:

/dev/ad0 - 20 GB
/dev/ad1 - 40 GB
/dev/ad2 - 100 GB
/dev/ad3 - 60 GB
/dev/da0 - 8 GB
/dev/da1 - 8 GB

So, I had already made a gstripe(8) out of the two SCSI drives, da[1|2], however I wanted to see if I could do the same with ad[1|2|3]. As I did not want to resort to gvinum, which is rather heavy, and I was unable to figure out how it worked. The entire point behind gstripe is that since it is striped, the writes/reads are faster since it writes/reads to all the drives at the same time. So first I tried:

gstripe label -v st1 /dev/ad1 /dev/ad2 /dev/ad3

That however complained that it would only use 40 GB's on all of the drives, since the smallest drive in the collection was 40 GB. I then read up on gconcat(8), which concatenates all the drives together to look like one big drive, without the speed improvement of striping. So I figured, since FreeBSD's gstripe is GEOM based, it should not care about what the underlying data sink is, just that it is a device, so just maybe this could work:

gconcat label -v gb100 /dev/ad1 /dev/ad3

So now I had created a 100 GB "hd" at /dev/concat/gb100. I now did what I was planning to do:

gstripe label -v st1 /dev/ad2 /dev/concat/gb100

No problem! :-D. I now had 180.48 GB, of which only about 166 GB was usable. Which is still excellent. As it still came with a speed improvement. Followed up with the standard advice from the handbook I did the following:

bsdlabel -wB /dev/stripe/st1
newfs -U /dev/stripe/st1a
mount /dev/stripe/st1a /mnt

Which got me the following:

/dev/stripe/st1a    180G    5.5G    161G     3%    /mnt

Full:

Filesystem          Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a         496M     63M    393M    14%    /
devfs               1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ad0s1e         496M    230K    456M     0%    /tmp
/dev/ad0s1f          15G    2.2G     11G    17%    /usr
/dev/ad0s1d         1.4G    115M    1.2G     9%    /var
/dev/stripe/st0a     16G    4.0K     15G     0%    /usr/scsi
/dev/stripe/st1a    180G    5.5G    161G     3%    /mnt

w00tage. Next up I might actually add gdbe(8) or geli(8) even in front of the stripe, so that I will have an encrypted stripe. Talk about stacking. Might give gvinum a try sometime :P

All working:

keyhole# gconcat status
        Name  Status  Components
concat/gb100      UP  ad1
                      ad3
keyhole# gstripe status
      Name  Status  Components
stripe/st0      UP  da0
                    da1
stripe/st1      UP  ad2
                    concat/gb100

Moving my domains

I am moving my domains away from registerfly.com (not linked on purpose) and am moving them to GoDaddy. I was sick and tired of RegisterFly's website loading slower than molasses coming down from a mountain top. The inability to keep my account secure (someone logged into it, I got an email, and immediately change the password).

I apologize if there are any domain hickups in the process. I hope this helps me in the future for when I need to work with my domains, and change the DNS settings. Waiting for the login to happen for over 40 seconds is just not acceptable.