Blogging All About BSDs

One of the new features coming in 9.0 is the ability to select and run multiple window managers, meaning you no longer have to like KDE to like PC-BSD

We do realize that we’re opening up a can of worms in that we’ll be discovering lots of bugs in various window managers and/or their FreeBSD implementation. This can be seen

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We did some testing on 3G modems at OLF and loading the u3g driver seems to do the trick (earlier versions of FreeBSD had a conflict between u3g and umass but this seems to be fixed now). You can load the driver by issuing this command as the superuser:

kldload u3g

If you would like the driver to autoload at

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One of the changes coming in 9.0 is the ability to select multiple desktop environments during installation. Kris completed the code for this late last week and was able to show it off at the PC-BSD booth during Ohio LinuxFest. Here is a preliminary screenshot:

In order to fully integrate the PC-BSD utilities into a desktop manager, the desktop manager

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Earlier today, Karl Fischer mentioned that Tapatalk might be a useful forum feature. As described on its website, Tapatalk “is a forum app on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Nokia. Our app provides you super fast forum access to any vBulletin, IPBoard, phpBB or SMF forum that has activated our Tapatalk plugin”.

The forum system administrator added the plugin

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The following PBIs are now available in Software Manager:

• MESS: an acronym that stands for Multi Emulator Super System. MESS will more or less faithfully reproduce computer and console systems on a PC. MESS can currently emulate over 250 systems from the last 5 decades.
• Mixxx: software for DJ’ing. You can use wave based audio files, Ogg Vorbis and MP3

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The latest NVIDIA driver is now available through Update Manager for both 32 and 64 bit systems. From the release highlights:

• Fixed a bug that prevented XvMC from initializing in most cases.
• Added support for xorg-server video driver ABI version 8, which will be included in the upcoming xorg-server-1.9 series of releases.
• Fixed a bug that caused extremely slow

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The following PBIs are now available in Software Manager:

• QutIM: multiprotocol IM client, supports Jabber, ICQ and some other protocols. It offers a shiny QT4-based look and extra features like spam control, tabbed chat windows and others.
• John: a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting different architectures), DOS, Win32, BeOS,

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The following PBIs are now available for installation through Software Manager:

• Search and Rescue: a 3D flight simulator in which the player flies around
  the map rescuing people. The game has a selection of several different
  helicoptors and a jet airplane to choose from. The game includes
  training missions, more complete missions and a campaign mode as
  well as a

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It’s still very early days for planning the features that will go into PC-BSD 9.0, but there is a start of a task list and some details on improvements that will be made to the PBI format.

We definitely want to hear from you about what you’d like to see included / changed / made better for this release. Currently

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There’s a discussion in the comments section of the Using VirtualBox post which brings up the question of how screenshots should be handled in the Handbook. What’s your opinion? Do you find it useful if:

• the screenshot shows the default values (what the user sees when they first access a menu or screen)
• the screenshot shows the desired value (e.g.

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The Using VirtualBox section of the Handbook has been updated.

Leave a comment if you see anything amiss or want some more content added to this section e.g. it doesn’t answer a scenario that you have encountered using VirtualBox to install PC-BSD.

The latest version of Bordeaux is now available. Bordeaux is inexpensive software that allows you to run Windows applications on a non-Windows system such as PC-BSD. This can be handy if you have recently migrated to PC-BSD and still need to use applications that you purchased for Windows or if you have a Windows application that you need to

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LinuxBSDos.com has a review of PC-BSD 8.1. The review begins with:

PC-BSD 8.1 was released on July 20, 2010, roughly five months after version 8.0 was released. Some of the suggestions made in the review of PC-BSD 8.0 have been carried out in this latest release. In fact, the changes were made within one month of that review being published.

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How to do so has been a common topic on the #pcbsd Freenode IRC channel. We’ve  provided two ways for doing so and updated the Handbook as follows:

Submit PBI Requests

Want to request a specific application to be made available in PBI format? This is an excellent way to let PBI developers know which applications are most useful to

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The following PBIs were added this week and are available for installation in Software Manager:

• Workrave: Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit. These can be customized and it stops the counter when you

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Just a quick heads up that changes to the Handbook and FAQ will be slower this week as I’m being kept busy with the final technical review for the BSDP exam objectives document which hopefully will be ready for publication by end of next week.

PC-BSD will definitely be rocking the Ohio LinuxFest in mid-September. This is an awesome event

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Something else that should keep us busy for the next few months is updating the FAQS. There are currently several hundred and nearly all of them are out-of-date. Part of our evil plan is to have the FAQS available as an off-line version that can be included with every release. Having the FAQS available as a document means it will

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I’m still learning the various quirks of WordPress and would appreciate some help/advice from those with more experience.

Can anyone recommend a good archive utility that allows for easy navigation without taking up the whole sidebar? I’m envisioning something with a drop down menu that lets you select the month and/or another drop down menu that lets you select a

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More cleanup in the Handbook today… Some of it was in the Additional Resources section where I cleaned out the dead links and added the ones I could think of off the top of my head. I’m sure I missed many good resources (editing for 8 hours tends to empty out the top of one’s head…)

You can help us

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