I’ve spent this weekend mostly installing
FreeBSD on my job’s laptop. First I thought it was going to be hard because the hardware support but what was my surprise…it’s working like a champ! everything even the bluetooth.
The graphic part is semi-working, I mean I’m using
X.Org with the radeon driver, but the kernel-side module to get DRI is not recognizing my card but well that’s not big problem cause I don’t use 3D too much.
To get EST working I needed to install a port called est which provides a kernel module enabled in /etc/rc.conf, also installed a daemon named estctrl to modify the working frequency when needed.
The wireless card, an Intel WirelessPro 2200G, is not working yet but I’ve been reading on how to get it configured using NDIS drivers, that means getting the windows .SYS and .INF loaded into a FreeBSD kernel. It’s seems to work quite well…I’ll write about this in further posts.
Copyright (c) 1992-2005 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE #0: Sun Jun 19 17:26:29 CEST 2005
root@sjimenezac2k:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
Timecounter “i8254″ frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz (1594.83-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = “GenuineIntel” Id = 0×695 Stepping = 5
Yes! I’ve call just two minutes ago to my current ISP
ya.com to ask for their new products, actually about how I could get their 2Mbps(ADSL)+Voice for 26.95€/month plus taxes. They’ve told me this is a service for new customers and it’s gonna be painful to close my current account and open a new one with this new product cause I should stay like a month and a half without the service and I’ll loose my IP address which is not dynamic 
) they charge about 12€/month for this now…I’ve got it some years ago before they realized can’t give away IP addresses like if they were sweets for children….:P also I’d have to pay for opening the new customer account something like 32€…so I’ve thought it’s not worth it…
Then they offered me another product I can get 1Mbps right now (during this month…) for 32.95€/month plus taxes and by the end of July they’ll double my downstream bandwidth for free so I’ll have 2Mbps + static IP address + voice for 32.95€/month…:O~~~~ ohhhh yeah…I know Europe and many other countries are far away from this prices but…this is Spain 
Best is I was paying 35.95€/month plus taxes for my poor 512Kbps/128Kbps without the voice service so when that sweet lady was telling me about these offers I was thinking: “then why the heck I’m paying 35.95€??? Couldn’t they just send me an email asking if I wanted to switch???” I know…a penny is a penny…and they want my penis err…what was I thinking?! pennies .
Since last December I’ve read two books taking the time from mornings and evenings while going to or coming back from work and I’d like to write a little review here.
The first one was
The Power of Many written by Christian Crumlish. I must admit this kind of writes always interested me cause I use to analyze people and their behavior without notice I’m doing so, then someone smart explaining the why and the how communities are using the new technologies seemed to me really worth it of reading.
Everything that’s going on today on Internet could be found on this book, blogs, forums, mailing lists…the living web as sometimes it’s defined. But I really like to now if everything explained is actually real cause my country seems to be sleeping…wake up you bastards! just kidding…seriously, I can see how some people without too many technical skills are using their PC and their Internet access to know new people, to organize meetings, etc…but still there’s lots of conservative minds around who think Internet is taking away real communication between real people and the Internet is providing ways to hide the “real me” of any participant in these chats or whatever they use to meet people.
But I can say…who is taking away this real communications? Internet or the governments? I mean where can I meet my group of friends? In a pub? it’s always the same, we are loosing our spaces to meet with people and discuss sometimes without too much sense but that’s how it always has been…I can listen to my grandpa telling me how he helped to build a little park on my neighborhood…but nowadays these little spaces are disappearing, everything is buildings and less green spaces where grow up the children and see how their parents chat. So normal people start to see Internet as a tool to communicate and organize their social life…but it’s just that a TOOL.
Ok, of course there’re sick people who strive to use it for taking profit of the anonymity but these are this way even in real, most of they use to be people with real problems who just can fall into any other way of communication where they can be what they want not just what they really are.
Think about this…why teenagers are falling into the GSM carriers hands? Humans are a social species who need to be communicated with their human fellows then looking at our today’s society you’ll find a lack of ways to communicate to each other so people just switched from traditional ways to new ones thanking to technology, it is giving back to us what’s ours by a natural right.
Now the second one,
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. This has been a very nice reading since first pages, Linus has showed as a very interesting and really smart person…not just because he wrote Linux, it’s everything he has done during his short life I’m pretty sure like any other person he had done mistakes and so on…but he takes decisions quite in a smart way, always thinking what could be the best for him, for Linux and so on…
One of the most surprising points was how he met his wife, Tove. He was as teacher assistant at Helsinki and Tove was one of his students by that time Internet was not present as it is today so as homework he asked to everybody send an email to his address. There were very different mails…from the usual and simple “this is a test” to very important quotes. Then Linus opened Tove’s email and read how she asked him to have a date! finally they got married…the first woman approached to him electronically was the only one…(please let me know if something here is wrong…I don’t have the book near to check it…)
This a really interesting book where you can see how a real nerd/geek was grown up and how he spent most of his time to provide a “terminal emulator” which turned into an operating system, you can read about his thoughts and see he is really smart and not just a programmer, you can share those thoughts or you can’t but it easy to see his brightness .
My next book will be “The Eight”, this is a real twist for me…I’ve never been interested on such books and maybe I’m not but I’d like to give it a shot cause a very good friend of mine has recommended it…I’ll write my progresses in the near future
Ok since some time I’ve been quite off I mean technologically speaking. I took last two weekends to visit some friends first in
Vinaros (Castellon) and second on
Alboraia (Valencia) where I’m going this night again. This will be last trip during at least a month or so because I should save money to my next one! it will be to Madrid where I’m planning to stay for 4 o 5 days.
By some personal reasons I’ve been quite away from my beloved hobby…Operating Systems, now that I’m starting to be back I’ve downloaded
NetBSD which has the 2.0.2 as latest stable version, also I’ve looked how
FreeBSD is doing these days to strive it on my laptop but as I’m writing I’m thinking about
OpenBSD could be a nice choice for it cause they’ve got nice Wi-Fi support (Theo’s quest) and IIRC PowerNOW is been supported for some time now.
My laptop has been a pain in the ass since I got it…with its b0rked BIOS. Acer did nothing really well with my Aspire, the BIOS does not set the SSE bit properly and if I try to update it to the latest version available it gets even worse cause the table holding PowerNOW’s frequencies turns to be smaller than it was in previous version. That’s a big problem dealing with open source operating systems because if no one had this problems it means no one has cared about them so you have to start patching here and here and here…another pain in the ass cause this are just too specific patches to be accepted then you must keep patching across updates…oh! I forget about the funnier problem with my laptop…:P it doesn’t not set the CPU_ID to the proper value so it’s not recognized as a mobile CPU with PowerNOW technology…:P
I will keep
Gentoo as main OS for my laptop till I see how’s the BSD world these days .
I’m waiting for the carpenter ends the furniture my parents wanted for the computers room, he’s not even started it so I guess it’s gonna take some weeks yet. I’ve got everything in my room which is being so warm at nights keeping my workstation on. I’d like to have it ASAP cause I need my _space_ for setting up what I’ve got in mind…a main NetBSD server and a secondary one running Gentoo hardened project.
