sawyl: (Default)
This morning I was presented with something of a conundrum: either stay in and try to get BSD going on my parents spare computer or spent an hour and a half standing around in the mud, freezing my arse off in the park, watching my niece play football.

Which did I pick? Well, suffice to say, I'm going to have to spend the rest of the day trying to work out what exactly happened to the XP boot loader.
Updated: After a little bit of a struggle — I initially failed to do a "sudo sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16" — I eventually got GRUB installed and working. I then added the following to the menu.lst file to load XP:

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader 1
makeactive
boot


And suddenly everything started working like a charm. Actually, the whole thing turned out to be quite a fun way to pass a cold Saturday morning. Certainly better than standing around in the freezing mud with the rest of my family...
sawyl: (Default)
Whilst contemplating whether I can be bothered to do the traditional November BSD upgrade, I've just discovered that my antique box can actually boot off the CD drive after all. This means that all the time I've spent over the last few years messing around with floppies, trying to get the boot image just so, has been time completely wasted. Typical.
sawyl: (Default)
Fed up with having to use SUX to read man pages, I finally got round to setting up man.cgi from the goodly folks at FreeBSD.org. It took a while to knock the thing into shape mainly, if I'm honest, because of the horrible pile of cruft that is man under Linux and not because of problems with the BSD browser.

My only complaint so far is the slightly counter-intuitive interface. It's not immediately apparent that the pull down menu only really affects key word searches and that changing the OS from the menu makes absolutely no difference to the section indexes etc. Then again, it's nice just to have the facility to search through the manuals for more than one OS, even if they are tricky to browse, so I guess it's a bit churlish to complain overmuch.
sawyl: (Default)
I was amused by the opinion piece in yesterday's Register about the problem with BSD security levels. In the article, Jason Miller wrote:

There were two different issues, each affecting different implementations. As usual, I carefully read through the advisories trying to understand what sort of impact the vulnerabilities had, how disclosure had been done, and that sort of thing. Once I got to the "Fix" section of the advisory, something caught my eye immediately.

No fix will be released for OpenBSD. To quote Theo de Raadt: "Sorry, we are going to change nothing. Securelevels are useless." I wouldn't have believed it to be an authentic vendor response had any other name been attached to the quote.

I'm very surprised to discover that Miller feels that way because, to me, the quote seemed like vintage de Raadt, with it's refusal to compromise and it's suggestion that he's way too busy with real work to bother about polishing his words into marketing speak. In fact, now that I think about it, I was rather bemused by the way the article insisted on referring to OpenBSD as vendor — they're more of a gestalt entity like Debian than a corporate vendor like Red Hat.

sawyl: (Default)
I've been playing with NetBSD for a while, trying to get it to boot with Xen, but so far I haven't had a lot of luck.

I've managed to install NetBSD, build the Xen tools from pkgsrc, install grub and build a domain0 NetBSD kernel, but when I try to boot the Xen hypervisor, I get the error "Not enough memory for DOM0 memory reservation."

I wonder if the scarcity of memory physical memory on my test box — I've only got 64MB — might be the problem.

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