Read UPDATING, Luck...

I spent weekend updating my desktop system. I've built 8.2, updated Xorg, KDE and different trifles. Finally I reinstalled autoconf,automake,libltdl,libtool, because portmaster couldn't update them (ports moved). Periodically I had to kill grep during port install, because I forgot to update portmaster. These two problems could be solved if I had read "UPDATING"... But the last one was interesting: I didn't manage to make xf86-video-ati work, system hanged with "radeon" driver and performance dropped significantly with "radeonhd". At last, I rolled back to using x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati613. I have to update other major ports (OpenJDK, Chromium, Firefox), but this can wait. I'm going to wait for Chromium 9 (which was promised to land in ports tree in March-April) and to replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice on this week...

Finally wine is fixed...

Finally one irritating wine bug was fixed. Now I've just updated my wine to 1.3.3 (I had this in my port tree) with applied suggested patch. Some windows applications still don't work on my desktop (FreeBSD 8.1, xf86-video-ati-6.13.2, wine-1.3.3). However, they work on Linux and Intel integrated video adapter, but it seems I should blame ati video driver for this. It seems that Intel is the best video adapter for Unix-like system. At least, I hope Intel will not make it unusable by dropping support for no-KMS mode.

I hate state establishments

I hate Russian state establishments: they want you to fill a pill of papers to work for them and don't want to pay a penny for your job.

Some exotic licenses...

We all agree that 2-clause BSD-license is a suitable license for your software. But I have found two more interesting permissive licenses: Beer-ware license and more recently Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.

More troubles with OpenVZ

I have two troubles with OpenVZ:
1) udevd works strange, in particular, /dev/ptmx gets incorrect permissions and so xterm, gnome-terminal, etc doesn't work. Solved it whith "chmod 666 /dev/ptmx" in rc.local
2) su doesn't work for usual user: asks a password, and when the password is correct, it returns immediately with "incorrect password", when the password is wrong, it returns the same after timeout. Decided to use sudo.

Vnc worked without surprises: just created necessary entries in /etc/sysconfig/vncservers:

VNCSERVERS="2:username"
VNCSERVERARGS[2]="-nohttpd"

I had to replace ~/.vnc/xstartup with the following to run gnome-session on each user login:

while /bin/true;  do
   /usr/bin/gnome-session
done

Now I have to install some supplementary software (OpenJDK, NetBeans, Oracle SQL Developer) and create template from this settings. After finishing deploying template, I'll have about 20 VMs for students...

OpenVZ and Oracle

I prepare for new Oracle course now. I'd like to provide every student a OpenVZ container running developer desktop and Oracle XE. Just for now, it seems XE runs normally in container. Just set SHMPAGES at least to 524288 in /etc/sysconfig/vz-scripts/<vid>.conf and install XE in container in the following way:

yum install libaio bc
rpm --nopre -ivh oracle-xe-univ-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm
/etc/rc.d/oracle-xe configure

A system must be configurable...

After reading Stonebraker articles, like this one. I can't decide if knobs are so bad. I tend to agree with this post... A system must be configurable, whatever other people think. I do like to have 1000 knobs in my application (or in system I support). It doesn't mean that I'm happy to tune them all, but I'd like to have a possibility of tuning them when something goes wrong. And I hate applications which try to be more clever than me....

SPARC is not dead...

I have missed T3 benchmarks so far. It seems that SPARC clusters rule as ever. I suspect that T3 price is not such pleasant as its performance, however I'm glad to see prosperous non-x86 platform.
And we have just given away our last SPARC server (Sun Fire V440). I'd be glad to work with SPARC servers in the future, however, the probability of this is quite low.