BSD & Gaming

Articles Include:

• Drupal on FreeBSD – part 3
• Email MX server in FreeBSD – Confguring FreeBSD as a mail MX server with Postfx
• Installing NGINX and PHP 5.3.x on FreeBSD 8.1
• Text Terminal magic with tmux
• Writing ‘bots using XMPP
• How to quickly make a bootable USB stick with FreeBSD
• FreeBSD and simple char device driver for real PCI-hardware
• BSD’s and Solaris on the Desktop. Are they ready to serve?
• Games Geeks Play!
• Why can’t offce employees get along with open source offce suites?

Get it fresh off the press by going to BSDMagazine.Org for your free copy now.

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I’m enjoying my android tablet and having fun finding great applications for it. With the 10.2″ screen I keep a lot of photos on it but have had problems with the preloaded image viewers. The default picture viewing application blows chunks in the worst way, frequently crashing and intermittently unable to view new additions to the galleries because of buggy image caching. Forget about using it to set new desktop wallpaper, it forces you to crop the chosen image size down and limits it to a low resolution version.

I’ve tried a ton of picture viewers from the market and other sources, nothing works the way I wanted them to and until now none solved the bad wallpaper dilemma. However I finally found a program called “JustPictures!” and it is the best I have found so far. JustPictures! offers some useful features like choosing what folders to use and how to display images. Most importantly it also lets you apply a larger sized high res image for the desktop. Give it a try, JustPictures! is free and definitely better than the stock application.

Christmas came early this year for me thanks to the generosity of my family. They know I haven’t had the cash to splurge on any new tech stuff in ages and I’ve been daydreaming about a new PDA or Tablet PC for a while. I just had to decide what I wanted.

I knew I didn’t want to spend the insane dollars required just to get an iPad with very limited features. In my mind things like USB ports, built in WiFi, and flash card readers should always be included as standard fare. Neither should getting any of those items be an excuse for sellers to donkey punch your wallet and suck higher fees out of you….  No thanks Apple you lost my interest with that business model!

Being old school some facts didn’t really sink in till I started researching my choices, I found that the days of stand alone PDA designs are long over, they’ve all been incorporated into cell phones.  Bleh! No more cell phones, they oughta’ be outlawed! Get off my lawn ya dam punks!

While netbooks are appealing, actually using the super tiny keyboards and looking at the small screens for any length of time lost my interest. Ah well, crosses netbooks off the selection list. Given my idiosyncratic preferences the choices are down to some sort of a tablet and picking what operating system I wanted.

Apple’s OS is definitely out since as I already stated I have zero interest in the whole iPad boondoggle. I also tend to stay as far away from Windows as I can. That left the final contender being an ANDROID based device.

Once I decided on a DROID based tablet I spent a many hours, days actually, looking at options, system specs, etc.  I kept getting drawn to the Zenithink tablets despite a few complaints I found, which included a particularly snarky magazine article deriding them. The article was dismissive of the ZT-180 because it wasn’t the omnipotent Apple-Killer they wanted it to be. While I can see their disappointment over not having a rival to flaunt at Apple, I couldn’t agree with their conclusions at all since they based them on silly expectations.  In my view if you take the ZT-180 for what it is and what it offers in it’s price range, then it makes a very nice choice with a broad range of abilities compared to some competitors.

Pricing from stateside dealers ran anywhere from fifty to eighty dollars more than dealers outside the U.S. so I ordered one from over-seas instead. Delivery took less than ten days to arrive from time of order. I’ve had it for almost two weeks now and it’s been a heck of a lot of fun to mess around with. Once I’ve had more time to kick it around and mod it to my preferences I’ll write up the details.

In conclusion Santa was very good to me this year and I’m really pleased!!  ANDROID ROCKS!

ZT-180 Wiki page from SlateDroid

PCBSD 8.1 is now available for your desktop or laptop!! What are you waiting for? Go get yourself a copy now!

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5

Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

• FreeBSD 8.1-Release
• KDE 4.4.5
• Numerous fixes to the installation backend
• Support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning
• Improved ZFS support
• Bugfixes to desktop tools / utilities

Announcement – [LINK]

Release notes – [LINK]

Download via FTP mirrors – [LINK]

FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE is available.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

-zfsloader added
-zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14
-NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities
-UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support
-SMP support in PowerPC G5
-BIND 9.6.2-P2
-sendmail updated to 8.14.4
-OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1
-GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5

Announcement – [LINK]

Release notes – [LINK]

Download via official BitTorrent – [LINK]

Download via FTP mirrors – [LINK]

For those of you who haven’t found it yet, there is a really good Dieselpunk web site located at http://www.dieselpunks.org with tons of great information and picture galleries. Don’t waste any time go on over and take a look,  it’s really worth it !

WIRED had an article marking today’s anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. It got me thinking about a lot of things, mainly about where we have been as a country and where we are going in the future. It’s tough to see positive things when, as a nation, we are so dispirited. It was huge events like Apollo 11 that helped us to see we can do great things and we can reach outside of our petty worldly fears and selfishness for something bigger. I just hope in today’s apologetic rhetoric we don’t rush to rewrite history into a more politically correct version forgetting the accomplishments made and losing hard won lessons.

The knowledge gained from NASA’s work has affected everything from the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the homes we live in to the technology that goes into the cars, computers, phones, and every other gadget we love. Maybe the short sighted folks in D.C. will remember that and realize that while it may cost a little to keep it fed, NASA is the “golden goose” that pays us back a thousand fold everyday.

For WIRED’s article go here – [LINK]

The O’Reilly folks put out a nice little article covering PCBSD’s ease of installation. I myself used FreeBSD for years compiling everything by hand contending on occasion with “dependency hell”.

Today I am definitely a PCBSD convert. PCBSD’s simple gui installer makes upgrading or new installs a snap. I also love how easy it is to install new software or upgrade existing programs using the PBI system.

Read the article here – [LINK]

Get your July issue now! It’s becoming a free monthly magazine and you can download your copy in PDF format directly from their web site.

Get the July issue here – [LINK]

Back issues are available as well – [LINK]

Remember when a handheld computer was just a PDA and not a phone/camera/mini texting tool/blah blah blah as well? Personally I hate cell phones let alone text messaging, and I don’t have any real use for either. OK… I admit I have a cheap ass “pay as you go” cell shoved down into the bottom of my backpack just in case of emergency, but I don’t want it to do anything else. I love the sense of freedom I get when I accidentally leave the dam phone at home. Just try to find a stand alone PDA today, I don’t really see any except for used ones.

I had a Palm Vx for years, I loved it! Light, thin, and portable with a ton of accessories that could slip into a shirt pocket without feeling like you just put a ten pound brick in there. As time went on features like a flash card slot, sound port, and wireless capability were added to the genre – all good stuff. Then they stuffed in a cell phone too – bleh! Don’t get me started on iPads and netbooks, they’re not what I want. It’d be nice if someone served the niche market I’m in. But I know it won’t ever be profitable again with today’s market so I’ll have to settle for something else.