caleb, freebsd, fedora, google, and the x-prize

Isn't my almost-3-months-old son cute?

FreeBSD 5.3 Beta 7 (the last beta) has been announced by Scott Lang. TaoSecurity has an interesting overview.

I recently installed Fedora (core 2) as part of an experiment to enable Firefox (and Mozilla in general) support for some of our Flash software. Big deal for me, since i'm a FreeBSD fan and usually poo-poo linux distributions :) I have to say i'm impressed - i really don't have the time to learn the intricacies of a new os base right now - and i don't have to! The installer is easier to run than XPs, intuitive and straightforward. Up2date is cool, Gnome kicks KDE's butt, and almost everything is where a FreeBSD geek expects it to be :-) Easy to use (at least for default usage) firewall interface. So far i've installed Nessus as an external RPM (it was easy - yum is an excellent RPM management tool).

Now the hardware i installed it on... is another reason why i went the Fedora route. I scavenged one of our oldest "behemoth" servers (1998 bios hee hee), which is a 4 processor (Intel PII 450 MHz) machine with 2 gigs of ram (good grief) and a DAC960 RAID controller (with 6 x 6 gig scsi drives + 1 spare). All fine, except for two things:

1. The machine also has an onboard Symbios Logic scsi controller. The Symbios and DAC hate each other (the Symbios, if enabled, nukes the DAC logical drive on reboots, which sucks) so i disabled the Symbios... but FreeBSD and Fedora installers by default probe the device, which results in the DAC logical drive being nuked.
2. FreeBSD doesn't have decent drivers for the DAC960.

Both FreeBSD and Fedora can disable device probing on installation, but Fedora's Anaconda (with kudzu) installer is streaks ahead of FreeBSD when it comes to selectively installing device drivers. Fedora core 2 also has fully functional DAC960 drivers... so it works brilliantly as long as you boot with "noprobe" and don't install drivers for the Symbios Logic.

3 of the 4 processors are happily running a Seti@Home (BOINC) client... now i just have to figure out how to utilize 2 gigs of ram (Mem:  2074752k total,  338932k used,  1735820k free - what a waste :-)

GMail has new features (woo!) - including draft emails, forwarding messages, moved and improved contacts list, and Atom feeds for new mail notifications (nice!).

And finally congratulations to the SpaceShipOne team for grabbing the X-Prize. Awesome awesome awesome :)

"If God is like white light," he said, "Then the different religions might all be like pieces in a stained glass window." (from beth's blog)