hubertf's NetBSD Blog
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[20110417] Prezi: on NetBSD and pkgsrc
Looking around for alternative presentation methods, I stumbled across Prezi. PreziIt uses a path through a mind map to show concepts and connections. It's free for public use, can create output for the web (Flash), as PDF (boring slideshow style :) and also give you a ZIP file with a Windows and a Mac OS X binary for offline consumption.

Meetings can be scheduled for webinar-style online presentation, and there's a aso a Desktop version that can be used offline.

As a show-off, here's what's possible, with NetBSD and pkgsrc as topic, plus some historical background on those topics:

This presentation is also available as PDF snapshot, as Windows/Mac ZIP-snapshot file and online.

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[20070504] Coverity and pkgsrc
I've found this interesting report about Coverity and pkgsrc via the NetBSD News Beat and the DragonFly BSD Digest, telling that ``[...] Coverity has chosen to use pkgsrc (www.pkgsrc.org) as a framework for building and scanning software. Pkgsrc makes it easier for anyone, including Coverity, to build free software.''

There's also another interesting part that hints that pkgsrc could gain more users by persuing that user community: ``It happens that pkgsrc is running a little behind and still has 0.63 as its basis. I will try to get a more recent version in pkgsrc (in particular because new code is more likely to contain error, ego notwithstanding), but from looking at the scan, it's clear many of these bugs remain in the current codebase.''

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[20070405] Advocacy Flyers updated
Shameless copy from my posting to netbsd-advocacy: I've updated the collection of flyers in http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/advocacy/ with the latest set of flyers from Stefan Schumacher. Contents have been updated, internal (TeX) structure was cleaned up (except for the Xen one... volunteers?), and there's a bunch of new flyers in DIN A4 format:
  • General information on NetBSD in English, German, and both
  • NetBSD Security in German+English
  • pkgsrc in English and German
  • Xen in German+English
I've included all the files to rebuild the PDFs along with the PDFs themselves.

A note on the format: We went from the 3-fold flyer over A5 to A4 - it's easiest to print and doesn't require folding. (Have you ever folded some 500 flyers? :-) Future flyers will most likely be in A4 format.

Thanks a LOT to Stefan Schumacher for all the work he has put into this!

Enjoy!

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[20070309] Catching up: events, articles, benchmarks, summer of code...
So I was away for a few days, being sick and then giving a talk at the Chemnitz Linuxdays and then off for a few days in Austria visiting Vienna & Zotter, and there's a backlog of stuff that happened in NetBSD's madhouse^Wwonderful world. Here's a quick run-down of things that I'm too lazy to post single items on:
  • Linuxdays Chemnitz: I was only there for my presentation on sunday, due to not feeling too well the days before. Still, Stefan, Jörg, Charlie and many others staffed the booth just fine, and I think every single household in and around Chemnitz has a NetBSD install and/or Live CD now. :)

    Related talks to mention are Stefan Schumacher's talk on hardening systems with systrace and deleting data. My own talk was not too NetBSD specific, showing an application on how to implement dynamic DNS with some retail web/domain hoster. Slides for my talks are available as OpenOffice .ODP and as PDF. (I'll reconsider the move from TeX/prosper to OpenOffice after it was NOT as easy as I expected to find a machine running OOo for presentation purpose, after my laptop's harddisk crashed on the way to Chemnitz!)

  • While at roadshows: Stefan Schumacher has made DIN A4 pkgsrc flyers in english and german language.

  • NetBSD's puff-based FUSE implementation "refuse" is now in a state to also run the NTFS-g3 filesystem, which offers read/write support for NTFS. It's available from pkgsrc/filesystems/fuse-ntfs-3g.

  • Google News found me an article that NetBSD stack supports Geode NAS design: ``Wasabi Systems Inc.'s BSD-based NAS (network attached storage) software stack now supports a Geode-based reference design from AMD. Wasabi Storage Builder for NAS, combined with AMD's Geode LX NAS RDK (reference design kit), provides a secure, reliable platform for the development of NAS devices, according to Wasabi. ''

    While that's all fine for Wasabi, it should be noted that whatever the company Wasabi offers is not automatically available in the freely available operating system called NetBSD. Integration efforts would have to happen first, so the headline of that article is unfortunately misleading if not to say plain wrong!

  • Another article that's more to the point: Julio M. Merino Vidal has worked on getting multiboot support into NetBSD, and in his article ``Making NetBSD Multiboot-Compatible'' he talks more about it.

  • Andrew Doran has done lots of work on NetBSD's thread and SMP implementation recently, and he has made a comparison between performance of the Scheduler-Activations-based code in NetBSD 4 and the one that will be in NetBSD 5 (AKA NetBSD-current, currently numbered as 4.99.13). See his mail to tech-kern or watch the images for 'make cleandir' on an empty source tree and the MySQL supersmack benchmark.

  • Google runs another Summer of Code, and this year it's not clear upfront who will be allowed as mentoring organizations. NetBSD is ready to participate again, and there's an official announcement from NetBSD about this, including pointers to our suggested/wanted list of projects and the project application HowTo. People interested in submitting a project proposal (via google!) are encouraged to use the remaining time until the deadline to discuss their proposals on the public NetBSD tech-* lists! (Personally I'll try to stay out of GSoC this year to finish some reallife work. At least that's the plan so far ...)

  • Three new security advisories were released:

  • Another article that doesn't mention NetBSD but g4u: ``How to Install a New Hard Drive: Tech Clinic'' by Joel Johnson. From the article: `` To make your new drive work like your old drive, you'll need a disk "cloner." There are a myriad of options, from commercial solutions such as the old favorite Ghost from Symantec ($70; symantec.com) and Copy Commander from VCom ($35; v-com.com) to free applications, such as MaxBlast from Maxtor, that come bundled with hard drives. If you're comfortable mucking around with Linux/BSD, I've had great luck with the free g4u application. If you have a local file server, you can even send the disk image from your laptop to an FTP site, install the larger drive, then FTP it back to your laptop, obviating the need for a drive enclosure''.

So much for now. Enjoy!

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[20061101] The NetBSD Foundation Spreadshirt.net Store
I know that TNF has a Cafepress store, which is nice for people in the USA, but those of us on the other side of the planet may want to get something with less shipping and taxes attached. In that regard, I've learned today that TNF also has a Spreadshirt.net store!

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[20060312] NetBSD promo material updated
Working with Stefan Schumacher,Joerg Pernfuss and Rainer Brinkmöller, I have updated a bunch of NetBSD promo material:

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[20060308] NetBSD at the Chemnitz Linuxdays (Updated)
There's a NetBSD booth at the Chemnitz Linuxtays and Stefan Schumacher has posted a bunch of first pictures. Lots of action going oin here, I'll post more later.

If you're bored, drop by!

Update: Stefan added more pictures to the above page, and there are also more pictures by lay.

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[20060307] NetBSD at the Chemnitz Linuxdays 2006
I spent the past weekend at the Chemnitz Linuxdays and had an excellent time. See my mail to netbsd-advocacy for my full report.

Please note the request for volunteers for the following upcoming events:

  • CeBit (already staffed, but can't hurt having some more people as backup)
  • Vienna Linuxdays
  • Wiesbaden "Linuxtag"
Drop me mail if you want to go there, I'll get you in contact with the people who coordinate a *BSD booth!

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[20060303] Put a flag on your desk(top)
It's nice to show what you run. So far, the xdaemon packages were good for displaying daemons in an xteddy-style, but there was nothing showing the (new) NetBSD logo. I've changed this tonight, and after installing either pkgsrc/x11/xdaemon (lean, doesn't need imlib) or pkgsrc/x11/daemon2 (wants imlib and whatnot), you can put a NetBSD flag on your desktop:
    % cd /usr/pkgsrc/x11/xdaemon
    % make install
    % rehash
    % xnetbsd-flag &
    % xnetbsd-flag2 &
    % xdaemon &
    % xdaemon2 &
Enjoy!

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[20060302] Not An Article: Interview with Stephen Jones
I wasn't aware of bsdtalk, a blog which (also) carries interviews of various BSD-related celebrities.

This week, Stephen Jones of SDF, Super Dimension Fortress, who provides free shell accounts at http://www.freeshell.org was interviewed. Klick here. for the mp3!

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[20060301] Feedback wanted for Xen flyer (english+german)
Joerg Pernfuss is working on a flyer for roadshows, to promote BSD (NetBSD and FreeBSD) on Xen. A preview is available, for any suggested improvements send Joerg your feedback!

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[20060227] PCjacking
From the PCjacking website (and found via symlink): ``PCjacking is sticking Linux Live CDs in computers located in popular department stores, to let the customers know that something other than Windows exists (...). If you think it's an useful thing to do, try it yourself ! PCjacking is totally safe for the hijacked PC, and leaves it completely unaltered.''

I'm tempted to say that this IS a nice idea (and guerillia marketing at its best :-). Esp. after I ran by a retail store the other day that had a machine showing some KDE desktop in the window (made me go "wtf?!"). Now, how about grabbing some NetBSD Live CDs and visiting your nearby retail store tomorrow? :)

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[20060208] Xen and the Art of SysAdmin
Last wednesday, Johnny Lam gave a presentation about "Xen and the Art of SysAdmin" at the New York BSD User Group, NYCBUG. The presentation was about using Xen in the real world to simplify the maintenance of BSD systems, including a short introduction to Xen and how it works, an in-depth look at the details of one particular Xen setup along with some performance results, and how using Xen simplifies life as an admin.

Both the presentation (html) and the audio track (mp3) are available.

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[20060203] Quote of the day: from slashdot
I think there's a lot of truth in this: ``You head down a path to convergence when you run a BSD. Everything stays consistent over the long term, so instead of continually re-learning the latest python-based gui-goop config utility, you gradually learn what each and every line in the important files in /etc is for.'' (Source)

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[20060201] Preorder now: "Juggling Chucky" NetBSD T-Shirts
I've ordered another box of the world-famous "Juggling Chucky" NetBSD T-Shirts. Come to the Chemnitz Linuxtag to pick up yours, or drop me mail for some limited orders. Personal pickup preferred! :)

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[20060118] Introducing NetBSD, in spanish language
I don't speak spanish, but the history section introducing NetBSD's origins in this presentation (PDF) doesn't need to many words, and I think it's very nicely done. For the rest, I'll have to brush up my Spanish a bit, but maybe someone out there prefers it to English. :)

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[20060117] Review wanted: Flyers
Stefan Schumacher has made NetBSD flyers with general and security focus, in both german and english language. He'd definitely appreciate some feedback - see his archive for PDFs and a reply address. Thanks!

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[20060104] A NetBSD Community Wiki
The state of NetBSD's documentation has been discussed on and off, in public and not-so-public, in the past few weeks and months. There are many reasons for the current state of affairs, including busy developers, a toolchain for htdocs that's not lightweight, lack of a few dedicated individuals to have an iron grip on all of the documentation, etc. Of course it doesn't help that only NetBSD-developers have (write)access to 'htdocs', and that the barrier for contributing users is rather high (sending PRs or posting to mailing lists in the hope of getting a busy developer's attention, fighting the XML toolchain) either.

A solution that was proposed several times is to add/offer a Wiki for NetBSD-related data. While there are various pros and cons, Zafer Aydogan has setup an (inofficial) NetBSD Wiki where everyone (i think) can get write access and work on documentation not available at www.NetBSD.org.

To offer my personal $0.02: My preferred way of documentation would be to have it all in one place, but I guess that won't work out. We'll see what the Wiki becomes to, and then later evaluate it WRT contents and user-friendlyness in comparison to other, existing documentation provided by the NetBSD project.

For now: happy editing! :)

P.S.: Sending patches against htdocs' XML files to www@ is of course still very much welcome! :-)

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[20050417] Stephan Maus' original article
After Stephan Maus' essay "Veitstanz der ikonoklastischen Teufel auf dem Gerätepark" which describes how to fight the digital immaturity with Open Source, and which was printed in the german newspaper "Süddeutsche", here is the unabbreviate article "The Culture of Open Source" on Stephan Maus' homepage, describing the absurd situation in today's computer "market", and how one can escape with the help of Open Source and NetBSD. The bibliograph lists a FreeX article on NetBSD besides W. Gibson's Cyberpunk novells and Userfriendly.

A very nice (german language!) intro for people who don't have a lot of Open Source background about ways of thinking not following what today's "market" propagates!

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[20050416] What is the difference between NetBSD and ...
[some other operating system] - this is one of the questions I hear a lot when going go roadshows, and which arises on #NetBSD every now and then, too. While everyone technically savvy won't ask the question, telling people about how an operating system -- usually including their own favourite penguin-based brand as well as NetBSD -- are built up, is needed to make them understand. One thing that has helped me doing so is a poster from O'Reilly which is entitled "Anatomy of a Linux System", but which really applies to a much wider range. The linked PDF isn't exactly in best quality, unfortunately - any volunteers to talk to O'Reilly to make a new poster with s/Linux/Unix/ or even s/Linux/NetBSD/? :) FWIW, I've made the most interesting part of the poster available in a separate image here (the text on the red marble in the middle is "kernel").

That image and a lecture on portability should to for a first impression of the difference (and similarities!) between NetBSD and some other operating system.

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Disclaimer: All opinion expressed here is purely my own. No responsibility is taken for anything.

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