FreeBSDwiki:Community Portal

Revision as of 21:03, 7 January 2005

What's this page for?

BSD-related links in general?

I wouldn't mind some BSD wallpapers.

I would appreciate some information in the commands section on process and file locking: locating/tracking down locked files and processes. I would also appreciate some extra info on what commands to use to unlock resources that remain locked after a program abnormally terminates.

-- Joe B. --

Can you give me a little more background info on this? I've never had any trouble with file or process locking; particularly given that, at least if you're root, there IS no such thing. Actually I'm unaware of per-user file locking on a non-superuser level either - which isn't to say that it doesn't EXIST, but I see an AWFUL lot of programs implementing their own flock system with special files to indicate locking on data files. Which tends to reinforce my (possibly naive) idea that if you want locking, you have to implement it for yourself..

So, yeah, can you give us more info about what you're having trouble with exactly?

--Jimbo 21:43, 17 Nov 2004 (EST)

Sounds like it's being init'd by root (or a user with root privs) at boot time and doesn't want to give it up. if you've used lsof to see what's open, kill -HUP or kill -9 it.

-dave

you can use lsof to see what files are open....

--Dave

I have installed Hylafax and tried to set it up. For some reason, the installation was interrupted and I keep getting the message that the modem [/dev/cuaa4], is 'locked', so no faxes can be sent. I can still dial the modem with a program like Seyon or Minicom. I've tried to hunt down the lockfiles used by the program, in case any of them are misbehaving, but with no luck and, besides, I'm still unsure how to unlock a locked socket or file if I find one. I'm running FreeBSD 5.1. The lockup continues even after a hard reboot and reinstall.

-- Joe B. --

Hrm. I'm unfamiliar with Hylafax, and to be honest my experience with modems under BSD is also nonexistent - I haven't used dialup under *nix since I got PPP set up under SuSE with my very first experiments with running my own *nix box about six years ago. What user context is your app running under? It's possible that you might have to do something special to delegate some privileges if you want it to run in a non-root context, sort of like mounting or dismounting CDs or floppies.

--Jimbo 16:08, 2 Dec 2004 (EST)

Hylafax has configuration files for its demons. They are similar to other allow/deny files, like, say, lpd's. All of those have been set up properly, as far as I can tell.

-- Joe B. --

check permissions on the daemons and the files they're supposed ot be accessing -- including devices. could be they don't have rights to do what they're supposed to and therefore fucking up.

Dave

Can we have a page for problem ports like java and eventually the walkthru for people who just left windoze, as well as a place to put a small page to present user?

Relax

not a bad idea -- i don't understand what you mean by "a small page to present user" since users of the wiki do have their own pages...click on jimbo's name (or Dave) for an example.

dave

Cool - but where is the page that points at the users?

Relax

Special:Listusers

btw, see the little icon at the top of the edit area that looks sorta like a signature, in between the red "nowiki" icon and the solid line icon? That's the signature icon, handy for Talk pages like this one, because it does this for you:

--Jimbo 13:03, 24 Dec 2004 (EST)

Should we post a story to slashdot so we can get more users?

relax

Fine by me. Hell, I'm advertising the thing on Google's adsense, what's wrong with free publicity? =) --Jimbo 01:19, 4 Jan 2005 (EST)

My story of a FreeBSD wiki was rejected. I may be good with technical writing but not with marketing or story telling...

Someone else can give it a try? There are many slashdot editors so there is bound to be one that is thrilled by the idea of a BSD wiki!

We might want to provide one grandma-usable drolling-idiot-proof script that installs java on a browser or other feats unheard of in freeBSD newbie circles. It would prove technical competence, and provide a story because sun would stubornly insist on clicking on one of their agreements but made the whole install very obnoxious to most users precisely because they wanted users to see the license agreement. Such behavior isn't very open source minded.

Anyhow that's what I based my slashdot story attempt on (the obnoxious license preventing a simple "make install" from being used and the wiki as last hope of the FreeBSD newbie), but I'm sure someone else would word it better than me.

And THAT would be free publicity on a few sites, slashdot or no slashdot. (-;

P.S.: and we could all add a FreeBSD wiki link to every slashdot discussion about any form of wiki. Don't spam, just make sure you make a meaningful contribution to the discussion (i.e. be a karma whore and quote wikipedia first or make some kind of self-interview of your wiki experience. Pointing out which wiki codes are superior at what also helps).

relax

---

I added a slashdot comment on the new java license fiasco story. It links here. Dear wiki, brace for impact!!

P.S.: we have spam in the main page at the bottom. How do wikis deal with those? Can we make the wiki auto-revert when certain spamlinks are added??

relax

--

I saw you link to the wiki, and I added you as a "friend" (jimbo's on my friends list as well,) and my story to OSNews.com didn't get published, so it's fair to say that it was rejected as well.

The main problem with a simple "one script to install Java on FreeBSD" is that a) such a script would break the Sun License w/r/t Java -- this is the main reason there isn't a port for it, AFAIK -- and b) such a script would have to be really fucking complex to take into account all the different FreeBSD distros (4 series, 5.x series, various architectures etc) as well as checking that all the prereq's are available on your system. Also, there's no simple way to install all the files you have to download since you a) have to have a login to get to the Sun download page and b) have to get a bunch of stuff. If you were just able to download the files, a simple fetch or wget would suffice, but as it is, you have to login, agree to a license agreement and select which downloads to get. Downloading the files in to one central location is not an option for the sun license agreement(s). Sun might not be as big as Microsoft or as popular as Apple, but they're a big company that would be Very Unhappy if someone were to distribute their stuff without their consent. Large companies with lots of lawyers and piles of money are Not Fun when you piss them off.

The closest you could really get is a script that printed "you need to get file12312-sadf-ix86.tar.bz2 before you can continue. Do you want to do this? You will need to login and download the file manually." and if the user enters "yes", do a "mozilla http://downloads.sun.com/java" or something. Added to the fact that it's not a sure thing that a given computer will have a GUI, much less a browser, much less mozilla specifically. If it were easy, the FreeBSD.org folks who do Java (and there seem to be a fair number of them,) would have done so. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a big PITA. You may be able to compile a package and distribute THAT, but I doubt it; I'm fairly sure that the blackdown and other java package maintainers are in the FreeBSD committers group(s) and as such are covered by the FreeBSD/Sun Java agreement.

--Dave 21:03, 7 Jan 2005 (EST)