DAY 4: MOTOROLA ATRIX DIARY

I managed to go one day without wanting to throw this phone out the window, at the TV, or at Usama Bin Laden. Speaking of UBL, the b***** is dead! Woot! Back to the Atrix. I have pretty much customized the phone as much as I need to just for everyday use. My throat did not hurt today (from the California Crud), so I was able to test the voice dial and voice command functions. QuickOffice is a decent app. Vlingo is no better than the Google app for voice commands, so I do not see why that app costs money on other platforms. I only got a few bugs here and there using the native web browser. I have pretty much given up on Opera, which is a shame. Opera is a great browser. Maybe in a couple updates from now those Opera bugs will get worked out. I am a little disappointed at the lack of UNIX command functionality on the terminal, but I am sure I can fix that over time. Hopefully this week while I am at the conference I can sneak in some coding and hopefully not break the phone.

Related Articles

• Day 3: Motorola Atrix Diary (walterkilar.wordpress.com)
• Day 2: Motorola Atrix Diary (walterkilar.wordpress.com)
• Day 1: Motorola Atrix Diary (walterkilar.wordpress.com)

FreeBSD Diary: Fresh install

• deleted Windows Vista partition
• installed 8.0-RC1
• freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.2-RELEASE
• sudo portsnap fetch && portsnap extract
• update apache2, ssh, sql, rubygem-rails
• TODO: trusted BSD configuration

/etc/rc.conf

pf_enable="YES"                 # Enable PF (load module if required)
pf_rules="/etc/pf.conf"         # rules definition file for pf
pf_flags=""                     # additional flags for pfctl startup
pflog_enable="YES"              # start pflogd(8)
pflog_logfile="/var/log/pflog"  # where pflogd should store the logfile
pflog_flags=""                  # additional flags for pflogd startup

# pfctl -t blockedips -T add 211.181.82.141

# pfctl -e

# /etc/rc.d/pf start
# /etc/rc.d/pflog start

FreeBSD Journal

I installed FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 last week, since I had the installation disk lying around from the last time I had free time, back in September 2009. Since I accidentally drilled a hole in the computer that I had planned on using as a web server I decided to use my old Windows XP Tablet laptop, which I had not used since 2006. The installation went quickly, but I was annoyed that I years ago I had left too little space to do a proper installation of FreeBSD. My fstab and disk usage looked like this:

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on

/dev/ad0s2a    409M    449M    -40M    110%    /

devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev

/dev/ad0s2e    365M     98K    336M     0%    /tmp

/dev/ad0s2f    5.7G    -399M    2.3G    107%    /usr

/dev/ad0s2d    688M    526M    107M    83%    /var

 

 

Note that two of my drives were overloaded. The 500Mb+ of extra space was being held in RAM (thank you BSD). After quite a bit of pruning I was able to get the system to look as it does now:

/dev/ad0s2a    409M    209M    167M   56%    /

devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev

/dev/ad0s2e    365M     98K    336M     0%    /tmp

/dev/ad0s2f    5.7G    2.9G    2.3G    55%    /usr

/dev/ad0s2d    688M    526M    107M    83%    /var

Now that I had a pruned system, I needed to update to a currently supported FreeBSD version, 8.2. 8.0 reached EOL last November.

Now that I have the system up and running, I have installed a web server and SSH server to teach the kids about computing. Check out updates at http://kilar.dyndns.org.