Re: Intel Mac Mini OpenBSD 4.3
http://openbsd.org/amd64.html Is really the best answer, whatever is compatible should work.. by definition. Not much hands on myself. On 1-May-08, at 4:14 PM, Khalid Schofield wrote: What USB card would you recommend? Have you got any experience? If the internal one is not as supported as a USB one maybe I'll shove a USB wifi adapter in. thanks On 1 May 2008, at 22:10, Paul Greidanus wrote: I don't know offhand, but a USB external is always an option if the internal card will not work. On 1-May-08, at 3:54 PM, Khalid Schofield wrote: Hi, thinking about buying an intel mac mini to run openbsd 4.3 on for my webserver at home. I need to use the wireless. Does anyone know anything about the wifi support of the mac mini with openbsd 4.3? Any experiences of openbsd on the intel mac mini. Currently have a PowerPC mac mini running openbsd 4.0 but not using bluetooth or wireless. 802.11G support would be fantastic! khalid
Re: Chatting with developers? IRC!
On 15-Apr-08, at 11:12 AM, Unix Fan wrote: I found an old email on the mailing lists, dating back to 1996, when Theo announced users could connect and chat with the developers on their ICB server. I'm wondering, when did it go private? Why can't users join and chat.. or idle.. and watch OpenBSD development as it takes place, are there any other places to go besides -cvs? It sounds like you're interested in building some sort of online OpenBSD community, maybe some developers, maybe some users.. maybe some newbies, maybe some experienced people. This exists, it's #openbsd on irc.freenode.net. I'm there, my nick is prg3. I'm not a dev though, so I may not count. Paul
Re: floppy.fs
Douglas A. Tutty wrote: On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 11:22:11PM -0700, Paul Greidanus wrote: I'm just wondering how many people out there are using the floppy.fs installer still? I'm wondering if it would be a worthwhile thought to expand past the 1.44Mb limit for the CD and .rd install options if there are features that can be added to the installer. No, I'm not thinking a gui/menu based installer as the main reason, but there might be benefits to something like that. If the ability to boot floppy was removed, it would be a show stopper for me and I guess I'd have to switch to NetBSD (assuming that they sill do floppy initial boot). My old boxes have CDs but they can only boot from floppy or hard disk. I wouldn't see a problem if you want to allow an initial boot from floppy then run an enhanced installer from CD or some other source as an option. Just please don't get rid of floppy boot or increase the minimum memory requirements. Not that I have any say, but you asked. It sounds like there's a huge amount of the community still using floppies on a near daily basis.. way more then I'd have thought. Of course, the only place I can remove the floppy images is from a personal mirror, so there's no risk. And even if I could, with the response I got, there's no way that I'd even want to get rid of them. Thanks everyone for the feedback! Paul
Re: floppy.fs
Richard Daemon wrote: On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:58 AM, Stuart Henderson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2008-03-05, Giancarlo Razzolini [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I do the installation using a pen drive, not a floppy, so it would be nice if there was another image, suited for a pen drive or other things bigger than floppy. Just do an OS installation to the pen drive then you can boot from it and run bsd.rd. You can also copy the installation tgz files to it, if you would like to install on machines without a working network. I pretty much exclusively use netboot of some kind these days though, pxeboot(8) is super easy on OpenBSD... Speaking of which, is there a way or any plans to add the option to install from a tftpd itself rather than pxebooting - pull down the pxeboot and bsd.rd files over tftp then install from ftp, http, etc.? I'm confused.. pxeboot/bsd.rd requires a tftp server, so you are booting from tftp already. Do you want to install the system from tftpboot, i.e. base.tgz? tftp is error prone, and bad for large files, so you almost need http/ftp to do large files. And it's easy to setup ftp.
Re: floppy.fs
Theo de Raadt wrote: There is one thing that some people out there could work on. Noone in our group is currently working on it, and it would be nice. - A very carefully designed improvement/replacement to disklabel -E that can sub-partition more automatically. Something like: disklabel sd0 -p labelletter,start,end,mountpoint disklabel sd0 -p a,0,5G,/ Or are you talking about something completely different with sub-partitions? Another thought I've had on this thread is to give the user a default/sane partitioning option? Although, the definition of what is sane default partitioning is a topic that can be debated until the universe grows cold. - Might be nice if it can handle multiple disks correctly, and if it was more aware of the consequences of partitions mounted inside each other. I've gotta play with this to understand the problem better. - No existing features that disklabel -E has may be deleted. People use them. It is not easy to do right, but bad hacks won't qualify for this. Do back hacks qualify anywhere? :)
floppy.fs
Hi All I'm just wondering how many people out there are using the floppy.fs installer still? I'm wondering if it would be a worthwhile thought to expand past the 1.44Mb limit for the CD and .rd install options if there are features that can be added to the installer. No, I'm not thinking a gui/menu based installer as the main reason, but there might be benefits to something like that. Paul
Re: floppy.fs
Theo de Raadt wrote: I'm just wondering how many people out there are using the floppy.fs installer still? I think your assumption is that we are facing the space problem just from the i386 side. We are not. We run on lots of architectures. There is some semblance of size pressure from all architectures. But in general we HAVE been coping just fine with that pressure, and excending the install scripts. Fair enough, I remember hearing/reading somewhere that there was no room left to add any features, apparently incorrect. In a worst case, if there is a useful, yet large feature, it can be added into cd and bsd.rd, but leaving it out of floppy? Having the floppy makes Open unique, and it's a good thing to have. The main reason I asked is that I have not seen a floppy disk, or drive in the past 5 years, so it's interesting to know if others are actually using floppies still for this? We've been adding new features to the installer every release. I guess you just haven't noticed them, but they are there. Lots of them. I do notice subtle additions from time to time, but no huge changes. This is a good thing, it shouldn't change that much. But, if there are really good, and useful changes that don't fit, then it might be a problem.
Re: floppy.fs
Theo de Raadt wrote: In a worst case, if there is a useful, yet large feature, it can be added into cd and bsd.rd, but leaving it out of floppy? Having the floppy makes Open unique, and it's a good thing to have. Like what? Where's the diff for this useful, very large feature? Don't have one, and I don't even have an idea for anything that would fit, it probably doesn't exist. However, if I do think of things that would be good, I'll keep fitting it into floppy in mind. floppyX.fs is here to stay. The main reason I asked is that I have not seen a floppy disk, or drive in the past 5 years, so it's interesting to know if others are actually using floppies still for this? I used one three days ago. That good enough for you? Doesn't matter what it means to me.. But good to know that it's still used.
Re: Server room temperature sensors
Joe wrote: Can anyone recommend a server room temperature sensor that I can use with openbsd? I want to monitor temperature and humidity. I hope to graph the data from the sensor. The sensor can be connected to my openbsd via usb, serial, or even network. I'm pretty happy with my overpriced and expensive Netbotz boxes from APC.. they do everything, and more, including email alarms, http works great from my blackberry. You can snmp query them if you want, or just trust that they'll alert you as appropriate. They don't so much work with OpenBSD as they work on their own and use smtp, http and snmp to talk to the world over Ethernet. However, the cheapest one was around $1500 when I picked them up, so it's by far not the cheapest way to do this. Paul
Re: [Fwd: Open-Hardware]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 12:15:05PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: I mean to write an article about the issue of free hardware designs some day when I have some time. Please make sure you research the topic before you do. And feel free to send a draft here so we can correct the research,
Re: [Fwd: Open-Hardware]
Richard Stallman wrote: In the case of hardware, it would mean it is too expensive to copy... which it could be... so does that mean freedom to copy something became irrelevant as the cost of copying becomes relatively expensive? When something is impractical to copy, then the question of whether we are free to do so is purely academic, and I see no reason to fight about it. When something is feasible to copy, then the question of whether we are free to do so makes a real difference. This is an academic issue for now, and it is not easy, or possibly even possible to have open hardware at this point, however, right and wrong should never be tempered by this. If it's wrong to have closed software, it should be wrong to have closed hardware. (especially since the line between hardware and software is very blurred these days) Should you do more then say that, maybe put a webpage encouraging open hardware development? Probably not, you're right, your time is too valuable to push it.
Re: [Fwd: Open-Hardware]
Richard Stallman wrote: If something is harder to copy, it is ethically ok to have a different standard for this piece of technology. Seriously, that's what you're saying above. Because hardware may have to be copied by hand, you consider them ethically not the same. Yes, that's my position, for 20 years or more. I think that's the right place to make the distinction: between you can copy it yourself and somebody can build more of them. I'm reading this right, the decision as to if something is right and wrong, ethical and non-ethical, is a function of how easy it is? Freedom is only important if you don't have to pay for it? Wow.
[Fwd: Open-Hardware]
Aparently difficult and interesting questions don't get answers until they're posted to a list.. [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/DEFANGED which had a name of Open-Hardware.26774DEFANGED-eml]
Re: [Fwd: Open-Hardware]
Paul Greidanus wrote: Aparently difficult and interesting questions don't get answers until they're posted to a list.. [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/DEFANGED which had a name of Open-Hardware.26774DEFANGED-eml] And it would have worked better if I included the actual message: Hi Richard, I've been marginally following the discussion on OpenBSD and FSF and of the noise related. I'm curious how you can recomend an OS, like gNewSense that only runs on non-free hardware, that has required non-free software to be used in it's creation? Every time you buy a product from Intel, a portion of that money goes to companies like Cadence and Mentor Graphics. Now this is non-free in a monetary sense, but there are also ethical freedom implications. There are tools that can replace these non-free programs, like gEDA, which can be used to build processors and components, like are available on opencores.net and opensparc.net. (I don't know about these as far as free..) Currently Ubuntu works on ultraSparc-III, while gNewSense does not. This is telling people that they need to support non-free software, to even use your free software recomendations? I do understand that hardware is more difficult and expensive to copy and distriubute then software, but ethical objections should not be limited by difficulty. If there is enough demand for a company to produce a free system, then the market should provide a company who can make money by building this hardware. The definition of free here would be where the hardware is 100% available for download, specifications, HDL, design, firmware, everything, and licensed to fit with your definition of free. I've looked briefly, and I was unable to find a reference to this from you anywhere, you seem to be satisfied fighting this on the superficial immediate code-execution front, and leaving the nested software required for hardware creation alone. Thanks for your thoughts back on this, Paul
Re: [Fwd: Open-Hardware]
Richard Stallman wrote: I'm curious how you can recomend an OS, like gNewSense that only runs on non-free hardware, that has required non-free software to be used in it's creation? How do you do these things? Perhaps I do them the same way. I don't, however, I don't claim to live by the same free vs non-free rules, I use what works for me. The term non-free hardware is misleading, because the issues that divide free software from non-free software do not apply to hardware. There are no copiers for hardware and it has no source code. There is a free copier of hardware: you, me, or anyone with a certian amount of skill, and the required wires and other parts. This is how the entire home PC business started, the whole homebrew market. Hardware has source code. Virtually every major piece of a computer is written and modelled in Verilog or VHDL these days, which is bytes on a disk, in ASCII characters, which sounds pretty much like code. There is a monetary cost to copying hardware (fabrication fees, board manufacturing) and software (power to run the system, the cd media, the internet feed), and while these are vastly different sums of money, they are both non-zero, so monetarily, both cost something. Technology can allow for free hardware, just as well as it can for hardware. If there is open-source and free hardware designs and code, anyone with a FPGA, or availability of various other technologies can take this hardware design, make changes, and make it better. Things can be contributed back to the community, and IP-free hardware systems that are actually useful can exist. With an FPGA, (yes, this may require the use of non-free licenses to create the fpga, this is unfortunate for now), any user can modify and improve their own system with no fabrication costs, just like software. As for Intels use of non-ree software, I am sorry for them, and I hope that someday they will be able to move to free software. Yet you still support them, and require gNewsense users to use Intel/AMD hardware?
