In may or june last year, I bought a new worstation because my old one was dead (motherboard).
Thanks Remi ;-).
So I am currently playing with an IBM Xseries 226: Xeon 2,8Ghz ; 1Go DDR2 ; SATA HDs ; PCIe GFX card etc…
My logitech webcam now works perfectly under FreeBSD thanks to the pwcbsd driver, I still got some issues with my fresh new gamepad (Logitech Cordless Rumbled Pad 2). I need to get this one working to finish my mythtv box.

The first one: Beryl & VNC
VNC does not currently support accelerated GL rendering.
Some workarounds are though possible:
- use x11vnc with the -noxdamage switch
- take a look at virtualgl (at least since 2.0beta there is a MacOSX Intel client, nevertheless it is not part of the FreeBSD ports tree…)

The second one concerns multi-head systems:
Xinerama disables the RandR extension so Xinerama is unable to work with Beryl since it requires that extension.
Beryl (Emerald ?) is unable to manage the second head presents in my system, so I can start Xorg with 2 screens but the second one will be unusable.
As of today, you have got two options:
- at lest, dual-heading seems to work with nvidia TwinView (which offers better OpenGL performances)
- use one window manager per head (ie: run two instances of emerald)

Google Summer of Code results were released last week.
I had submitted a proposal for FreeBSD untitled “Performance Tracking over Time” unfortunately the FreeBSD project only receive 14 slots from Google, this means that half of the proposals, including mine, were not accepted.
Indeed it seems that the Core Team had prefered to focus on enhancements by adding new features to the base system rather than bringing new tools which may help developers and improve code quality.

Anyway, I have decided to take the responsability of the initial project because I would really like to work on such concepts; adding that I have got Davis support.

“If you want to work on this we’d definitly like that.
I’d be happy to offer advice and feedback on this work if you choose to
work on it.” - Davis Brooks

Stay connected,

I got my PDA, it runs Windows Mobile 5.0, great isn’t it ?
But how can I sync it with my laptop (MacOSX iCal, Address Book & co) ?
Exporting my calendars in vCal does not help much, PocketCalendar only took the first item… the same goes for PocketContacts… (f*ck !!!)
Of course, ActiveSync 4.1 does not work with VPC7. Those days, I feel really out of luck.
In the first times, I was looking forward funambol which appears to do what I want & got some support for the software I used sync-evolution or sync-mozilla (only calendar…), nevertheless there are no real Unix client nor something usuable on MacOSX.
Maybee, the Windows Mobile client is able to sync against an Open-Xchange ? It’s all about syncML after all…
This proposal is false since Funambol uses its own file format.
At the moment, I found Plaxo to be fairly usefull.
It got a Mobile client thanks to WebIS (not opensource anyway…) and an official MacOSX port.
The sync is done over https & your datas are stored using a 128bits scheme encryption, is this safe enough ?
Not for me, I do not like my datas to be stored on a server I do not owned; especially when it goes to private information.
Moreover, one caveat exists anyway since it can only sync my contacts but not my agenda. I hope this feature to be added soon.

I had the privilege to test this CD player @home this WE.
This is a great CD player; abviously it sounds better than my Denon 1920…
Better answer in mediums and bass, better stereo picture, more precis & with more details,etc… on every CD I have played (Sarah McLachlan, Hooverphonic accoustic, Rob Dougan, K’s Choice, Fiona Apple, Fisher, Muse… )
Well, you have understood, I want one ! but…around 700 euros (including the matching Qed Qunex 3 cables) does the difference worth the money ?
I should probably change my speakers first, upgrading from the B&W 600 series to the 700’s

Je viens d’écrire une documentation qui apporte une solution au problème rencontré avec les drivers MacOSX des dongles usb-série avec un chip de Profilic (PL2303). Ces derniers clament que leur driver est compatible Tiger, la réalité est tout autre…
C’est par ici

I just wrote a documentation which explains the way to use an usb-serial adapter on MacOSX (chip pl2303 from Prolific).
Even if they claim their driver to be Tiger compatible, the reality is somewhat different…
Follow the link

It appears that you can easilly change the physical address of an ethernet interface on MacOSX.
This facility is included in ifconfig(8)
For example, I was faced to an issue in NYC, with the cable internet access of the house I live.
I just fire up a xterm and type the following as root.
#ifconfig en0 lladdr 00:40:ca:3d:dd:3d (put your correct MAC address)
then, using DHCP I was able to reach the internet.
NB: This does not work on the wireless interface, I currently do not know why, maybee apple does not want to allow MAC spoofing on the Wireless NIC….?
Anyway, you can still try to patch the kernel source code with etherspoof.
Enjoy it !

UPDATE: The issue was related to the broadcom proprietary driver. Some workarounds exist by binary patching the driver. You have got to inject (in hexadecimal) the MAC address of your choice in the driver and reload it. Follow this link for more information.
A GUI called SpoofMAC has recently made things easier. Great job !

Je suis réellement impressioné par l’émulation de binaires Linux sous FreeBSD, j’avais déjà pris ma claque à l’époque en ayant fait tourner des binaires (man 1 brandelf) linké en static dont le but était de reprogrammer les EEPROM de certaines NIC (cartes réseaux).
Là je viens de faire tourner DBDesigner, une application de design de database SQL. Il faut savoir que DBDesigner est écrit en Pascal et donc compilé avec Kylix pour Linux.
Il m’a suffit de modifier la première ligne du script startdb par #!/usr/compat/linux/bin/bash, de créer un symlink suivant la ligne de commande suivant.
daffy@katarina:/compat/linux/usr/lib %> sudo ln -s libmng.so.1.0.0 libmng.so.1
et hopla c’était parti. FreeBSD rulez !!!

Je suis tombé sur un charmant programme permettant de transformer une playlist m3u (xmms par exemple) en HTML. J’en profite donc pour mettre ma liste online.
Vous la trouverez ici
Thank you guy for making this possible