If you’re like me, eager to test new stuff in FreeBSD, you might as well run a virtualized FreeBSD laboratory on your desktop. I use Oracle VirtualBox, but you might as well use Microsoft Hyper-V, real hardware, or some other contraption. Couple this with ZFS and boot environments, and you’re even able to rapidly revert […]

Read More → Your own virtualized desktop FreeBSD lab

Update 2015-01-05: I was more or less forced to adopt VT, UTF-8, KMS, and DRM2 when I upgraded my laptop from stable/9 to stable/10 in the time between Christmas of 2014 and New Year of 2015. My laptop, a Dell Latitude D531 of mid-2007 design, is equipped with the AMD/ATI Radeon X1270 GPU. What an […]

Read More → FreeBSD VT aka newcons in base/head

The latest Oracle Java RE 7u51 at its normal level of “High” security causes the Dell iDRAC6 virtual console (version 1.95 (Build 05)) to die with this Java trace: java.lang.SecurityException: Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar: https://hostname.some.domain:443/software/avctKVM.jar at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Simply […]

Read More → Dell iDRAC6 and Oracle Java RE 7u51

I updated my FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT virtual machine today. It reached r255120 and it’s running with vtnet as its virtual network interface under VirtualBox 4.2.16. I noticed the vtnet0 interface gained 10 Gbit/s virtual wire speed. Previously the interface ran with only 1 Gbit/s virtual wire speed. The actual wire speed depends largely on the physical limitations of […]

Read More → 10 Gbit/s virtual wire speed in VirtualBox 4.2.16