FreeBSD – Page 12 – Trond's place

Configuring X11 is more or less a dark art, and you must almost be a wizard of the Slytherine House to get modern X.org 1.14.7 working on a FreeBSD guest in VirtualBox. Nonetheless, through lots of experimentation this evening, have I finally arrived at this configuration file: Somehow, you need both the InputClass and the […]

I have (successfully) attempted to migrate a running i386 stable/9 system into a running amd64 stable/9 system, and attempted to migrate a running i386 stable/10 system into a running amd64 stable/10 system, only to see if these tasks are in fact feasible. The results speaks for themselves, given the boundary conditions outlined below. If your […]

Update 2015-01-23 Order has once again been restored. I have successfully upgraded 8.4-RELEASE (r251259) to stable/8 r277528, and further to stable/9 r277528, and finally to stable/10 r277559. Update 2015-01-14 Work is underway enabling latest stable/8 to go directly to latest stable/9. All my FreeBSD systems have run stable/something-something, compiled from source, for as long as […]

The removal of BIND from base in stable/10 left us with the option of running BIND from ports either in a jail, or as an ordinary service. The old BIND in base was able to run in a chroot environment, isolated from the rest of the system. Some of us believe a chroot is a […]

Enabling encrypted swap has changed in FreeBSD stable/10. I was interested in running AES-XTS with a 256 bit random key and a simulated blocksize of 4096 bytes. I had to change the line in /etc/fstab for the swap partition from to The kernel could then happily report:

The 20141214 entry in ports/head/UPDATING says: 20141214: AFFECTS: users of TeXLive AUTHOR: hrs@FreeBSD.org Several scripts in print/texlive-base have been moved to devel/tex-kpathsea. Upgrading them can fail because texlive-base depends on tex-kpathsea, and the new ex-kpathsea tries to install files which were installed by the old texlive-base. The following error message indicates this situation: pkg-static: tex-kpathsea-6.2.0_1 […]

devel/gettext, as of version 0.19.3, has been split into three ports: devel/gettext, the meta-port depending the two next ports; devel/gettext-runtime, the runtime libraries; and devel/gettext-tools, the tools for managing the message catalogs. In my case, as I build my own ports, making the transition required manual intervention using both portupgrade and the ports collection tree:

Update 2014-11-30 Upgrading to Oracle VirtualBox 4.3.20 removed the timeout messages shown below. The bug was acknowledged in the change log as Storage: fixed an interrupt acknowledge issue causing hanging guests or slower I/O (4.3.18 regression) Since upgrading Oracle VirtualBox from 4.3.16 to 4.3.18 on my Windows 7 x64 host, most of my FreeBSD guests […]

I upgraded a stable/8 i386 system and switched from lang/perl5.16 to lang/perl5.20 only to experience problems with swig generated code for AMANDA. I have confirmed this behaviour on stable/9 amd64 too. I found 17 files containing these three lines: This results in error messages such as:

A recent post to the Illumos ZFS list suggested using: to force ZFS to choose 4K disk blocks when creating zpools.

Category: FreeBSD

Configuring X.org on FreeBSD guests running in VirtualBox

Migrating FreeBSD from i386 to amd64

Upgrading FreeBSD from stable/8 to stable/9, and to stable/10

Missing chroot for dns/bind9{9,10}?

Enabling encrypted swap in stable/10

Solving conflicts between print/texlive-base and devel/tex-kpathsea

gettext 0.19.3 in FreeBSD

VirtualBox 4.3.18 and AHCI

AMANDA 3.3.2 and #undef bool

Forcing ZFS to choose 4K disk blocks aka ashift=12