I have a bunch of FreeBSD VMs running in VirtualBox. They all share a number of virtual harddrives, and among them are a virtual harddrive with the common contents of /var/db/ports. My ports configuration of emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions have the OPENGL and X11 options set. This is useless on some of my simpler VMs, as those VMs […]

Read More → Local slave port for emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions without OpenGL and X11

On my FreeBSD/i386 stable/10 and head VMs I have set up clang as the system compiler. I have also set CPUTYPE to corei7 as this is accepted by clang and pretty much describes the capabilities of the host system.

Read More → CPUTYPE woes with editors/emacs on FreeBSD/i386 stable/10

If you’re curious to find out how all your installed ports depend upon each other, you might want to run this neat, little script saving its output to a file, and install graphics/graphviz.

Read More → Using GraphViz to visualize the runtime dependencies of the installed ports

Update 2014-08-07: r363978, dated Mon Aug 4 09:11:25 2014 UTC, solves the parallel build bug once and for all, and there’s no need for the Makefile.local as shown below. I’ve been scratching my head over why mail/thunderbird doesn’t build in parallel when www/firefox does. Research reveals MAKE_JOBS_SAFE was removed last August, in r324744. I can’t […]

Read More → Parallel build of mail/thunderbird in FreeBSD?

None of the below is relevant as of 2014-06-06, other than the possible need of reverting sys/dev/pci/pci.c. I have confirmed that FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 r267147 works as expected on Dell OptiPlex GX260. If you happen to run FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on older Dell desktop PCs, like an OptiPlex GX260, you might want to back out r262226 prior […]

Read More → FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on Dell OptiPlex GX260

While compiling a custom kernel for FreeBSD/amd64 base/head r264077, I began wondering how old is the oldest source file, how young is the youngest? This is the command I devised: The oldest source files are: The youngest source file is: That’s a span of about 10.815 years.

Read More → Youngest and oldest source file in FreeBSD base/head

I grew tired of handholding portupgrade because of the latter’s inability to handle new dependencies. The script below is the result of my frustration. The script is available for downloading at http://ximalas.info/~trond/create-zfs/canmount/upgrade-outdated-ports.sh.

Read More → Coping with portupgrade’s inability to handle new dependencies