this controller blinks the led amber

Those features are super nice to have. I used the hp-compaq cciss controllers and also have all of the features you want to have.

i was nervous as one of the modes with the controller just caused my zpool to go crazy w/ checksum errors

That does not sound good. Because it would mean that the data was actually being modified in some way.

dvl posted the same problem: dan.langille.org/2023/02/24/booting…without-mrsas-driver-lots-of-errors

but i couldn't make sense of why the controller was doing that

That mfi driver from dvl's blog report really sounds scary! Seems clear that something is wrong there and it should be avoided.

can I play MultiplayerAngband/TomeNet/etc.?

The mrsas was only running at 1.5Gbps but worked reliably without data corruption so even if slow that would be the choice. But finding out why it is not using 6Gbps would be a 4x speed improvement. I could not tell what speed the mfi driver negotiated but it seemed unusable.

speed wasn't the problem, it was errors/ checksum and write.

i tried a ufs partition just to see and instead of being robust it just force unmounted it for me

Is this a help channel or a discussion channel?

Bit of both

I'm having a hard time booting freebsd 14.3 on powerpc 32bit eb, fresh install. It is on a powermac g4 mystic (agp, gigabit ethernet).

I see "ofw_close: devh=0x0" then the freebsd open firmware boot block, then the boot path, then the boot loader, then the boot volume, then it just freezes.

any help from anyone or anyone that just joined getting 14.3 to boot on a powermac g4?

pair0doc: i don't know, but i'm curious what's happening when you're trying?

i assume you're using the freebsd powerpc distribution

yes jmnbtslsQE using the powerpc distribution, will repost what's happening.

I see "ofw_close: devh=0x0" then the freebsd open firmware boot block, then the boot path, then the boot loader, then the boot volume, then it just freezes.

I'm assuming if I entered the right commands in OF (open firmware) I could get it to boot, though I don't know OF that well.

the odd thing is that the boot volume ends with /@0:3 and I thought I only had the apple partition map, the unix partion, then the swap partition (in that order). I can not see how the volume would be /@0:3

welcome tm512 explaining my issues with ppc32 eb and 14.3

well, I moved up to CURRENT, so that I could try the latest git HEAD of drm-kmod. despite my efforts, I can not trigger the GPU hangs that occur on 14 and 15 with drm-61-kmod, drm-66-kmod, and the 6.9 drivers from drm-latest-kmod

still going to continue stress-testing this, once I'm satisfied, I guess I have to go back and test the older drivers here on 16, to make sure those do hang

which would rule out the fix being in 16 itself

tm512 is it true that CURRENT does not support ppc?

I believe 14 is the last release to support any 32-bit platform aside from armv7

is CURRENT another way of saying version 16. This is my first time on FreeBSD in a long time and my first on BSD with my powermac.

CURRENT is the main development branch, versioned at 16.0 since it will eventually become 16.0-RELEASE (presumably late 2027 or early 2028)

I don't really want to be on 16 due to how bleeding edge it is, but this was something I needed to test

if it turns out that the latest DRM drivers from Linux 6.10 fix the GPU hangs, I really hope that the LinuxKPI changes required for the 6.10 drivers gets MFC'd back into 15 so I can roll back

MFC'd? backported?

what brand of video card?

"merge from CURRENT", essentially backporting yes

this is a Vega 8 iGPU on a Ryzen 5 PRO 3500U

for 32-bit PPC, FreeBSD does not seem to be the right choice nowadays, unfortunately. 14 will remain supported until 2028, but that is really not that far away

I'd be most confident with NetBSD

I don't generally prefer NetBSD over FreeBSD, but I'm confident that NetBSD won't strip out 32-bit platform support anytime soon. hell, they still have a port for 68k Macs

hah i installed netbsd on a 68k mac liiiiiike 27 years ago

and it was ancient THEN

I burned a copy of NetBSD, though as of right now something is going on with the system and when I boot to OF (open firmware) I can not even open my optical drive.

i do wonder how much work i could get a 33mhz 68K mac to do

I could not get adeline linux to boot. other choices are gentoo linux which I was not ready to take that jump yet, to a rolling compiled release. I'm quite fimular with debian, mint, and slackware though a gentoo jump just seems a bit for me.

whether FreeBSD, or NetBSD both seem better then my old lubuntu 16.04 or trying the jump to gentoo.

gentoo would be a very time consuming process on an old PPC. I remember seeing this youtube video a while back, installing gentoo on iirc an iBook G4, and it totalled up to at least a couple days of compilation time if I'm not mistaken

I have GREAT news. I was sitting at the FreeBSD lock up and I managed to get the dvd rom to open up. Now I should be able to boot into OF and boot from the NetBSD cd. Progress YES.

congrats?

still not getting any hangs on CURRENT with the latest DRM drivers

I'm running mpv a lot trying to get it to hang. if it does eventually hang it's at least proving more resilient than 14-STABLE + drm-61

is `desktop-installer` a new thing?

just installed freebsd and some networks give no route to host errors, fun

freebsd booting is so…. wordy

this desktop installer is going to make the install a gui portion of my self documentation a lot shorter - if it works

is there a way to change the default text termianl so its black text on a white background instead of white text on a blakc background?

argh ok how come every time i try to change a desktop environment from 1080p resolution to 720p resolution, all i get is a garbled mess? i know the monitor supports 720p, thats what i run when i boot this machine into macos

GoSox, Try: vidcontrol -b white -f black

I am a dark mode person though so not something I would ever use myself.

my eyes don’t like light text on dark backgrounds

also this desktop had a scale factor i changed so i don’t actually have to change the resolution

When you say desktop environment I assume you mean X Windows? In that case look at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file for errors.

I have so many floaters in my eyes that looking at a white background just highlights them all and is annoying as possible. I always use a dark background. Easier on my eyes.

i mean… i installed cinnamon via desktop-installer aaaaand now i’m in it

sooooo now that i’m in Cinnamon, how do I download a browser, without already having a browser?

lol i’m having 1996 comptuer problems over here

oh ok, you install it through pkg and that makes it available in the desktop as a gui app

Right. Try: pkg search firefox and then "pkg install firefox" or chromiumm or whatever.

so is there a GUI app for network related settings? I’m not seeing anything network related in the settings apps

Are you installing FreeBSD for the first time ever and installing it on a laptop?

not my first time ever but i’ve barely used it and don’t know it well. I’m primarily a mac user. And its not going on a laptop although it is a mac mini so its laptop-ish but it will ultimately be going on a rackmount server if all goes well, with multiple ethernet ports and a slightly more complicated than normal tcp setup

Whew! Okay, good. On a laptop is not the best way to jump in and learn FreeBSD. IMNHO.

In a rack server you won't have to worry about wifi. So that won't be a problem there.

whats the difference? i mean besides the ability to close the lid

well yes no wifi and now on my test machine, it has wifi but i’m just using ethernet

As you say, suspend-resume. But also graphics drivers. Also WiFi. Also WiFi userinterface.

I am not myself using FreeBSD on a laptop, not yet anyway, and so am not going to be any help for you with those particular things. All of my machines are headless servers with wired networking.

And I must relocate. So will be afk for a while...

i’m trying to get proficient enough with this that i can set up my a new server to replace my extremely old apple based server

FreeBSD is an excellent server operating system. So you should have a great result.

the learning curve is…. curvey

The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The next best time is now.

lol thats why i’m doing it

If you have a task (other than those "laptop tasks" that we just talked about above) then we can talk through it.

i’m sampling GUIs right now then ill pick one and move on to trying to set up all of the services on this test machine that i can

Maybe. If it is something I actually know about!

Uh, GUI? On a racked server system?

well, i’d love a GUI app for managing tcpip settings. like the Network pane of apple’s System Prefs

yeah, i’m going to have to remote in to manage it and i’m not going to get far without a gui to work with

i was not born into a command line family :P

So 99.44% of the time I use ssh to log from my desktop (which is running FreeBSD) into a remote headless server. That's a command line only interface. Everything /I/ do on remote servers is done from the command line. I don't even know where I would start with a GUI for such things. (shrug) But feel free to try it that way yourself.

thats a pretty specfiic percentage

I have to tunnel port 5900 for VNC to run bsdinstall to install FreeBSD on remote servers. So it's not zero. Needing to make up such numbers I always quote Ivory Soap which has 99.44% pure soap on it's wrapper. :-)

hi, everyone! this talk reminds me on the time I wanted to go by Solaris 10 on my laptop; the wifi was not in the HCL (not supported), making the laptop unuseful as laptop; I went with Solaris 11 who had the Intel wifi but the laptop (2009) was very slow so I kept Solaris using on appropriate machines only; GoSox, if you keep wanting FreeBSD GUI then you don't learn FreeBSD, you only use it, only useful

for boasting yourself

GoSox: man why don't you just learn some terminal stuff

it's not that hard

I would phrase it differently. I wouldn't entice someone by saying it isn't hard. Because there is some learning curve to it. Instead I would say that the investment is worthwhile because it is empowering. The command line is extremely productive as compared to the GUI. At least for server type things.

A GUI is a captured user interface. You can only do what the captured interface is going to allow you to do. But the command doesn't have those limits. On the command line you can do anything that you can do. There are no limits.

well heres a question you guys will love to answer

a Mac mini is not laptop-esque enough, at least not in ways relevant to FreeBSD here. to my knowledge the main problems with laptops are related to wifi, special keys, and I guess suspend/resume. also issue-prone stuff on desktops, but more common with laptops

how do you exit out of a GUI and back to the default command line

if you're using X11, pkill X

alt+ctrl+F1 maybe?

will probably do it, though if you've got a login manager set up, it might just restart automatically

sorry i can be wrong

that leak

that leads to one of the many frame buffers

it's been a while since I had to use that combination

ctrl+alt+function keys switches VTs, which will give you a terminal but the graphical environment will still be running in the background

yes. but ain't that enough?

you can relaunch the desktop environment from terminal if you want to go back

hmmm seems i can’t install a new desktop in a terminal window from another desktop

sooooo i guess what i want to do at this point is disable auto-starting of the desktop?

and also then how to i manually start the desktop once i do that?

I would have suggested Control-Alt-F1 to get to the first vt console too. But is that needed to install a different desktop? Also note there is a difference between a DE Desktop Environment such as Xfce, Mate, or other and an XDM X Display manager such as lightdm, slim, gdm, other.

(I don't happen to use a Desktop Environment. I only run a window manager. I can install many of those and just start the one I want.)

i guess i don’t understand the difference

For a DE there is the XDM such as lightdm and it can start an X session such as Xfce and there can be multiple ones installed and then you select the one you want to start.

Last time I ran one and looked there was a selection possible so that one could select the different ones that were installed.

I just looked at a system with lightdm installed and it has a pulldown to select from the installed DEs.

The journey of 10,000 miles begins with the first step. Things might not make sense now. But somewhere along in the journey bits and pieces will make sense. Further along the journey more things make sense. We don't ever get to the point that we understand everything. It is journey not a destination.

GoSox: there should be no problem to install anything in the pkg repo from any shell, as long as you have root privileges there, my guess is that you were missing that, you can use su to switch to root, if you are in the appropriate group or use sudo or doas to run a command as root if you have installed and configured that

i thought the desktop-installer script specifically told me to run it as root, not through sudo

sudo is a way to run something as root

“Desktop-installer should generally be run from a text console using a direct root login, rather than through su or sudo.”

Let me hint that when using su always use "su -" to load a root login environment, otherwise PATH and other things wont' be set correctly.

I have never heard of desktop-installer before. I don't have such a thing on my system.

Oh, sysutils/desktop-installer TIL about a new port. Never used it before.

I can't imagine why it would caution against using it with sudo or su as that would be the most normal thing.

I am just going to note that desktop-installer's README file says this "Many server systems need not and should not have a graphical user interface. Adding one would would be of little use in a data center, and would just mean a lot more packages to upgrade during normal maintenance. This would be a waste of time and bandwidth."

Just say'n! :-)

i assure you, i will use the gui even when my server is 1000 miles away at the data center

You do you! :-)

But I hope you eventually come over to the light side. We have treats!

More seriously one of the problems of graphical interfaces over the Internet WAN is that they are highly latency driven. On the local system latency is zero so no problem. Over the LAN across the building the latency is low and things work acceptably well. Over the Internet WAN latency is high and delays in graphical interfaces is so bad that it will drive anyone insane.

i’ve been doing it for 20+ years. its not that bad. Its not like i’m going to be doing daily work over VNC. but occasional work.

It's way too late here for me to be awake. Good night all!

Good luck in your journey.

how can i make the font bigger? not the GUI font, the CLI font. its so small I can barely read it

are you in a terminal emulator or the frame buffer?

i don’t understand the question

are you using any sort of a program to use the terminal? (e.g. terminator)

nope

but

okay so it's the frame buffer then

i’ve already wiped and reinstalled freebsd but ill likely run in to the same probablem again shortly

its large at first, then once you install a GUI, even when you’re at the “frame buffer”, the text is much smaller

GoSox: forums.freebsd.org/threads/how-to-change-vt-console-font-size.91145

this is for the console. In X11 you can select which font size for whichever wm/de you're using

hah, i was already on that very post 5 minutes ago

but i don’t understand the solution

but it also might not even matter

well the bigger the font the easier it'll be to read

When I launch the apache24 port, I notice there's 11 httpd processes.

Where do I adjust that value?

i think thats in the httpd.conf , if you’re asking the exact proeprty, i don’t recall

i consider my apache config to be a work of art :D the last time i set up a new server (a few years ago), i went through line by line and configured everything i need just right, and deleted everything I don’t need. And I set lots of default settings so that my virtual host sections could all be very short

if only it wasn’t running on ancient macos :P

OT, but IT: What should you call a text operation that replaces groups of repeated characters with a single instance of that character, e.g. `s/ */ /g`? -- compress? compact?

^ The command above is a SED command, replacing groups of space characters with a single space.

That's an indentation wrecker

cl

vkarlsen, a matter of perspective :-)

well that was an hour of pointlessness.... got this new machine, snapshot my server over to the new hardware thought this if_rge.ko driver was limiting my 2.5Gb connection.... looking through forums, etc.... well it's limited because I've got a 1Gb switch... hahah...

sig`, how do you snapshot the soul between the bodies?

(the OS between machines)

zfs send -R

:)

I back my full migration snapshots up over ssh to another machine

And is there an FS-agnostic method?

dd

hm. definitely appreciate the simplicity of jails after using things like Docker containers for so long

hodapp: Yes every time I find a new neat piece of s/w and it's only docker I rage.

I had not had much luck with Podman. I think it's mostly my incompetence. I have not had the time to debug it.

Have not had

Good afternoon!

ant-x, If you look at "cat -s" the manual there calls -s squeezing so to me your sed command is just a regular expression search and replace but you might call it squeezing whitespace too.

hodapp Agreed!

good day all

hi wsky

hi elnegro how are you doing

good playing with freebsd to escape for a while of linux :)

u?

Good day wsky

elnegro: just pondering

good day o0x1eef

Come join us in #freebsd-social

o0x1eef: last time i was there you kept on promoting something i'm not interested in

Ok, let's forget about that topic.

ok

I've just installed an intel 550-T2 card in my machine and it's autonegotiating the ix interface at 1gbit instead of 2.5gbit

Per reviews.freebsd.org/D26245 I have to override the advertisement speeds, but they're read-only and that has to go into the loader.conf for override

Can anyone epxlain how I'm supposed to set that value to `0x10` in the loader?

Soemthing like `dev.ix.1.advertise_speed=0x10` ?

nvm. Figured it all out - will blog post about it :)

what abi does freebsd use on ppc64le?

elf v2?

hrmph. just changed one interface from DHCP to SYNCDHCP, and now a bhyve VM - which is bridged with this - will only come up with self-assigned IP

...wtf. There's a bridge that "vm switch" created, and "vm switch list" shows that ix0 is one of its physical ports. but... ifconfig never shows ix0 as a member on the bridge.