Category: English

The return of the FreeBSD desktop

I have a confession to make: I haven’t used FreeBSD as a desktop OS for years. The reason is twofold:

  1. Since 2005, my work has required me to run Linux (Debian and Ubuntu at Linpro, RedHat at the University of Oslo) and, briefly, Windows at Kongsberg Maritime. I eventually stopped using stationary computers, resorting instead to a (company-provided) laptop running either Ubuntu, or Windows with Ubuntu in VirtualBox.
  2. More importantly, around the time I started at Linpro, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a FreeBSD desktop. The modularization of X.org and the increasing complexity of desktop environments mean that the number of packages required for a complete desktop system has grown from a bit over 100 to well over 600 (in addition to the kernel and base operating system, which is monolithic in FreeBSD). The FreeBSD ports system does not scale well, and the lack of a proper binary update procedure makes it almost impossible to keep that many packages up-to-date.

This is about to change. Continue reading “The return of the FreeBSD desktop”

An old Planet bug resurfaces

So, I see that Planet still hasn’t fixed the bug I pointed out (and provided a patch for) in 2008. Specifically, it sorts entries by “updated” rather “published”. As a consequence, some years-old blog posts I recently re-tagged showed up as new on Planet NUUG.

Here’s the patch, although I have no idea whether it still applies:

--- __init__.py.orig    2006-07-27 02:01:54.000000000 +0200
+++ __init__.py 2008-01-28 11:38:02.000000000 +0100
@@ -924,7 +924,7 @@
         added in previous updates and don't creep into the next one.
         """
 
-        for other_key in ("updated", "modified", "published", "issued", "created"):
+        for other_key in ("published", "issued", "created", "updated", "modified"):
             if self.has_key(other_key):
                 date = self.get_as_date(other_key)
                 break