On my box

We are really close to have a FreeBSD amd64 driver for Nvidia graphical boards.
You can read progresses on this post.

Christian Zander, a Software Engineer at Nvidia, said:
“at this point, native FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64 NVIDIA graphics drivers work on both platforms, as do OpenGL applications native to them; FreeBSD/i386 OpenGL applications also run on FreeBSD/amd64. Further, with a recent set of Linuxulator mmap() fixes, Linux/x86 OpenGL applications work on both FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64.”

Well, great news!
He couldn’t give a date for public BETA driver release, tough.

Thank you Zander and FreeBSD hackers, especially John Baldwin, to make this possibile.

There are many battery manager out of there for the most of Desktop Environments but if you don’t want to use them and spend most of your time in a terminal session you would take a look to acpiconf on FreeBSD.

% acpiconf -i0

Return all the information about your battery number 0, though you may be interested only in remaining time and state of battery (charging, discharging).
You may use this my own script. It is free as in beer

================
#!/bin/sh

acpiconf -i0 | grep Remaining
acpiconf -i0 | grep State

If you are a C/C++ programmer and use Italian keyboard you know the missing of ~ char.
I know you can use ALT+126(numeric pad) but that’s very painful on laptop.
I casually discover that under X many terminal emulator such as xterm, urxvt accept a convenience shortcut:
ALTGR+ì gives you the tilde ~

Another very important character in the shell programming is the `(ALT+96).
ALTGR+’ gives you the `

That works on console too.

Who knows what a fantastic things will happen in this year.

I think this one will be the year of 64-bit (at least for Windows user).

I’m not expected to view all user switch to 64bit OSes but I’m sure we’ll see more closed source company to move their apps to 64-bit world!

Flash 64-bit? Java for 64-bit users?maybe firefox? nvidia driver for notebook?

Well, let’s hope so.

Happy new year!

Usually, I don’t enjoy game like this but I’d give it a try for this time

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result is:

“That’s almost never shared memory” –from Scott Meyers’ “Effective STL.”

As you can see, I was working while the game took me.

I’m thirty and I’ve been a Windows developer for a decade. Now I think it’s time to move on at least on my own box. I’d like to become a kernel hacker. It’s a very hard resolution, I know, but I think to have right motivations.

I chose FreeBSD to hack. It’s a good open source operating system and has a great community around, good documentation, simply to use and… I like beastie (the mascot of the FreeBSD Project)

If you want to learn about a new Operating System you have to use it as you primary OS so I’m going to install it on my HP Pavillion dv9000 series.