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Comment: Re:There used to be a buzz (Score 2) 89

by archen (#46228071) Attached to: Enlightenment E19 Pre-Alpha Released

On a lower end laptop I had X installed and decided I wanted something more capable than Fluxbox. For some reason Enlightenment popped into my head so I gave it ago. Enlightenment started as more a window manager, and then became surpassed by "Desktop Environments". I was surprised to find Enlightenment now meets nearly all my needs. File manager, task bar, window manager. With desktop environments going overboard (KDE) getting fatter than intended (XFCE) or simply going the wrong direction (Gnome), it's odd that Enlightenment out of all of them came full circle and achieved the right balance.

Comment: Re:Where to go after Slashdot? (Score 1) 573

by archen (#46173357) Attached to: HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack"

That was 12 years ago. I'm not sure what the "hype" was, and slashdot has never been perfect, but it certainly wasn't that bad. Now we're looking at the source going terrible and people actively want alternatives. A lot of open source forks started this way. The parent limps along with problems for years, then some major problem causes a shit storm. It forks into something new, parent dies off and everyone wonders why the fork didn't happen sooner. XFree86 and OpenOffice come to mind, but there are many examples. The lesson to consider there, is that the audience of Slashdot is very willing to go with whatever suits them best and aren't rabidly brand loyal the way most people tend to be. The tipping point is often the amount of pain that has to happen before the shift occurs.

Comment: Re:Too late, switched to Chrome (Score 5, Insightful) 167

by archen (#46154409) Attached to: Firefox 27 Released: TLS 1.2 Support, SPDY 3.1, SocialAPI Improvements

I'm not sure a "Classic" version would help much, it's the Internet itself that's bloated. You can have the fastest browser ever, but you're still downloading all that social media crap with Javascript pulled from all corners of the globe. The fastest web browsing experience? Firefox with Adblock and NoScript.

Comment: Re:NIMFY (Score 1) 136

by archen (#46028709) Attached to: FreeBSD 10.0 Released

9x Generic wouldn't boot on the laptop. Something always got hung up in the process, and it appeared to be something with the hard drive. When I did an upgrade from source from 8 to 9 everything worked just fine. I messed with a few options trying to figure out the exact issue, but decided it wasn't worth the effort or a bug report for some buggy decade old laptop.

Also if anyone read my previous post, I'm fairly sure clang doesn't compile properly for a Geode LX if the cputype is set to k6-2. I tried k6 as well and that didn't work either. I unset cputype and let it go to the default and it works fine. If you have such a processor and set cputype in make.conf, I'd test compile something (using clang) to make sure it works. This was on a Soekris Engineering net 5501

Comment: Re:NIMFY (Score 5, Informative) 136

by archen (#46018675) Attached to: FreeBSD 10.0 Released

I haven't found an elegant way to migrate to iconv going into the base system aside from plowing through a reinstall of ports.

One laptop I have which is very old has 128Mb of RAM and a P3m. I've never had a problem building the system, until clang entered the picture (which I just worked around in 9x by not building clang). Gcc compiles Gcc fine. Clang compiles Clang fine. Gcc compiling clang hits swap very hard and it literally takes days to compile. It bombed out once or twice, and my last attempt I just decided to let it go even though I thought the system was hung. Since then I've had no problems rebuilding the system, and with clang as the default compiler it takes about as long as before so that appears to have been a one time situation.

I have a virtualized web server I've had around since 8x. The network interface has always been em0, but with xen support the name changed to xn0 (leading to no networking). As I've never seen the network interface name change, that wasn't an expected issue.

I'm not 100% sure, but compiling with clang for an AMD Geode (LX) processor using the k6-2 seems to lead to a broken build (which is what I've used with GCC for quite a while) Still working through this at the moment. Plugging the drive into an Athlon X2 and everything works, so I suspect this is the issue.

Comment: Re:NIMFY (Score 1) 136

by archen (#46017939) Attached to: FreeBSD 10.0 Released

I think waiting is probably the safe way to go this time around. 10x has some very aggressive changes compared to other releases. Not as bad as 4x to 5x, but I've hit some fairly severe problems on some systems (not all just some). Thus far it hasn't been anything I couldn't fix, but it certainly has led to additional downtime. That's fine for test migrations, but I'm probably going to hold out for 9.3 to 10.1 otherwise.

Comment: Re:Warranty isn't the only factor (Score 1) 270

by archen (#45600557) Attached to: For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives

You might find http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/26/netapp-weighs-in-on-disks/ interesting. It's not uncommon for a drive to report a fail state, then be brought back and never show issues ever again. See the section on drive resurrection. With the first fail, NetApp will treat it as a soft fail and attempt to bring the drive back online. If that also fails, it's marked as a hard fail requiring replacement. This article is from 2007 and also states "Actual MTBFs (or AFRs) of “enterprise” and “consumer” drives are pretty much the same". This isn't exactly news.

Comment: Re:Win95? (Score 1) 110

by archen (#45502991) Attached to: Intel's 128MB L4 Cache May Be Coming To Broadwell and Other Future CPUs

Depends on what you're doing with it. I have a laptop (Pentium 3 / 128Mb RAM) with FreeBSD 10 on it. It works well but the application options running in X are limited unless you want to go into swap. A huge portion of what people consider regular computer usuage is "browse the internet". Good luck doing that these days with 128Mb RAM.

Comment: Re:A sad day (Score 1) 400

by archen (#45483087) Attached to: Winamp Shutting Down On December 20

Yup. Think about it. Say around 10k (conservative example estimate) people paying $20 per month to keep their email address, and not upgrading your mail servers since the 90s. They buckled down into maintenance mode survival years ago, and seem well prepared to leech off what they have. I wouldn't be surprised if they hang around this way for another two decades.

Comment: Re:It is a shame that OpenOffice gets the nice nam (Score 1) 155

by archen (#43747247) Attached to: Apache OpenOffice Downloaded 50 Million Times In a Year

Questions for you:

  • What do you think LibreOffice should do to make its brand more recognizable?

Most people probably think this is irrelevent, but make icons that look like something or ANYTHING. The Libre Office Icons seriously look like the system "I have no icon for this file type" icon. I think a problem with Libre Office is that there is nothing BUT the name. At least Open Office I kind of assocate with the seagulls.
