Having an online tidy up

Over the last year I have been passing projects over to friends and gradually reducing my online responsibilities. Work and family life have taken priority.

I have spent the day cancelling domains, cancelling the renewal of hosts, and advising users of site close-downs. The only host and domain i’m keeping is linux-hardcore.com which has always been /home for myself and a few close friends.

I’ve been slowly losing interest in the Linux community, and haven’t got the enthusiasm I used to have for setting up sites and trying new ideas. It’s been great fun over the last 5 years and i’ve made some good friends but as hard as I try to find something new or interesting, everything seems to have become “samey”.

So I am going to re-theme my blog and add little more “me” to it as well as Linux related material, and see how it goes.

IPv6 Time – Less than 10% of IPv4 addresses available

You may have avoided moving your network to IPv6 for years, but you won’t be able to put it off much longer. Here’s why you need to plan for a transition.

Every few years there’s another panic about everyone running out of IP addresses. The terror that the Internet would simply run out of room is finally coming true. It’s not so much that computers are consuming the IP addresses; it’s all those smartphones, iPads, and other devices that require Internet access.

The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the organization that oversees the allocation of all Internet number resources, announced in January 2010 that less than 10% of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

READ MORE: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/ready-or-not-your-network-is-moving-to-ipv6/

Linux Sis Graphic Card Progress – No More Sisfb

Crunchbang Statler

Well, As my laptop uses a Sis graphics card:

Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter

I have always had to have the “video=sisfb” argument in Grub to load the sisfb (Sis Frame Buffer). Otherwise I fell victim to the “Bad Colour Depth” bug.

I have just installed the latest Sis driver “xserver-xorg-video-sis_0.10.2-3” from the Debian sid repos on Crunchbang Statler (Debian Squeeze) and removed the sisfb argument from Grub2 and have a beautiful shiny desktop with no colour problems whatsoever

For those who are curious, some photos can be seen here: http://sites.google.com/site/superpikmaster/sis

FreeBSD

I have installed FreeBSD alongside Staler on this laptop and have been faced with the same Sis bug, unfortunately, there is no sisfb module available for FreeBSD, so I have been looking for other solutions. Quite a giant leap  into a new OS, not juts trying to fix the bug, but looking into the possibility of porting a new sis driver.

At the moment, my FreeBSD install has the 0.10.2-2 driver, so I am really hoping we get the 0.10.2-3 driver soon. I will be emailing the maintainers to see how that stands as I feel that porting the driver myself is going to be way out of my depth. However, the FreeBSD forum members have been very helpful and provided me links to guides. http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=81906

I have a very, very nice FreeBSD Open Box setup now, all built from the base up (netinstall) from ports which took 5 days to compile and configure everything. I don’t want to have to abandon it for the sake of a Sis driver upgrade.

Fingers crossed.