Well I just spent a weekend trying to get my nice new
hardware working. Thanks to a FreeBSD user, I received a
40GB ATA100 Maxtor drive which I am using in my new Sun
Blade 100, which also got an infusion of 512MB additional
ECC PC133 SDRAM for a total of 640MB. But after all that
trouble I went to, I discover some time later that the
IDPROM contents became invalid. Great. So I scampered all
over the net looking for how to rewrite the ether & hostid
info into the IDPROM. Doesn't seem like there's any way,
even though the machine is brand spanking new directly from
Sun. So it seems I'll have to call them tomorrow and get a
new IDPROM shipped to me, probably. Ethernet device *seems* ok, as I config'd the ethernet address in solaris and was able to get pinging and stuff.
Then the laptop router I'm trying to setup. I got the USB
ethernet device (D-Link DSB-650TX which works with FreeBSD's
aue(4) driver) last Tuesday. I'd been putting off trying to
actually get it working due to lack of time. Finally, on
Friday I go to try it, and what do I find out? The kernel
panics if I try to ifconfig it, with the March 31 -current.
So I updated to the latest kernel only to find out that it
panics as soon as aue0 tries to attach.. before the kernel
can even call init(8). So I talk to Joe Karthauser, the guy
who's been doing the recent merges from NetBSD and OpenBSD
and find out the scoop. Seems neither of us atm can figure
out how to get useful dumps when this happens. I guess I'll
have to leave this for later.
Due to all that, I think it will be at least a few more days
before I commit the KDE 3.0 ports for FreeBSD. I'm not
really getting very much useful feedback on those anyway.
It would be nice if more people tested the packages. Sigh.
Oh well. Time to get lunch now...