Welcome to The Pix Software Home Page

Information about software projects is located here. We have worked on many different software projects over the years. Some of these were of dubious merit and worth. Some of those systems are documented here. Others are noted in passing.

Other files located here are technical reference documents and commentary about external software systems we have used. In particular, our long experience with BSD/OS has resulted in certain opinions about what is good and bad about that operating system. Some of those opinions are located here (both good and bad).

A Chipset Driver for BSD/OS
A document that describes a chipset quirk driver that I wrote for BSD/OS 4.3. It solves a couple of problems that can occur with certain VIA chipsets, which are likely to be found on relatively modern, Athlon based motherboards. This driver has also successfully been used on BSD/OS 4.2 systems. It will not work on versions of BSD/OS prior to 4.2, without additional kernel modifications.

What Should Be Incorporated into BSD/OS
A document that is an opinion piece of how BSD/OS ought to be changed by Wind River Systems to address the needs and desires of their customer base. As an opinion piece, from a non-WRS employee, it merely states opinions about what would be nice features for BSD/OS to have. While I don't have any way to force WRS change their product in this fashion, it would certainly be appreciated if they changed it to support most or all of the items on my lists.

After all, if WRS doesn't take good care of its customer base, it won't have a customer base to worry about long term. As it turns out, since WRS killed the BSD/OS product line in 2003, this is all a moot point. One can only DISPAIR and think of this.

The BSD/OS ELF FAQ
Donn Seeley's excellent and informative FAQ about the ELF support in BSD/OS 4.x. Incredibly useful and well written. For a long time, it was easy to find this on the BSDi webserver. Then they hid the information and their search engine refuses to acknowledge this file exists. Since then, the software assets of BSDi got sold to WindRiver -- now I'm sure this information will never reappear on their webserver. So, I've taken a copy of the file, stripped out all the extraneous stuff except for the juicy technical parts, fixed the (too numerous to mention) HTML errors and stashed it here. Ultimately, I'm sure that a search engine will index this page and the rest of the world can find out about the BSD/OS ELF FAQ too.

Someday, I'm sure that the extra good karma points from this act alone will result in fame and fortune.

IPFW Sample Files
Authoritative copies of various IPFW filters, help files and other documentation. Look here for commentary, sample filters and other things that pertain to the BSD/OS IPFW filtering framework.

Mozilla Browser Builds for BSD/OS
A local cache of various snapshots and releases of the Mozilla browser along with detailed information about how each version was configured and built. This is where the binaries that get copied onto ftp.mozilla.org originate from.

PXE Booting BSD/OS 4.3 and BSD/OS 5.0
One of the new features that was added to BSD/OS 4.3 was fairly good support for PXE booting of x86 machines. A standalone boot program, pxeboot, suitable for download to a PXE enabled network card was added to the operating system. Minimal documentation about how to use this feature was also added to the system. Here are some notes and explanations of what is required to make PXE booting work for both BSD/OS 4.3 and BSD/OS 5.0.

Transparent HTTP proxy/caching with BSD/OS 4.X
A writeup about how to get a transparent Squid http proxy up and running on BSD/OS 4.X. The examples in this writeup use the 2.3 version of Squid that comes with BSD/OS 4.2 (plus a couple of small patches) and a tiny IPFW filter to make it work. This code works with BSD/OS 4.3 and BSD/OS 5.0 with no additional porting effort. I have not yet tried these changes on BSD/OS 5.1, but I suspect they will also work there with few if any changes. I have an updated patch for the transparent proxying inSquid version 2.5-STABLE3. I successfully used this patch under BSD/OS 5.0 for several months. As of 06-April-2004, I have upgraded my Squid installation to version 2.5-STABLE5. A patch for the transparent proxying for Squid version 2.5-STABLE5 is available. Good luck and happy caching!

Xtank Home Page
Currently empty, but at some point in the future, this location will document the complete history of Xtank and some of its releases.

Patches for Roundcube Webmail for SQLite3 support
Roundcube Webmail is a fairly nice looking webmail solution that can use various databases for storing backend information (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite2). These patches add support for SQLite3 as the storage mechanism. Tested against Roundcube version 0.5.3, as installed from the FreeBSD "ports" tree.
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$Date: 2011/08/02 18:25:26 $