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.
lidl at pix dot net
$Date: 2011/08/02 18:25:26 $