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.
lidl at pix dot net
$Date: 2004/04/08 15:12:06 $