FreeBSD, Firefox 3.6, and Java…

By finndo On March 31, 2010 · 1 Comment

I had a real hard time figuring this out, as the FreeBSD handbook is once again out of date on this subject.  so I’ll list the steps I followed to get Firefox working and to get java to run on it (still not 100% on the working java thing, but I [...]

I had a real hard time figuring this out, as the FreeBSD handbook is once again out of date on this subject.  so I’ll list the steps I followed to get Firefox working and to get java to run on it (still not 100% on the working java thing, but I found plenty of things to try!)

 

Firefox 3.6

******************

easy as pie, follow these steps and hope you don’t have any problems (I did not)

  1. cd /usr/ports/www/firefox3
  2. sudo make install clean

done, worked like a charm, happy to oblige.

 

now… on to java (at this point still not working), quite a few more steps here and whatever file you find in your ports tree is not going to work, so just ignore it.

Java 1.6.0.07.02

******************

  1. cd /usr/ports/java/javavmwrapper
  2. sudo make install clean
  3. now open a web browser (I had to do this on another machine, then ftp it to my FreeBSD box, as seamonkey crashes everytime I start it and lynx downloaded the webpage the file is on and not the file, could be an issue between the keyboard and the chair however…) and travel the world wide web until you reach: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml
  4. find the correct version for your system and download it, I used:
    Diablo Latte JRE 1.6.0-7 FreeBSD 7.x/amd64 End-User 26M diablo-jre-freebsd7.amd64.1.6.0.07.02.tbz
  5. click the link, ok the agreement, then DL (lynx just DL’d the page when I told it to follow the link, not sure what I did wrong, but I went around the issue instead of resolving it).  (oh and a side note, if you frequently end up at websites to get text based information and do not want java and flash scripts and embedded object killing your inet speed, locking up your processes, or just don’t want to see or have others see the images that may appear on the screen, use lynx as your www browser, it works great… most of the time.)
  6. now you can put the java file where you want, I ended up placing mine in /usr/ports/distfiles/diablosimply because the diablo port that was already on my system told me to go DL it and put it in /usr/ports/distfiles. from here on I will reference that dir, keep that in mind if you put it somewhere else.
  7. if you are not already there, cd /usr/ports/distfiles/diablo
  8. make config-recursive install clean
  9. now you should get this as your output (the version numbers may change if you do this farther into the future when new versions of things are available):
    pkg_add: warning: package ‘diablo-jdk-1.6.0.07.02′ requires ‘xtrans-1.0.4′, but ‘xtrans-1.2.3′ is installed
    pkg_add: warning: package ‘diablo-jdk-1.6.0.07.02′ requires ‘xproto-7.0.10_1′, but ‘xproto-7.0.15′ is installed
    pkg_add: warning: package ‘diablo-jdk-1.6.0.07.02′ requires ‘xextproto-7.0.2′, but ‘xextproto-7.0.5′ is installed
  10. sudo pkgdb -F (resolved the dependency issue from step #9 immediately)
  11. sudo ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/local/lib/firefox3/plugins (makes a symbolic link between the plugin file and the Firefox directory for plugins, basically up to this point you have installed java for FreeBSD, now we are setting it up to work in Firefox.  A user on a forum has made the conclusion that konqueror does not require this step and can call java itself if it has been installed correctly.  note if you don’t go read that post, you do have to set the path to java in konqueror or setting a JAVA_HOME environmental variable.) 
  12.  sudo ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/local/lib/browser_plugins/symlinks/gecko18/libjavaplugin_oji.so
  13. sudo ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/local/lib/browser_plugins/symlinks/gecko19/libjavaplugin_oji.so
  14. sudo ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/local/lib/browser_plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
  15. ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ~/.mozilla/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so (sudo not needed because this is being put in your home directory)
    I found all these locations (in 11 – 15) by doing a “sudo find / -name libmozsvgdec.so” as this plugin does show up in Firefox, but java still does not.
  16. so I checked my links, and sure enough all of the links looked like this:
    lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     20 Mar 31 09:37 libjavaplugin_oji.so@ -> libjavaplugin_oji.so so I did
    a.  sudo rm libjavaplugin_oji.so 
    b. sudo ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ./libjavaplugin_oji.so
    in each directory that had the bad link
  17. so, from a FreeBSD forum post I found this information: try running “sudo /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/bin/jcontrol” which would not run via ssh, or the “F2″ command line in KDE4, could not open it from Dolphin, nor from a local console (ttyv2). both the local console and ssh terminal give the same error: Error occurred during initialization of VM
    Unable to load ZIP library: /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/libzip.so
    I have verified it is there and is owned by root.

Now this page has a very interesting piece of information dated feb 3rd 2010…

JAVA PLUGIN DOES NOT WORK IN FIREFOX 3.6 ON FREEBSD AT THIS TIME

this may have something to do with why the FreeBSD ports have Firefox, Firefox3, and Firefox 35. 

 

so, I’m off to see if 3.5 and 3.6 can co-exist… one last note before I head off, I read on one of these forums that if you do everything else before installing Firefox, then run sudo make config-recursive install cleanone of the option in the config with be to enable java or some such, so we will see what happends…

 

after running sudo make config-recursive command in the /usr/ports/www/firefox directory I figured out exactly why to use the -recursive part… it runs the config option on ALL dependencies also. (oh and fyi I saw nothing about java in any of them…)

 

A couple of sites I visited while writing this up…

FreeBSD wiki – great site, except most of the pages were dated 2007

Lioks‘ FreeBSD tutorials & tips for beginners

The FreeBSD freshports page, which also shows “that very interesting piece of information”

A message poston a Unix forum about getting Firefox to work on FreeBSD, it’s for FreeBSD 5.3 but was a slightly amusing post, so I am linking it here anyway.

And finally the search I used to find them

 

Ok boys and girls, off to uninstall my Firefox 3.6.2 and to install Firefox 3.5, see you next time!

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FreeBSD 8.0 and KDE 4.4

By finndo On March 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Continuing on from my last post, it was really quite simple to get KDE to run after I closed that post.  in fact I only had to type in 2 lines and the second one ran KDE.

 

exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4 > ~/.xinitrc startx

 

BAM! that was [...]

Continuing on from my last post, it was really quite simple to get KDE to run after I closed that post.  in fact I only had to type in 2 lines and the second one ran KDE.

 

  1. exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4 > ~/.xinitrc
  2. startx

 

BAM! that was it, finally!! after 2.5 years of trying I could not believe it was so simple… and then I noticed… I had no KB or Mouse… I did not know it was possible to be so happy and so sad at the same time…

 

You can search the inet any way you want and you’ll find out that running “X -configure” will generate your xorg.conf.new file that you then have to move to “/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf “   one more item to note, when you test this, make sure you type “X -retro” or “Xorg -retro” else you will just get a blank screen.

*****WARNING*****ok, now that I got your attention, you must run the following command before attempting to use your xorg.conf in the previously mentioned location or you will lock your system up and have to hit the power button. “sudo chmod root:wheel /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf“  if you do not have sudo installed, you have 3 choices.

 

  1. login as root (something I never do except to add my user id to the sudoers file)
  2. type “su -” and switch to root
  3. login as root and type “pkg_add -r sudo” then either add yourself to the wheel group or add yourself to the sudoers file

 

there are several ways to add yourself to the wheel group, the only one that sticks out in my mind right now that I can vouch for is “pw moduser [username] -G wheel [username]” this one sets your group to wheel AND your default group [username], if you skip the second [username] you will no longer have access to any of your own files or you can type “pw groupmod wheel -m [username]” should do the same, to add yourself to the sudoers file you need to type “visudo” then you will be in vi, here is what to do if you don’t know vi.

 

  1. press ”/” (initiates a search)
  2. type “root” (tells vi what to search for)
  3. press enter (begins the search process)
  4. press “n” (takes you to the next instance of “root”)
  5. press “o” (creates a new blank line under the current one and starts editing)
  6. type [username] [tab] “ALL=(ALL) ALL“  (make sure you use caps on the “ALL”, this allows [username] to use sudo)
  7. press ESC (stops edit mode)
  8. press “:” (informs vi you wish to enter a command)
  9. type “wq!” (tells vi to “write” the current file to disk and “quit” vi “NOW”
  10. press enter (executes the command you have entered

 

Now you will no longer have to log in as root on your machine, or su to root again.  Back to my problems…  So, I ran the dreaded -configure command (dreaded because after running it on any system in the last 2-3 years the only result I have ever gotten is the blank black screen syndrome) and of course, I got exactly what I was expecting… a blank black screen when I tested X with that config file.  This is the reason I did not switch to FreeBSD instead of windows back when FreeBSD 6.1 was released, I could never get beyond this point.  Well, about a days worth of inet searching and I have come across some useful information that “worked” for several users.  Nothing worked for me (feel free to search the issue and you’ll get a lovely list of others having this issue, some getting off easy, some giving up, some finding alternate ways to do it.)  about 15 minutes ago (not that you will know when that was based off my posting time, but it makes sense to say it that way…) I found a lovely forum post on FreeBSD.org, now when you look at that post you may not be surprised by what you see there, it is fairly common troubleshooting and common knowledge about the workings of FreeBSD and X.org; HOWEVER!!! and here is the kicker, it has in it a code snippet of the ever elusive “ServerFlags” section of  xorg.conf, something that apparently is not auto generated and really is not documented well (additionally other posts I saw told you to stick it in the “ServerLayout” section, which only causes X to crash without loading.)  I added the following to my xorg.conf file:

 

  1. Section “ServerFlags”
  2.                 Option “AllowEmptyInput” “off”
  3. EndSection
  4. Section “InputDevice”
  5.                 Identifier   “Keyboard0″
  6.                 Driver         ”kbd”
  7.                 Option “XkbOptions” “terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp”
  8. EndSection

 

Now, if you ran “X -configure” lines 4, 5, 6, and 8 should already be in there.  Lines 1 – 3 allow my mouse to work in X, and line 7 allows me to hit ctrl+alt+bksp to exit X and both worked!!  So I quickly exited X and tried “startx” and sure enough, KDE loaded, I could see it, and my mouse worked!!  hot dog!!

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FreeBSD 8.0 in the house

By finndo On March 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

So, (yes it is about 2:30am for me right now, had a small (=98 or 99 for me normal is mid 96 or low 97 degree temp) fever last night, ate some food I should have not and spent about 45 minutes in the bathroom about an hour ago… not sitting…) [...]

So, (yes it is about 2:30am for me right now, had a small (=98 or 99 for me normal is mid 96 or low 97 degree temp) fever last night, ate some food I should have not and spent about 45 minutes in the bathroom about an hour ago… not sitting…) I completed the installation following the guide I mentioned in my FreeBSD and VMWare post a week or two ago, but I was so intent on the guide I forgot to mark the main HDD slice as bootable, and then it was all down hill from there.  the FreeBSD bootloader failed to locate a kernel and it was a real mess.  I have done this in the past and never really figured out how to resolve it without reinstalling.  The best I can tell you is what I just did…

 

  1. reboot from the install CD
  2. go into the post-configuration menu and select fdisk
  3. select the slice you installed root on “/”
  4. press “s” to make it bootable, should make a “A” appear next to it
  5. go into the label editor and go to each mount and press “m” and enter the mount point (make sure it is the same as the last time you ran setup, should be ”/” “/usr” “/var” ”/tmp” in that order if you want to have a happy and long life :)
  6. then go add some random package doesn’t matter what
  7. select commit, it will make the HDD partition changes and add the random package
  8. exit out and reboot

 

Now somehow I missed the network card config (probably because I was halfway through the install when my wife dragged me out to watch her drink green beer.  granted I had a good time up until about 1am this morning in the bathroom.  fyi I only had 1 beer, so the beer did not make me sick (it was not green!), it had to be the sandwich, which btw was good the first time…), so when I rebooted (and it did work after that) I had no IP addy. SO, back into the setup app

 

  1. type sysinstall
  2. go to configure ”post install configuration”
  3. networking
  4. interfaces “configure additional networking interfaces”
  5. answer the questions

 

ok, now I have everything up and running, followed a link in the guide I was following to “what to do first after installing FreeBSD” basically gives you the commands to enter to update the system and the ports tree.

 

So, the next step in the guide has you setup and run dbus, which promptly gave me an error about not having it’s user ID’s configured correctly (I blame my shotty installation technique… :P   )  fixable by going here, which by the way does say that the issue is from my nuked /etc/passwd file when I reran setup.  This is bad, because I will be seeing more errors from this in the future… maybe I should nuke and restart before I get too far in?

 

I wish I did not have nearly everything I own stuffed in plastic tubs and sitting in a storage unit right now… I used to have a cheat sheet in a small ringed notedbook that had all these neat commands for FreeBSD written out, like how/when to use portupgrade and pkgdb.  so, somehow my brain nearly functioned correctly and reminded me of this. SO I did a quick search from my laptop and found a page on pkgdb which also talks and is linked to a page on portupgrade…

 

I quickly ran pkgdb (if you’ve ever done this on a fresh install you’ll get the joke there, if not pop open virtual box install freebsd and follow allong to get a sense of what makes that funny) and got several issues resolved.

 

First I made sure to install all of these during the system install, as I know I will use them, but here is a list of the commands I have entered (as root) since my system booted for the first time to get it all setup. (in order, don’t know if it is the best order, but it is the order I did it!!)

 

  1. freebsd-update fetch install
  2. portsnap fetch extract
  3. pkgdb -F (this one can take 20 seconds or 2 hours)
  4. cvsup /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h cvsup12.us.freebsd.org (this one is a good one to run over night, or when you have to run out to the store... no prompts and takes a couple of minutes)
  5. cd /var/db
  6. tar cvfz var.db.pkg.[MMDDYYYY].tgz pkg
  7. cd ~ (get back to the root home directory)
  8. portupgrade -ra (this one takes a VERY long time and is directly affected by your internet speed; however you will frequently be prompted for options.  If you know what it is and want it, put an "X" in the box, if not, keep to the defaults and avoid anything marked experimental!)  Total run time 20 hours and it went unattended for up to 3.5 hours 3 times and for 30-50 mins twice. (each time it was sitting at a screen waiting for me when I got back to it)
  9. pkgdb -F (all good, finished in 5 seconds)
  10. cvsup /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h cvsup12.us.freebsd.org (went pretty quick this time, about 3 mins and DID make some more changes.)
  11. portupgrade -ra (finished in less than 10 minutes, but did update on some things and gave me an error "curl does not support both c-ares and IPv6 - disable one of them." apparently I checked to many boxes in the config screen!!  This process moved me from 528 packages installed to 631)
  12. portupgrade -ra (finished in about 15 minutes, but did update on some things AGAIN!)
  13. portupgrade -ra (keep on running it till it doesn't update anything... this run I noticed some errors flying by, and several updates but it only took about 5 mins to complete, maybe there are more, but I am ready to move on... I'll run this every night before I go to bed for a week until it stops updating.)

 

So, now back to the guide, I think I was trying to start dbus... (I borrowed these lines from the forum post linked above to fix my problem with starting dbus)

 

  1. cd /usr/ports/sysutils/policykit/ make deinstall
  2. make install clean
  3. cd /usr/ports/net/avahi-app
  4. make deinstall 
  5. make install clean

 

After that I was able to start both dbus and hald with no errors and the next step of that process was to reboot, so I shall, and then I'll continue this on a new post...

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Working on getting FreeBSD running…

By finndo On March 11, 2010 · 2 Comments

Right so first off I have to say that it is all my fault I am not currently up and running 100% in FreeBSD 8.0, I agree before anyone else can say it… I’m an idiot.  I went out and bought (went out=I hit up [...]

Right so first off I have to say that it is all my fault I am not currently up and running 100% in FreeBSD 8.0, I agree before anyone else can say it… I’m an idiot.  I went out and bought (went out=I hit up newegg.com)  a wireless card so I can stop bridging my network connection off my laptop, and I just had to buy an 802.11n dual antena (very cool looking too…) wireless PCI card, one that has a BRAND NEWish CHIPSET that is not currently supported in Linux, or BSD.  So, I will gladly bend over and take what’s coming to me for that one… But, it was the same price as the 802.11g card and supports MIMO!! so I think I deserve some brownie points for that…

Well, here is a copy of what I have posted on the DesktopBSD forum (more on that later)

Ok, well I had a nice long post typed out here (twice now, but I copied most of it before I hit the stupid key this time) with lots of details and useless additives; however I hit the stupid “back” button that IBM thought would be a good idea to put on the key board of this laptop right next to the up arrow… and so it is gone.

this will have to be a quick version, minus some heavily laden with porn russian websites (oh! there was also one trying to sell an iphone x-ray vision app too!!!) I can find zero info on this chipset, I have a Encore Electronics ENLWI-NX2 802.11n PCI card, works in Win7 AFTER running their config/setup progy.  Shows up in pciconf with class, card, chip, rev, and hdr hex codes, and a vendor and class listing, but nothing else.  It shows up in windows as an RTL8190P, I was unsuccessful in finding it in FreeBSD 8.0 x64; but I may have forgotten to capitalize the “R” in Realtek when I grepped the “pciconf -lv” results.

manufacturer product page: http://www.encore-usa.com/product_item.php?region=us&bid=2&pgid=81_2&pid=412

I followed the ndisgen instructions posted in this forum by sqlbsd, and all went well until I tried to load the RTL8190P_sys file, then the system hangs for 3-6 seconds and finally the PC just shut off.  So a bit more PC info… I tried running FreeBSD 8.0 x64 first, but did not even find the card listed in pciconf (or dmesg) when I grepped for Realtek (maybe I forgot to capitalize the “R”? but either way I didn’t see it, and although I got KDE setup and it booted to the login screen, I could not log in, the KB and mouse only worked on the console screens, so I came back to DesktopBSD).  So, I have a clean DesktopBSD 1.7 x64 install on my machine, only 1 network card and it is this wireless card.

I am going to try the 32bit drivers, the win 2k drivers, and then the vista drivers that shipped with the card.  I also have the setup file from the manufacturer’s website DL’d and will check that for a different version.  if anyone has any ideas I’d be happy to give them a go.  I may try an Ubuntu Live CD to check if it will recognize the card, also puppy linux tends to find wifi cards out of the box, so I may give that a shot and see if I can figure out which drivers they use.

I knew I should have just bought the 802.11g card… but I had to go with the 802.11n just cuz it was the same price… and had MIMO support…

****edit 10 minutes later****
I did notice that the Encore ENLWI-G is listed on the FreeBSD 7.2 Hardware list, so there is hope…

****update 8:12pm EST****
So, the newly downloaded drivers from the website were slightly more generic (RTL819xP drivers) but they are 7 months newer, so I tried them.  The Win64 failed to convert invalid syntax line 2355 or so, the the winxp2k drivers loaded fine, but failed to create the .ko file.  The vista x64 drivers converted with no errors and loaded without crashing the PC; however the system still does not recognize the wireless card. so I guess I move on to something else?

Right, well then… now you know… and we all know what happens after that… (right, if anyone can’t find those russian sites (I searched for “RTL8190 FreeBSD”) I’ll be happy to email you the links… j/k :oops:  ) so on to a little more explaining…

As stated in the post I failed to find the wireless card even listed in the installed hardware listing, I am 90% sure at this point I did not capitalize the “R” as that just makes no sense.  After which I just dumped the FreeBSD install and went to Desktop BSD, as I have installed DBSD 1.6 previously on this hardware and it had KDE working in under 50 mins with no manual configuring and I was unable to type on the login screen currently in FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE.  So I booted up of my newly minted Desktop BSD disc and away it went.  I learned that if you create more than one UFS partition during install that when you reboot you get a “Invalid Partition Table” message instead of your OS. easy fix, don’t make multiple partitions.  The OS is up and running at this very second, but without inet access.

So I am off to try an Ubuntu live CD, Fedora Live CD, and a Puppy and or Slax USB bootable File System.  In an attempt to find out if any non-windows OS can auto configure or even load the Windows drivers to get that wifi working (I believe I have a post around here somewhere about my HP laptop running Puppy and it finding th ewifi adapter and being able to locate networks, but not able to connect, and Ubuntu 8.x on that same laptop working perfectly with wifi, so we shall see what happens…)

*****quick update, before I even post it… HA! *****

after reading the reviews on the NewEgg site (specifically one from feb 28th), I decided to DL the RTL8192E drivers from the Realtek website, will give them a shot before the other OS’s.

*****update March 12th*****

So, I went ahead and added the lines to /boot/loader.conf to automate the loading of the driver during startup, but I have also been getting the same results with all driver versions. (XP drivers fail to convert, and Vista and 7 drivers convert fine, but the system still refuses to acknowledge the existence of the hardware device after using kldload or even restarting.)  I currently have a KUbuntu live CD loaded and an lspci from a terminal screen shows the network controller, states it is a realtek and gives a device of 8190.  however, the control panel does not acknowledge a wireless adapter as being present nor does ifconfig show the wireless adapter as being present.

I tried installing ndiswrapper from the cd and attempted to load the windows drivers from there.  First I tried running ndiswrapper and it told me it was not installed and to run ndiswrapper-common, when I installed it and tried to run it it told me to install a bunch of other things.  All were available except ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 which replied back that it was missing, obsolete, or no longer available, then that it had been replaced by ndiswrapper-common.  so I could not run ndiswrapper because I did not have ndiswrapper-utils and could not install it because it was replaced by what I already had? got me, without doing an actual install, the good news is that it completely recognized it, I’ll have to check with an installation if it is already in the newest linux kernel, I have just moved on to Fedora since I do not intend on doind an Ubuntu install if I do not have to.

I booted up the Fedora 12 disc I have and it failed to bring up the KDE GUI.  The Vterms were available, and an lspci -v showed the full information on the wireless card, so I am going to try a reboot and see what happens.

Everything came up fine with a reboot, not sure what happend the first time.  it is not working; however an lspci -v shows no kernel driver in use.  I will need to do some research to find out how to add the driver while running off the Live CD, probably get to that later.  been working all day in front of a computer, need to relax my eyes some now.

*************Update 3-17-2010**************

just found this website and I think this is a linux driver for the rtl8190p 802.11n chipset

http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/staging/rtl8192e/r8190_rtl8256.c

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