FreeBSD with new xorg 1.12.X

A while ago I switched my FreeBSD desktop to the new xorg 1.12.X. In ports this requires adding WITH_NEW_XORG=yes to /etc/make.conf.

I only found out today that for packages you need to add a file called /etc/pkg/FreeBSD-new-xorg.conf containing:

FreeBSD_new_xorg: {
 url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/new_xorg",
 mirror_type: "srv",
 signature_type: "fingerprints",
 fingerprints: "/usr/share/keys/pkg",
 enabled: yes
 }

Re-installing everything to see if it is more stable

FreeBSD svn and passwords

I have been getting the message about storing un-encrypted svn passwords for ages on FreeBSD and Ubuntu. I finally thought I would look into how you store encrypted passwords.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTENTION! Your password for authentication realm:
<https://dev.sinodun.com:443> Sinodun Projects Subversion Repository
can only be stored to disk unencrypted! You are advised to configure
your system so that Subversion can store passwords encrypted, if
possible. See the documentation for details.
You can avoid future appearances of this warning by setting the value
of the 'store-plaintext-passwords' option to either 'yes' or 'no' in
'/home/jad/.subversion/servers'.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Lots of goggling later the best I could find was an article about gnome-keyring-daemon and subversion which mentions the need for libsvn_auth_gnome_keyring-1.so. A quick search found this was missing on my system. A moment of dumbness later I remembered make config and found the port config option needed.

Screenshot

re-installing the port unfortunately broke svn with the following message:

svn: E175002: OPTIONS of 'https://dev.sinodun.com/svn/projects': SSL handshake failed: SSL disabled due to library version mismatch (https://dev.sinodun.com)

Thanks to this that was quickly fixed by rebuilding neon:

sudo portupgrade -f neon*

freebsd-update

I have always liked FreeBSD. IMHO it has the best and most up-to-date software collection in the form of ports (much more current than Gentoo last time I looked). I was always irritated by how hard it was to upgrade the kernel and core OS. Talking to several friends I found that the new(ish) freebsd-update utility seems to have passed a lot of people by.

It allows binary updates to the FreeBSD OS (not ports or packages) it also supports major and minor release upgrades. Along with portsnap and portupgrade FreeBSD is now as easy to manage as any other OS.

One minor gotcha is that it only updates the version number reported by uname if the kernel has been upgraded.