A while ago, I reported I had trouble getting FreeBSD fully functional as a guest OS under Virtual PC. I've revisited this idea and gotten further.
I never got X running on my FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE guest under Virtual PC. Shortly after that, my Windows 2000 installation died after a windows update, and I sort of gave up on Virtual PC. It turns out I didn't really need Windows that desperately after all, and I have a FreeBSD desktop machine I can use if I want to (and it turns out with OS X handy I don't want to very much).
I decided more or less on a whim to resurrect the w2k VPC (it turns out it was quite easy - I just had to blow away the system hive of the registry and reinstall the VPC guest support), and that inspired me to have another go at FreeBSD.
It turns out that whatever was ailing X has been fixed sometime between 4.2.0 and 4.3.0, as I was quite easily able to get a nice 1152x768 16 bit color X server running without too much trouble. There's no trick to it. You just tell X that you need to use the "s3" driver.
The only issue now is that the real time clock runs very slow. I'm hoping that upgrading to 5.2-RELEASE will fix this. If it does, then that will make FreeBSD fully functional. Update! It appears that adding 'kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254' to /etc/sysctl.conf may fix this. Since the machine is virtual, you can't count on the TSC clock being accurate at all. There is also some special software you can run from cron to occasionally sync the virtual clock to the host clock. If it isn't already, I'll look into making that a port.
I'm not sure what use I'll put it to. After all, OS X itself is based on FreeBSD, so I have all of the *nix I really want and need without virtualization.
The scourge of spam has started invading blog space.
Some of you may have noted the appearance of spam comments here. It appears that the motivation of the spammers is to increase their relevance on Google by scattering links to their chosen site on blogs. Once again, we see the trajedy of the commons in action.
I've tried to delete the spam comments as they come in, but in at least a couple cases, they leaked through because the comment notification e-mail that is sent to me actually was caught by my e-mail spam filter because the comment was that spammy.
Well, I've now installed the MT-blacklist plugin. It will make it more difficult for folks to post comments about viagra, diets, insurance and the like. If you are somehow trying to post a legitimate comment that concerns one of the topics, then I appologise for the inconvenience, but I can't imagine how any of the banned phrases would be on-topic here.