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I found an interesting site full of Tutorials and Guides for BSD called conveniently BSD Guides.

There aren’t a ton of guides but they do cover common tasks that users will want help with.  Things like an intro guide to vi, hardening FreeBSD, setting up a webserver and even general security tips.

If you’re new to using any BSD be it Free, Open, Net or Mac OS X it’s worth taking a few minutes to browse the collection and learn a few things at BSD Guides.

It’s actually pretty old news I guess but I just got around to doing some updating on my FreeBSD installation today and found out some major changes have been made to the way PHP is now installed.

It used to be that you could do an install of php “/usr/ports/www/mod_php4> make install clean” and a menu would come up to lets you select the extensions to install.  IE… support for mysql, session, xml, etc.

However now there are no options and you will get only a default base install.

To install the extensions you either have to do each one manually by finding them spread out around the ports tree.  MySQL support is in “/usr/ports/databases/php4-mysql” for example. The easier way is to use the new php extension meta-port in “/usr/ports/lang/php4-extensions”.  doing an “install” of this port will show the menu where you can select all the extensions then it will go out and do installs of all the extensions.

The notices are in the /usr/ports/CHANGES and /usr/ports/UPDATING dated July 17th, 2004.  Just thought I’d point this out since I’m sure there will be a few folks to miss this like I did.  Yes I know I should read the CHANGES and UPDATING files but like 90% of people I just run the updates on the ports and don’t check out things until something doesn’t work right!

** UPDATE (9/20/2004) **
Ok even after running the php4-extensions meta-port the modules were still not loading.  After spending this morning searching the web I managed to figure out that the problem is the php.ini file has a misconfigured “extension_dir”.  It appears default is set to “./” where as for php4 the actual location is “/usr/local/lib/php/20020429”.

If you look in the php.ini file found in “/usr/local/etc” for these lines:
; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = “./”

You can either comment out the extension_dir line by putting a semicolon before it or change the “./” to “/usr/local/lib/php/20020429”.  A quick restart of apache and you should be good to go.

Caught a link to an interesting article over at the BSDForums.

It's called BSD for Linux users and it's by is Matt Fuller.

The article covers an array of topics including; The history of BSD, BSD core/base, ports tree, differences in release procedures for BSD and Linux, upgrading differences, philosophical differences, and clears up common myths. I'll admit it is a bit bias but Mr. Fuller tries hard to keep it balanced. Still, it's a very good read not just for all the Linux users out there but anyone interested in BSD.

I know I'm always talking about BSD and some people probably get sick of it but tough cookies. You hear about Linux day in and day out in the media. BSD barely ever gets mentioned and if it does it's always a short blurb like "oh yea there's BSD too..." A little advocacy never hurt anyone so that's what I'm doing.

So grab the link and when you have some free time check it out.

I noticed in the logs that several people were doing searches for FreeBSD QuickSheets. Since I have never posted about it before I can only assume you found someone talking about it on a forum someplace. So here is a post for you to find doing a search. Right now I only have the 1 sheet. Hopefully I'll get around to writing another one during the winter break. Feel free to make suggestions for new sheets below in the comments.

I've created an official page that you can see on the local pages links on the left side back on the front page. However here is the current list below as well.

- - FreeBSD QuickSheets - -
Sheet #1:
Installing and Configuring CVSUP and PORTUPGRADE to update the Ports Tree and FreeBSD source code.

FreeBSD 4.9 was released late yesterday night.

It contains the usual assortment of bug fixes and security holes closed. Some new kernel changes, support for the Physical Address Extensions (PAE) capability on Intel Pentium Pro and higher processors has been added, drivers for more network cards, updates to ipfw, GNOME has been updated to 2.4 and KDE has been updated to 3.1.4 and a few other misc things.

Read the announcement here:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.9R/announce.html
Release notes:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/relnotes.html
Errata:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/errata.html

quote:

---

Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 23:19:08 -0800
From: "Murray Stokely"
To: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Subject: FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE is now available

I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE in April 2003, we have made conservative updates to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known security issues, and merged support for large memory i386 machines with Page Address Extensions (PAE) from 5.1.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list, available here:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/relnotes.html

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/errata.html

This release does not include all of the new technologies that were introduced with FreeBSD 5.1 in June. Most developer resources are focused on improving the FreeBSD 5.X branch, and this may very well be the last major release of FreeBSD 4.X. The security officer team will continue to actively support the 4.X branch according to the normal policy. Additional 4.9.X releases may be made available when necessitated by security vulnerabilities or high-impact bugfixes.

We encourage all our users to evaluate FreeBSD 5.1 and the upcoming 5.2. Because PAE support has only been a feature in 4.X for a few months, it has not received wide-spread testing, and our most conservative users may wish to stay with FreeBSD 4.8 until they choose to migrate to 5.X.

For more information about the distinctions between FreeBSD 4.X and 5.X, or for general information about the FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see :

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/

---

Good news for FreeBSD users. Yesterday the FreeBSD foundation announced that they worked out a deal with Sun and can now distribute a compiled binary version of the Jave VM and Dev Kit. This means no more having to download and patch the Linux version of Java to use on FreeBSD. It's designed for FreeBSD 4.8 but should work on all 4.x versions. It won't run on the 5.x line due to some bugs but they're working on getting this corrected quickly.

You can read the whole announcement here but below is a expert:
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/20030825-java131.shtml

"Boulder, CO - August 25, 2003 - The FreeBSD Foundation today announced the availability of a binary distribution of the Java JDK version 1.3.1 for the widely used FreeBSD operating system.

Wes Peters of the FreeBSD Core Team commented "This announcement hallmarks a new era of Java support for FreeBSD. Having easy to install binary Java packages will ensure that all users can enjoy the benefits of Java technology on the FreeBSD platform."

Java users can download, without charge, the FreeBSD Foundation's Java distribution from http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml. The FreeBSD Foundation is also providing OEM licenses to FreeBSD distributors, permitting them to ship out-of-the-box Java support with FreeBSD."