Articles about freebsd

1. Building CalculiX with the PaStiX solver without CUDA

   The CalculiX solver package on FreeBSD is compiled with the SPOOLES (SParse Object Oriented Linear Equations Solver) library by default. This is also the case in many Linux distributions because SPOOLES is free, while faster solvers like PARADISO are proprietary.

   SPOOLES is relatively fast compared to the built-in iterative solver, its most fundamental limitation is that the data must fit in RAM.

   However a patched version of the PaStiX solver has been integrated with CalculiX. It is often faster than SPOOLES and can use a GPU using the CUDA library.

2. Building vkQuake 1.22.0 on FreeBSD

   The FreeBSD port is relatively old, and doesn’t support SDL 2.2. So I built version 1.22.0, which is current at the time of writing.

   The requirements are the same als the port.

3. Writing speed on FreeBSD 13.1-p2 amd64 with ZFS

   This is a repeat of the test I ran in 2020 on the same desktop hardware, but now using the …

4. FreeBSD 13.1 install on a Lenovo IdeaPad 5

   When I originally got this machine, I needed it for $WORK. That is no longer the case, so I wanted to install FreeBSD 13.1 in combination with ZFS to gain experience with the latter.

   TL;DR Nice and quiet. Slightly faster than my i7-7700 workstation. Except for wifi, everything works.

5. Using a USB headset on FreeBSD

   At work I’ve been using several different USB headsets. Let’s see if they work on FreeBSD.

6. Buildworld benchmark on my new workstation

   As a real-world benchmark I rebuilt the FreeBSD OS after the most recent published vulnerabilities.

7. Writing speed on FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE amd64

   This is a repeat of the tests I ran in 2010 and 2012, on my current hardware.

   The test is …

8. Playing a sound when the battery is low

   Although I have a battery indicator on the bottom of my laptop screen I don’t alway check that often enough. That’s why I wanted to add an extra warning in the form of an audio signal. So even if I’m turned away from the laptop, it should still catch my attention.

9. Cleaning up old port configurations

   On FreeBSD, ports save their configuration parameters under /var/db/ports. When you de-install a port, this configuration remains behind. This is how to clean old configurations up.

10. Opencascade problem