Issues with PC-BSD 8.2

Coming back to work from my break, it was about time to get rid of FreeBSD 9.0 CURRENT on my production machine and to install a more stable system. As Grenville had almost only good things to say about PC-BSD (like a super easy ZFS installation), I gave it a shot.

I have to say: the installation process is really nice, not like FreeBSD. Took only a few clicks and a bit of waiting, and it worked. Installing additional programs was easy through the PBI system - for the software available. to get more, I had to use the ports system as usual. No problem at all, no conflicts (except that PC-BSD ships with howl, but I prefer avahi).

It's not all good and shiny though.Upon firing up VirtualBox for example, it fired up kdesu and asked me to login as root to continue. Well - done that, thought not much about it, must be PC-BSD's way. Same thing then for Skype, and things started not to make much sense, specially as Skype just wouldn't start that way. Upon firing up Wireshark it wanted to run it as root again. Well that's a no-no, except you really intend to, which most of the time I do not. It also comes up with a big fat warning if you do that.

I don't know why PC-BSd sets the programs up to start like that from KMenu or the KLauncher (ALT+F2), but it doesn't make sense. so to get rid of that behaviour, just right klick on the KMenu -> Menu editor , select the program in question, go to the Advanced tab and deselect the "run as different user" checkbox.

Now, the next thing to fix is Kile which complains about Okular not being installed although it is and getting KDE programs to find the printers, which GTK programs already do.

Embedding fonts in PDFs using ghostscript without recompiling or reexporting the source text

Well, this has been tackled many times already in a variety of blogs and webpages, but I keep it here as reference.

There is always some crappy program that doesn't embed the fonts when exporting to PDF -- which is needed for some conference papers.

In my case the crappy tool is Matlab. Instead of going back and fiddling around with Matlab to export the graphs again and try to get it to embed fonts, I prefer the following shortcut found here.

Actually the solution in the comments further down works best:

pdftops file.pdf
ps2pdf -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress file.ps file.pdf

On FreeBSD you need poppler-utils and ghostscript to get the pftops and ps2pdf commands.

And because I had a bunch of graphs in PDF format without fonts embedded I needed a script to automate the process. Using tcsh it works like that:

cd figures
mkdir non-embedded
mv *.pdf non-embedded
foreach file (non-embedded/*.pdf)
pdftops $file
set psfile = `echo $file | cut -d"." -f1`.ps
set pdffile = `echo $file | cut -d "/" -f2
ps2pdf -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress $psfile $pdffile
end

And a similar script can be used to crop the graphs in PDF format using pdfcrop:

foreach file (*.pdf)
pdfcrop $file
set cropped = `echo $file | cut -d "." -f 1`-crop.pdf
rm -rf $file
mv $cropped $file
end

This removes all extra white space around all graphs. Again useful to handle crappy Matlab outputs.

Edit:

And here's the magic command to create a pdf with embedded fonts, optimized and 600dpi resolution (as requested by Sheridan Press for example):

pdftops file.pdf
ps2pdf -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dOPTIMIZE=true -dCompatibility=1.4 -r600 file.ps file.pdf

Installing a FreeBSD guest system on VirtualBox (binary version) on a Linux host

I think this solution is a good start for my blog, I also added some pics :-).

FreeBSD 8.2 was not so keen to install on VirtualBox 4.0.4  as it should, refusing to use the DVD iso I mounted and booted off from as installation medium.

Well turns out, the default settings VirtualBox provides for a FreeBSD install are no good. FreeBSD seems not to be happy with the CDROM drive being attached at an IDE adapter, so you need to switch to SATA:

Furthermore, FreeBSD doesn't seem to be happy with the EHCI USB controller of the binary VirtualBox, so you need to disable that if you want to use USB 2.0 devices in FreeBSD. They'll revert to slow USB 1.1, but at least you can access them.

And if you want to do FreeBSD development work like I do, using one or more copies of the FreeBSD source tree, you need to allocate a larger disk as well, the default 8GB will not be enough. I would suggest at least 30GB.