This goes in your zshrc:

  vman() {
    if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
      /usr/bin/man
    else
      if man -w $* >/dev/null 2>/dev/null
      then
        /usr/bin/man $* | col -b | vim -c 'set ft=man nomod' -
      else
        echo No man page for $*
      fi
    fi
  }
  alias man='vman'

And this goes in your vimrc (in a suitable augroup):

  autocmd FileType man setlocal ro nonumber nolist fdm=indent fdn=2 sw=4 foldlevel=2 | nmap q :quit

Now you’ll get nicely highlighted man pages with folded sections, and you can hit q to quit just like less.

On FreeBSD, this doesn’t work so well. However, you can tell manually tell the Crucial site what motherboard you have and it will tell you exactly what sort of RAM is best.

This is fine if you know what motherboard you have.

if you don’t, the answer is dmidecode(8) (/usr/ports/sysutils/dmidecode). This utility grabs the same information which the Crucial thingy does, so all you need to do is find the info you need.

This is pretty easy:

# dmidecode -t baseboard
SMBIOS 2.3 present.

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: ABIT <http ://www.abit.com.tw>
        Product Name: 694X-686B (VP6)
        Version: v1.0 ~
        Serial Number:

Not masses of useful information returned from my old system, but still enough to identify the motherboard as an Abit VP6. This is all I need to know to find out what memory I should be buying.

I already know what size sticks of RAM I have, but just incase you need to check:

# dmidecode -t memory
SMBIOS 2.3 present.
...
Handle 0x0021, DMI type 17, 21 bytes
Memory Device
    Array Handle: 0x0020
    Error Information Handle: Not Provided
    Total Width: Unknown
    Data Width: Unknown
    Size: 512 MB
    Form Factor: DIMM
    Set: None
    Locator: BANK_0
    Bank Locator: Bank0/1
    Type: Unknown
    Type Detail: None

Again, not the most useful information ever seen, but enough to tell me I have a 512MB stick in bank 0. (On my newer desktop, I get much more useful information like the speed and voltage of the RAM.)

In FreeBSD, clicking on the addressbar doesn’t do that. However, when you manually select the URL so you can replace it, it overwrites the contents of your clipboard and makes it so much harder to paste the URL you were about to look at.

Luckily, you can fix this :) Browse to about:config and stick urlbar in the filter box. Find the browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll setting and change it (by double-clicking) to true.

To paste, you’ll probably have best success with Ctrl-V as middlemouse seems to paste the clipboard without overwriting the previous contents.

[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] ModVmdb load: Address of ModVmdb_InitCore: 0xb7c745a0\n
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Failed to create named-pipe directory:
  /var/run/vmware//httpd/3854: No such file or directory\n
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] VMWARE PANIC: \nNOT_IMPLEMENTED F(4023):707\n
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Panic: Could not allocate temporary context.\n

This is apparently a known problem on Ubuntu (which is what I’m running it on), and someone came up with this fix on the VMware community forums. However, I’m not entirely happy with setting a directory to 777 so instead I created the httpd directory and changed the owner to www-data, which is who the VMware Apache server runs as. That meant I could set the permissions to 700.

# mkdir /var/run/vmware/httpd
# chown www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd
# chmod 700 /var/run/vmware/httpd

Seems to be working fine now. I didn’t modify the startup script as suggested in the forum post yet, so I’ll see when I next restart this machine if I need to do that. (Possibly Ubuntu clears /var/run when it starts, which would explain it.)