One notable improvement features the memory allocator “jemalloc,” developed by FreeBSD guru Jason Evans. Firefox version 2 was known as something of a memory hog, and the update improves upon this greatly with upgrades such as a new rendering engine, but Evans’ contribution proved particularly significant. According to Firefox developer Stuart Parmenter, their tests of the browser on Windows Vista showed a 22% drop in memory usage once they turned on “jemalloc.”

Another FreeBSD technology utilized in the Firefox upgrade was the “bsdiff” binary patch system, which allows for reduced software update sizes and faster downloads for end users. In addition, the delivery of the Firefox software relied on FreeBSD as well–Internet Systems Consortium operates one of Mozilla’s download mirrors, powered by FreeBSD 7. During Mozilla’s record-breaking 24 hours of downloading, the server withstood rates of a gigabit per second. ISC referred to FreeBSD as “a rock solid platform.”

Of course, FreeBSD has a long history of being used inside other open-source projects, and this is just one example of the improvements that it can make. And just think: “jemalloc” is already a part of FreeBSD 7. If it can improve the performance of a web browser so drastically, then imagine the potential effect on an entire operating system.

The installation is as simple as download, extract to your local drive, upload to a directory on your web server and check the permissions. Certain directories you’ll need to give write access to by your Apache user, chmod 777 on those directories is often the quickest way. You’ll need to create a database for it to use if you haven’t done so already as well as a user for the program to access the Db with. Once that’s complete you can browse to the install location and begin the web-based configuration. It’s a quick 4-step process and that’s it. When you’ve successfully completed that you can delete the /install directory within the program directory and you’re all set.

As with many PHP programs, OpenCart saves settings in a config.php file in the main installation directory in case you need to edit them from the command line. There is also another config.php in the admin directory for your backend settings.

OpenCart is still a young project, currently at version 0.7.7 which was released October 9, 2007.  The User Manual isn’t quite complete yet but it is enough to get you through the install and setup. Once that’s complete you can log into the Admin section and look at store statistics, the latest orders and the latest product reviews. There’s also a full input system for adding items to your catalog. The store uses templates so it can maintain the look and feel of your entire website. It has also been ported to over 20 languages, supports multiple shipping and payment methods and has additional add-ons for extended capabilities. OpenCart is designed to be a full-featured, search engine friendly, easy-to-use Ecommerce interface for buyers and sellers.

Find out more at OpenCart’s website (http://www.opencart.com/).

This means that if you want to do something specific in FreeBSD you probably won’t need to do much work in order to get those functions and features. Depending on your level of familiarity with programming and FreeBSD you can choose how to install these programs. If you’re more tech-savvy and know your way around major programming languages then you might be interested in installing the source code for the programs, either from the ports tree or by installing it on your own separate from the ports tree.

When you install a port from the ports tree, you are basically running an ‘autorun’ type script that will download the source code of the program, compile, and install it locally. If you’re not familiar with a Makefile and compiling source code into binaries then you may be more interested in the Packages collection which allows you to directly install the binaries (executables) and not worry about doing the compiling and installation process. The collections allow you to directly install the applications from local media or directly from the network so you don’t need to worry about storing everything locally if you don’t need it.

The major benefits to installing from Packages include: smaller download, faster installation, no need to compile. The major benefits for installing from the Ports collections include: ability to tweak the performance and options of the applications and able to build-in specific functions that might not be activated in a pre-compiled binary.

Finally, both Ports and Packages are dependency aware which means they know what they need to function properly and can tell you or install the libraries as they need. This means that you should almost always be able to get up and running with the new applications in no time flat. Good Luck!

For more information see the FreeBSD Handbook:

• Chapter 4 Installing Applications: Packages and Ports

Unfortunately for some reason the Music Player Daemon (mpd henceforth) is set up to not compile with support for libshout which is needed for it to play with Icecast. Luckily as long as you have libshout (/usr/ports/audio/libshout) installed getting mpd to install with support for it is fairly simple. Navigate to /usr/ports/audio/musicpd and open up the Makefile in your favorite editor. Somewhere around line 40 should be a line that reads ‘CONFIGURE_ARGS= –disable-shout’, change this to read ‘CONFIGURE_ARGS= –enable-shout’ and it should compile just fine. Why this option is explicately disabled I do not know but hopefully it will be fixed in the near future. If you go poking around in the Makefile and aren’t able to fine the line to change they may have already fixed it.

Anyway, install musicpd now followed by Icecast (/usr/ports/audio/icecast2). I also installed phpMp, a web interface for mpd to manage the stream and playlists. It can be found in /usr/ports/www/phpmp. After everything is installed go to /usr/local/etc/ to do the configuring. Along with this post are two example configuration files, mpd.cond and icecast.xml for their respective applications. In my mpd.conf I have created a user to place all the required files under. If you use the web interface this users home directory will really only have a database file used by mpd in it along with a log. If you wanted you could create a public_html for the user and run phpMp out of it. In the configuration file for mpd you will need to update the paths if they are different, the stream name if you so desire, and connection information for Icecast (host, port, password). The password and other connection details you choose should be specified the same in icecast.conf. Working from the top down in icecast.xml you should first change/specify the source and relay passwords under authentication (the one used for mpd should also be used here), the administrative username and password, the hostname for the server, and the port to run on. Unless you need to change logging information the rest should be alright.

Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the lines ‘icecast_enable=”YES”‘ and ‘musicpd_enable=”YES”‘. Then do ‘/usr/local/etc/rc.d/icecast start’ followed by ‘/usr/local/etc/rc.d/musicpd start’. If Icecast started correctly you should be able to load the status page at http://hostname:portnumber. Once you have verified that Icecast is running correctly test mpd by executing ‘mpc add <some>’ and then loading /stream.ogg from Icecast. If you can hear the music playing then congratulations, you have properly set up Icecast and musicpd.Musicpd Configuration
Icecast Configuration