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Following on from the previous blog post, I started on the path of build a Linux From Scratch distribution. The project offers two paths one using traditional Sys V init and systemd for the other. I opted for systemd route and followed the guide, it was all very straight forward. Essentially you fetch a bunch of source archives off the internet, run tar, configure, make, make test, make install a…

How to open source: going from NetBSD to Linux

TL;DR: some BSD user tries something other and wonder why things are different.

This post has sat in draft form for quite some time. At first it was written with highlighting the NetBSD project in mind and I started thinking about revisiting it recently due to frustration with running a mainstream Linux distribution when investigating

how some critical libraries I was running were built

wha…

Trying to operate macOS in single user mode

Wednesday lunch time, I opened up my laptop and in the middle of writing an email my machine froze and after a few seconds rebooted. Uh oh, the system sat at the grey screen for a few seconds and then the dreaded folder with a question mark began flashing which means there was no bootable disk found.

Turned the machine off, turned it back on again, ah, a message that the machine had crashed…

Book review: BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability

It’s more than 11 years since the shouting in the data centre video landed and I still manage to surprise folks in 2020 who have never seen it with what is possible. The idea that such transparency is a reality in some circles comes as a shock.

Without the facility to be able to dynamically instrument a system the operator…

Heads up for RSS subscribers

I’m going to be experimenting with the migrating from WordPress to Hugo this week, if you subscribe to the RSS feeds on this site and wish to continue to do so, you might want to check everything is ok at your end after Monday the 25th. One of the key factors of migrating to Hugo is to preserve URLs for existing posts so hopefully there should be minimal fallout.

Full name of root account in BSD

NetBSD now has a users(7) and groups(7) manual. Looking into what entries existed in the passwdand groupfiles I wondered about root’s full name who we now know as Charlie Root in the BSDs.

Root was called Ernie Co-vax in 3BSD. An Ernie Kovacs also shows up in adduser(8). The 4.4BSD System Manager’s Manual mentions “at Berkeley we have machines named Ernie (Co-VAX), Kim (No-VAX)”.

Charlie Root in…

Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2019)

pkgsrcCon 2019 was held in Cambridge this year. The routine as usual was social on the Friday evening, day of talks on the Saturday, hacking on things on the Sunday. Armed with a bag of bits to record the talks, I headed up to Cambridge on Friday evening to meet up with sborrill before heading to the Castle Inn. Not much to report from Friday night, drinks were drunk, food was ate, PowerPC…

A week of pkgsrc #13

With the lead up to the release of pkgsrc-2019Q2 I picked up the ball with the testing on OS X Tiger again. It takes about a month for a G4 Mac Mini to attempt a bulk build of the entire pkgsrc tree with compilers usually taking up most days without success. To reduce the turnaround time, I switched to attempting a small subset of packages for a quicker turnaround using meta-pkgs/bulk-large.…

A week of pkgsrc #13

With the lead up to the release of pkgsrc-2019Q2 I picked up the ball with the testing on OS X Tiger again. It takes about a month for a G4 Mac Mini to attempt a bulk build of the entire pkgsrc tree with compilers usually taking up most days without success. To reduce the turnaround time, I switched to attempting a small subset of packages for a quicker turnaround using meta-pkgs/bulk-large.…

For this years pkgsrcCon, the baton was passed on to Pierre Pronchery & Thomas Merkel, location Berlin. It wasn’t clear whether I would be able to attend this year until the very last minute, booking plane tickets and accommodation a couple of days before. The day before I flew out was really hectic and I did not get any sleep. I left home around 1:30am and made my way to St Pancras for the…

NetBSD notes #1

I wanted to resume writing up notes about what I’d been working on as with the “A week of pkgsrc” series, this actually spans the last few weeks. 🙂 Things basically came together around the event of a late 2009 13″ MacBook entering my life. First port of call was to see state of NetBSD support since I last visited it. I’m still running FreeBSD on my 11″ Air and so was keen to see if there had…

Introducing RunBSD.info #NetBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #DragonFlyBSD

RunBSD.info is an introductory site covering the features & benefits across the different members of the BSD family of operating systems. To get things started, the content for the site was taken from an earlier post originally put together with a specific audience in mind. That audience was a group of hardware enthusiasts who are not necessarily interested in software but may require an…

FreeBSD on 11? MacBook Air 5,1 (mid-2012)

This tiny machine has been with me for a few years now, It has mostly run OS X though I have tried OpenBSD on it. Besides the screen resolution I’m still really happy with it, hardware wise. Software wise, not so much. I use an external disk containing a zpool with my data on it. Among this data are several source trees. CVS on a ZFS filesystem on OS X is painfully slow. I dislike that builds…

Lessons learnt from adding OpenBSD/x86_64 support to pkgsrc

Before even getting into the internals of operating systems to learn about differences among a group of operating systems, It’s fairly evident that something as simple as naming is different between operating systems. For example, the generations of trusty 32bit x86 PC is commonly named i386 in most operating systems, FreeBSD may also refer to it as just pc, Solaris & derivatives refer to it as…

12″ PowerBook G4 PT5 – Electronic Battle Weapon

Preparation for a trip started off a little earlier this christmas. I planned to take my PowerBook on the road with me to Hamburg for 33c3. Previous attempts to use this machine as my primary system on the road in the past had been thwarted by leaving too little time to build & prepare before departure. The system has been dual booting NetBSD & Mac OS X Tiger for some time now, recently I’ve been…