Long time, no nix!

Actually, that's not exactly true. I've been playing with the usual things and not really treading any new ground to speak of.

I've been playing off-and-on with NetBSD 8 in a virtualbox VM since May.

It's gotten a lot better (from my point of view). It's almost nearly useable as a replacement for Mint 18 ...almost. The performance isn't really there.

...and it wouldn't be, since there are no guest additions.

There are two tricks I've learned that makes life in VB a lot better for NetBSD 8:

1)SetExtras;
From the hosts' commandline:

VBoxManage setextradata $VMNAME CustomVideoMode1 1920x1080x16 

The "x16" is important. Your instinct will be to choose a color depth of 24, but it won't work. 16 will.

2)Use a custom xorg.conf in the guest:

I'm still working on this (is there a way to make Xorg see more ram? There's gotta be!), but this is what I have to date:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "X.org Configured"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
    ModulePath   "/usr/X11R7/lib/modules"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
    FontPath     "/usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load  "dri"
    Load  "dri2"
    Load  "glx"
    Load  "shadow"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Keyboard0"
    Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Mouse0"
    Driver      "mouse"
    Option        "Protocol" "wsmouse"
    Option        "Device" "/dev/wsmouse"
    Option        "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier   "Monitor0"
    VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
    ModelName    "Monitor Model"
    HorizSync    31-80
    VertRefresh  30-100
EndSection

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: : integer, : float, : "True"/"False",
        ### : "String", : " Hz/kHz/MHz",
        ### : "%"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "ShadowFB"               # []
        #Option     "DefaultRefresh"         # []
        #Option     "ModeSetClearScreen"     # []
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "vesa"
    BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    DefaultDepth 16
    Identifier "Screen0"
    Device     "Card0"
    Monitor    "Monitor0"
    SubSection "Display"
        Viewport   0 0
        Depth     16
    EndSubSection
#    SubSection "Display"
#        Viewport   0 0
#        Depth     24
#        Modes     "1920x1080"
#    EndSubSection
EndSection

I've also found that setting RAM between 4G and 6G is needed for larger apps (CLang, GCC) to finish compiling.




I've managed to compile xfce4 and MATE; Mate works well enough to use as a desktop.

Most applications I've tried so far work, with some exceptions:
1)Firefox "nightly" randomly crashes.
2)Codeblocks stalls and never completely starts
3)htop doesn't seem to report free RAM correctly
4)closing apps sometimes crashes MATE
5)vlc player doesn't handle videos as well as gnome-mplayer (it's unwatchable).

Again, it's very much a case of "so near and yet so far". All said and done though, after three days of compiling everything (source, pkgsrc) I have a reasonably functional desktop with most of the comforts of home.

NetBSD 8 is still in beta, of course -and it shows. But I'm having better luck with it and pkgsrc (under virtualbox) than I have with NetBSD 7.x, so I'm optimistic this will be a keeper once it's done!

LFS once more

I've got nothing terribly exciting going on with virtual machines right now. No itches to scratch.

What I do have is my old computer and it's gathering dust; along with some external USB hard drives.

 I tried Linux From Scratch before. I compiled everything, booted but there were configuration weirdnesses.

I'm going to do something different this time.

This time I'm going to boot and work from the Mint 18 usb disk, use the external HD as a download and work area ($LFS) and have sda set as my target.

If this works, this should make things a LOT easier than trying to split up one hard drive between Mint and LFS.

I'll post my results if I get any!

Back to Virtual NetBSD

I was mistaken in my last post about Openindiana. It appears to compile, but never reaches the point where the final packages are made. It's probably a problem with my sunstudio setup -I don't feel like chasing it down when there's alternatives to play with.

I'm very fond of NetBSD -have been for fifteen or so years now.

Sadly, for nine and a half years I haven't been able to get it to work with real hardware. At first it didn't like my sata drives (in a computer now long-since gone), these days it doesn't like my wifi or my wireless mouse.

...thank God for virtualization, huh?

make release started at:  Wed Mar  8 00:49:50 AKST 2017
make release finished at: Wed Mar  8 02:16:35 AKST 2017
===> Successful make release
===> build.sh ended:      Wed Mar  8 02:16:35 AKST 2017
===> Summary of results:
         build.sh command:    ./build.sh -x -j 6 -r release
         build.sh started:    Wed Mar  8 00:49:44 AKST 2017
         NetBSD version:      7.1_RC2
         MACHINE:             amd64
         MACHINE_ARCH:        x86_64
         Build platform:      NetBSD 7.1_RC2 amd64
         HOST_SH:             /bin/sh
         No $TOOLDIR/bin/nbmake, needs building.
         Bootstrapping nbmake
         MAKECONF file:       /etc/mk.conf
         TOOLDIR path:        /usr/src/obj/tooldir.NetBSD-7.1_RC2-amd64
         DESTDIR path:        /usr/src/obj/destdir.amd64
         RELEASEDIR path:     /usr/src/obj/releasedir
         Removing /usr/src/obj/tooldir.NetBSD-7.1_RC2-amd64
         Removing /usr/src/obj/destdir.amd64
         Created /usr/src/obj/tooldir.NetBSD-7.1_RC2-amd64/bin/nbmake
         Updated makewrapper: /usr/src/obj/tooldir.NetBSD-7.1_RC2-amd64/bin/nbmake-amd64
         Successful make release
         build.sh ended:      Wed Mar  8 02:16:35 AKST 2017
===> .

 tldr; it only takes an hour and a half to rebuild NetBSD on my i5. Not too shabby.

The next task is to build firefox, fluxbox and some other packages that make life under NetBSD easier.

I love the fact I can set this up to build on another computer and do things on my desktop while it runs. It's a lot better than doing everything all on one -it's almost decadent!

Home VM projects

A few months ago (Oct 2016) I got a second desktop as insurance in case my older one dies (it's well past warranty).

The first thing I did was to hook them up ethernet-to-ethernet with a crossover cable. The new computer is weaker than the old one, so I am slowly setting up the old one as a combination router and build machine.

I've done a couple of things with Virtualbox. The first was to create a Windows VM to use for Poser 11; it seems to work OK but I haven't played with it a lot. The second thing was to install the extention pack and play with hooking up an old usb HD to it, and share it between computers -running FreeBSD/UEFI on it. That didn't work terribly well. Both computers could see the drive, but the FreeBSD install got confused and after a couple of sessions wouldn't boot.

I am using VB on both computers. On the weaker computer, I have a Linux VM that has a self-compiled SIMH on it. Following this tutorial ( http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_4.3_BSD_on_SIMH ) I was able to get 4.3 up quickly, and was delighted to find out that I could set up tap networking and ftp back and forth to the machine -though I can't get telnet to work at all. I managed to get a few old GNU things to work. I've been trying to figure out how to 'upgrade' the vax780, but no luck yet. I think I simply am missing too much training and background info that people knew back then.

 I am playing with setting up tap instances on both; on the router I have tap interfaces set up (manually) and am connecting to qemu instances running there.

Today I set up an OI kvm machine to use as a build VM. Here's my latest OI build and not much has changed, honestly...a build still takes a little over two hours.

qemu commandline;

cat bin/hipster
qemu-system-x86_64 -vga std -global VGA.vgamem_mb=256 -smp 4 -m 5G -cpu host -enable-kvm -drive file=$HOME/qemu/x86/hipster17/36G.qcow2,media=disk,if=virtio,index=0,format=qcow2 -boot c -net nic,model=e1000 -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no -vnc 10.42.0.1:3399&

Output in virtual machine;

random@vipster2017:~$ cd /code/illumos-gate/
random@vipster2017:/code/illumos-gate$ time ./nightly.sh illumos.sh

real    47m39.132s
user    129m2.518s
sys     27m36.835s
random@vipster2017:/code/illumos-gate$


I ran that as a regular user in the Hipster vm, not root.

Setting up /etc/rc.local to set up tap turned out to not be the greatest idea, so I'm using that script in $HOME/bin and calling it with sudo when I need a tap interface.

So, I'm making progress in setting up a home network of computers but I have a lot of organizing left to do.