Computers

Them are fightin’ results.

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Someone asked me about my connection today so I ran a speed test. The results were a horrendous 200~220Kbps down/310~320Kbps up — which is ridicules for an ADSL line, that is Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line which generally means (and in the past extremely so! with my ISP) much higher download rates then upload rates.

After closing all other internet aware applications (Pidgin, XFire, WMP plugin) and closing the several webpage tabs (GMail, Forums) I waited several minutes and reran the speed test:

200Kbps downstream, 300Kbps upstream aDSL test result

This is crap, especially when you consider that for the strictly internet connection their going rate in this area is supposed to be $45/mo for more download then that and the upload rate compares to there top speed $65/mo service.

I pulled the plug on the modem and gave it half a minute before plugging the power back in. Ran a ping on the ISP’s mail server to check when it came back online then ran another speed test. I usually ping google but I hate why use a decent services bandwidth when I can hit the mail.MyISP.net instead?

1400Kbps downstream, 320Kbps upstream aDSL test result

The results are now much better but still less then what they are supposed according to the ‘minimal acceptable’ download and upload rates they should be being paid to deliver. Going to have to have Ma float through the statement and look up exactly what we are paying for because this sure ain’t it.

I also nearly died laughing when poking around there website and noting that part of there help-system and there ‘connection optimizer’ are Internet Explorer specific although the same website says that this ISP officially supports Windows NT, Mac OSX, IE5.5+, FF2+, Safari, and Netscape Communicator 4.x + which is an old dinosaur !!!

I don’t know what is worse, an ISP that can’t keep a stable connection (for the past several years), an ISP that can’t even keep there standards straight, or an ISP that collects higher bills then quality services rendered.

Why do I have a strange urge to lubricate my modem?

Adding MySQL to my OpenBSD machine

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My best friend while doing all of this was the MySQL Reference Manual :-).

The hard part was the fact that this and every thing else I want setup should have been done like 6 or 7 hours ago… But that’s my family for ya….

Phase I: Install and Configure the MySQL database service:

My desktop has WAMP installed and a mother load of development tools, my PC-BSD
laptop has the most complete development environment I have access to, and is
where I do all of my real work ^_^.

In order to make some progress in a few bits of playful testing and work that I
do need to tinker with, I’ve elected to setup things on Vectra to avoid the more
transient nature of the Windows machine here…

This is the notes I’ve compiled during the process. Managing to sleep off the
headache and get this done before everyone else wakes up… Grr. The machines an
OpenBSD 4.3-Release system working off an old Pentium 3 500Mhz with 384MB of RAM
— far from ideal for running MySQL but with just me to play with it, it’s no
problemo.

ssh2v
 ...
su - root
Password:

pkg_add -iv mysql-server
less /usr/local/share/doc/mysql/README.OpenBSD # refer to the instructions
given

vi /etc/login.conf
 ... # let the login class for _mysql and rebuild the login database
cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf
/usr/local/bin/mysql_install_db
 ... # initialize the database files
vi /etc/rc.mysql
 ...  # quick script to launch mysql properly, listing 2A
vi /etc/rc.local
 ...  # start it during resource configuration, listing 2B
/etc/rc.mysql
/usr/local/bin/mysql_secure_installation
 ...  # secure the installation := -u root -p (pw=V1p3l2)
mysqladmin -u root -p status
 ...
mysql -u root -p -h localhost # set up our databases using the mysql client
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or g.
Your MySQL connection id is 18
Server version: 5.0.51a-log OpenBSD port: mysql-server-5.0.51a

Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> CREATE USER trowa IDENTIFIED BY '*********';                   
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> CREATE DATABASE SpidersWeb
    -> ;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> SHOW DATABASES;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema | 
| SpidersWeb         | 
| mysql              | 
+--------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALTER, ALTER ROUTINE, CREATE, CREATE ROUTINE, DELETE, DROP,
    -> EXECUTE, INDEX, INSERT, LOCK TABLES, SELECT, CREATE VIEW, SHOW VIEW,
    -> UPDATE ON SpidersWeb.* TO 'trowa'@'%';
Query OK, 0 rows affected 
mysql> exit
Bye

That basically allows the database user to do just about everything to the
specified database from anywhere. I considered restricting access further but am
not in the mood to screw with changing it later should it become necessary (and
I hate setting up replacement routers, which happens every now and then).

Since every thing in the mysql client ends up in ~/.mysql_history, including the
password used in the CREATE USER statement. I am also rather glad that OpenBSD
keeps everyones nose out of /root by default, I plan on shredding the file:

rm -P /root/.mysql_history

for safety.

Phase II: Verify it works!

To make sure every thing works out properly enough (considering the current
local time!). I opened another urxvt on my laptop and connected to the server
machine.

Terry@dixie$ mysql -h vectra -u trowa -p SpidersWeb                        5:44
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or g.
Your MySQL connection id is 22
Server version: 5.0.51a-log OpenBSD port: mysql-server-5.0.51a

Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> SHOW TABLES
    -> ;
Empty set (0.01 sec)

mysql> exit
Bye
Terry@dixie$                                                               5:45

Various notes

I found the kern.maxfiles sysctl and standard issue /etc/my.cnf file suitable
for my needs (for now). So no need to screw with them tonight, later on I need
to work on setting up httpd and things… Already 0600Z and work is early
tomorrow so no time to sor that out

Rather then muck about, in case I need to stop and start mysqld I moved the
startup from /etc/rc.local to calling a shell script to run it properly. That
way OpenBSD should allow mysqld sufficant file handles and I can control things
via /etc/my.cnf if I wish to lower it.

Listing 1: /etc/login.conf

#
# This class is used when running MySQL from /etc/rc.local
# XXX: It will *N_O_T* be used when starting/stopping mysqld manually!!
#
_mysql:
        :ignorenologin:
        :datasize=infinity:
        :maxproc=infinity:
        :openfiles=3580:       # I've set this to sysctl::kern.maxfiles
        :stacksize-cur=8M:
        :localcipher=blowfish,8:
        :tc=daemon:

Listing 2A: /etc/rc.mysql

#!/bin/sh
#
# A simple script to launch mysqld with the proper login privledges
#

su -c _mysql root -c '/usr/local/bin/mysqld_safe >/dev/null 2>&1 &'
echo -n ' mysql

Listing 2B: edits to /etc/rc.local

# launch the MySQL database server
if [ -x /usr/local/bin/mysqld_safe -a -x /etc/rc.mysql ]; then
        /etc/rc.mysql
fi

Fixing last nights screwups

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Well this is what happens when your working around 0400 local time :

After last nights double upgrades my system wouldn’t except my login over ssh citing an invalid password (when it was correct!). Plus it was refus8ing connections on the port I have sshd listing to but accepting on the default port 22, even though I merged my sshd_config with the new one.

Hooked up a monitor and keyboard to the server and even root was being rejected. I know I forgot to run /dev/MAKEDEV before rebooting the kernel but if that had any problems either init, rc, or getty would be dying from problems setting up TTYs and mounting disks!

Booted off the install floppy I had left over from the 4.0 upgrade and dropped to shell. Since I had to did a rude shutdown when I realized what was up, I had to force the mounts before I could go to work. Then I change rooted into the servers file system to get to fixing the login problem.

mount -f /dev/wd0a /mnt
mount -f /dev/wd0g /mnt/usr
chroot -u root /mnt sh

I knew I forgot to make the new device nodes so I did that and took a look at /etc/group and /etc/passwd before touching any thing else.

/dev/MAKEDEV all
TERM=vt220 vi /etc/group
   ...

I had to set TERM for nvi because with an empty $TERM after the chroot operation, vi couldn’t handle the situation :

checked out the group file and noted my custom user groups were missing, changed files :e /etc/passwd and noted that my user account was also missing!

Made a fix of this:

group add -g 7778 nfsusers
adduser
    ...

Added the nfsusers group for the file shares and recreated my personal user before mounting /home. That gave me enough that I could reboot, strip monitor and keyboard, and SSH into it from the desktop to finish poking around.

On login my shell prompt was ‘Terry@noname-$ ‘ and I know my ksh prompts are ‘username@hostname-$ ‘ which means my systems hostname settings were nuked.

Lo and behold, it hit my like a bus.

During last nights upgrade I remembered specifically that I did remove etc42.tgz in /usr/obj/4.2 before using a for loop to extract all of the file sets. But I could not remember doing the same with etc43.tgz in /usr/obj/4.3 when I installed the last file sets :

Sure enough I looked in both directories and last nights log and bingo that is what happened! I ended up extracting the default configuration files for OpenBSD 4.3 after my upgrade.

I didn’t take a backup of /etc before hand because I knew it wouldn’t be harmed, assuming I didn’t fsck things up. And of course any thing irreplaceable is backed up in like 4 or 5 places any way.

It looks like the only major losses in /etc were exports which I rewrote simply. I copied the %ProgramFiles%etcgroup file to the server as /etc/group.old and used vimdiff to merge my other custom groups in before moving on.

rc.local was overwritten but that’s no loss because everything I had in there was commented out and there depends got pkg_delete’d last night 😉

I repaired /etc/hosts, checking my changes against the hosts file on my desktop, (%WinDir%system32driversetchosts). Each of my machines defines a couple of ‘quick’ items in hosts. Then fixed /etc/myname with my machines proper name.

the settings in /etc/ntpd.conf were overwritten but unused for ages, the patch operations also left me my original file as /etc/ntpd.conf.orig hehe and I cleaned the rest out

cp /etc/ntpd.conf.orig /etc/ntpd.conf.ORIG
rm /etc/*.orig

Then set to fixing ssh_config and sshd_config

cd /etc/ssh && vim .

This really is what I get for doing things so late at night +S

Upgrading OpenBSD — so darn easy!

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Tonight I finally got around to upgrading my OpenBSD machine, Vectra functions as my file server among other things hehe. The 4.2 upgrade screwed around with the expat library making it depend on xbase42.tgz which is the X Windows System, normally not needed unless one is running a graphical desktop environment.

The system runs headless with no monitor, keyboard, or mouse and functions as a file server. So I have no need what so ever to run a GUI, using a command prompt over SSH is actually my preferred way of working on the box any way. because it means I don’t need a monitor, keyboard, or mouse to work on Vectra and because SSH is not as heavy on the network as using VNC/X Forwarding and crap. Now that 4.3 was released May 1st and fixed the libexpat thing I can update

I took the machine from OpenBSD 4.1 to 4.2 to 4.3. I could probably have saved time by not dealing with any of the *42.tgz files besides etc42.tgz but I did it any way. I’ve also learned the hardway to back up /root first hehe (see end of post notes). OpenBSD is one of the most easy to install, upgrade, use, and maintain operating systems I have ever used.

Here is my general log of things, and yes I do use the shells command grouping and flow-control constructs when I feel like it :-P. Most of the configuration file changes in 4.2/4.3 were never modified by me so I could install most of them over the old ones

EDIT:, be sure to remove BOTH etc*.tgz before using any the for loops to install files!!! or end up in my sleepy boat. Updating the files in /dev before rebooting is also not a bad idea.

su – root
Password:
cd /usr/obj
mkdir {4.2,4.3} && cd 4.2
cat ~/.profile          # look up my mirrors address
ftp ftp.usa.openbsd.org
        …             # login as anonymous
ftp> cd /pub/OpenBSD/4.2/i386
        …             # fetch files for OpenBSD 4.2
ftp> get base42.tgz
        …
ftp> get etc42.tgz
        …
ftp> get comp42.tgz
        …
ftp> get misc42.tgz
        …
ftp> get man42.tgz
        …
ftp> get games42.tgz
        …
ftp> lcd ../4.3
        …     # change directories
ftp> cd /pub/OpenBSD/4.3/i386
        …             # fetch files for OpenBSD 4.3
ftp> get bsd
        …
ftp> get bsd.rd
        …
ftp> get base43.tgz
        …
ftp> get etc43.tgz
        …
ftp> get comp43.tgz
        …
ftp> get misc43.tgz
        …
ftp> get man43.tgz
        …
ftp> get games43.tgz
        …
ftp> close
221 Goodbye.
ftp> bye        # return to my shell, pwd := /usr/obj/4.2
ftp>  http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade42.patch      # fetch patch file for /etc
tar -xzphf etc42.tgz
cd etc          # pwd := /usr/obj/4.2/etc
# install the etc42 files as directed by the upgrade notes
cp magic man.conf netstart rc rc.conf rpc services /etc
cp mtree/* /etc/mtree/
cp mail/helpfile mail/localhost.cf mail/submit.cf /etc/mail
cp mail/sendmail.cf /etc/mail
cp etc/bgpd.conf /etc/                                                      
cp etc/mail/spamd.conf /etc/mail/                                            
cp etc/ospfd.conf /etc/                                                      
# test the patch
cd ..           # pwd:= /usr/obj/4.2 again
(cd /; patch -C -p0) < ./upgrade42.patch        # test patch
(cd /; patch -p0) < ./upgrade42.patch           # apply patch
        …    
# my /etc/ntpd.conf is customized and fails to patch clean
# remove the left over notes, _AFTER_ reviewing them !
(cd /etc; for i in `ls /etc/|grep rej`; do rm $i; done)
vimdiff etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config
        …    
# manually merge the new sshd_config with mine
                # this puts both files in a verticle split, new on the left,
                # old on the right. Merge changes in with the :diffput command
cd ../4.3              
# pwd := /usr/obj/4.3
ftp>  http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade43.patch      # fetch patch file for /etc
# install the etc43 files as directed by the upgrade notes
tar -xzphf etc43.tgz
cp moduli netstart ospf6d.conf rc rc.conf relayd.conf security snmpd.conf /etc
cp mtree/* /etc/mtree/
cp mail/README /etc/mail
cp ../var/named/etc/root.hint /var/named/etc
cp etc/ttys /etc/ttys                                                        
(cd /; patch -C -p0) < ./upgrade43.patch        # test patch
(cd /; patch -p0) < ./upgrade43.patch           # apply patch
        …
# remove the left over notes, _AFTER_ reviewing them !
(cd /etc; for i in `ls /etc/|grep rej`; do rm $i; done)
# remove uneeded files, as directed in 4.3 upgrade
notes
rm /etc/hoststated.conf /var/named/standard/root.hint
# add the new users and groups in 4.3:
useradd -u90 -g=uid -c"OSPF6 Daemon" -d/var/empty -s/sbin/nologin _ospf6d
useradd -u91 -g=uid -c"SNMP Daemon" -d/var/empty -s/sbin/nologin _snmpd
newaliases      
        …    
# update mail aliases
mtree -qdef /etc/mtree/4.4BSD.dist -p / -u                                  
        …    
# create new directories as needed
# change permissions as instructed by the 4.3 upgrade notes
chown root:operator /etc/chio.conf                                          
chmod 644 /etc/chio.conf                                                    
# install the new kernel as directed, pwd := /usr/obj/4.3
ln /bsd /bsd.41                                                              
cp bsd /bsd.41
mv /bsd.41 /bsd                                                              
shutdown -r now         # reboot into the new kernel so we can begin
extracting
                        # upgrade files safely.
# wait for the machine to come back up, and ssh back to it
ping vectra
ssh2v                   # an alias that expands to ssh’ing me into vectra
        …
su – root
Password:
# install all of the 4.2 upgrade files
(cd /usr/obj/4.2/; for ark in `ls | grep .tgz`; do tar -C / -xzphf $ark; done
# install all of the 4.3 upgrade files
(cd /usr/obj/4.3/; for ark in `ls | grep .tgz`; do tar -C / -xzphf $ark; done

Since there are a lot of printing related packages from back when I screwed with setting up a Lexmark WinJet with cups awhile back and the Samba system which is no longer used… Since oddly integrating Windows and BSD clients forced me into NFS shares : I’ve opted to delete all of the packages installed on the server and reinstall the only ones I actually give a flying rats rear end about

pkg_delete -cxi -F dependencies /var/db/pkg/*
pkg_add -vi bzip2 lzma

Sadly it seems that /root/profile for some odd reason was overwritten by one of the upgrade files, which really sucks… Because I didn’t stop to think — the tarballs for upgrade are the same as a fresh install which has to create roots default home directory!!!

I had set up roots ~/.profile to set PKG_PATH dynamically based on the current architecture and release level. So I redirected the output of ‘set’ to a file to retain the values and rewrote my file by hand and changed ~/.profile to source a separate ~/.kshrc before rebooting the system

set > /tmp/root.profile
vim -o ~/.profile -o ~/.kshrc
shutdown -r now
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Hmm, I’m rather getting interested in giving some thign ‘odd’ a go.

Installing FreeBSD 7 on the test machine, then converting it into a fully functional PC-BSD system.

It’s doable, just takes time and effort, and well, I like to tinker with programs from time to time ^_^.

Yes, I’m that bored trying to pass time between /actually/ being able to work lol.

I need a vacation…

Dails efforts…

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Finally a productive day… Because every one else but me slept through most of the afternoon ^_^

I finished adding a summary mode to my script, later I want to put in user agent exclusions among other things; so it can be tuned to more automated traffic hehe.

I also managed to install Ubuntu 8.04 on SAL1600 today, I’m very happy to say that the boot time is a heck of a lot better then 6.06 was when I inertially tested the distribution. The installer is more complex then PC-BSDs but still quite simple, last time I needed to use an ‘alternate’ install CD with a hacked debian installer in order to get GRUB in Ubuntu’s / rather then screwing with GAG. This time, I only had to scratch my head enough to choose the ‘advanced’ button before commiting to the format & install — and select the location to install GRUB to hehe 😉

Got done in about a half hour, counting setting up a few packages (nVidia drivers, g++, JDK, zsh, etc) and I can finish the rest later. I’m not very partial to Ubuntu although I do greatly like the human theme for Gnome they use. While both FreeBSD 6.x and Linux 2.6.x are fully able to support my desktops hardware: FreeBSD works perfectly out of the box other then sound, which is just a driver away. Most Linux distro on the other hand, need me to screw with things. Debian Sarge for example tried to convice me I had no hard drive controller or network interface, for which NetBSD agreed and Slackware concurred about the NIC ^_^.

I want to test CrossOver Games to see if I could get Rvs or SWAT4:TSS working in it… There is a trial for PC-BSD but the Linux version is supposed to work better and is officially supported. I’ve heard that WINE has improved greatly on FreeBSD (and PC-BSD 1.5.x includes patches to aid it afaik). Even with the gripes of WINE working much better on Linux then FreeBSD, I only tested it on FreeBSD two years ago and threw it out as useless for even light duty gaming.

I’d really prefer to be running Slackware or Gentoo if I had to run a GNU/Linux distro off my desktop… But I don’t have time to muck about just for testing this thing, hence the Ubuntu installation lol. I expect it will fail horribly and I’m not expecting much more then being able to get RvS installed but I’ll give it a go. And to be frank, with how poorly done Rvs and SWAT4 are from a software perspective… I’m really supprised people can run then on Vista, hell we have to side-step problems the games have with modern graphics cards (and SWAT4:TSS ain’t that fucking old!)

To be honest, I think I would have to create my own “Linux From Scratch” system to ever truly be happy with a Linux distro, that or just install OpenBSD instead and be perfectly happy hehe xD. But, in terms of having to run a specific OS, I’d be much more happy with GNU/Linux then I am with Windows XP. The only reason I’ve never removed WinXP from my desktop is I need one game box, you could say… If I wasn’t in [SAS] then I would be totally and 100% free of Windows for the rest of my days. But I love my team to damn much to leave, even if it means having to keep one working copy of Windows around.

The thing that really pisses me off, I can run FreeBSD and Linux on my desktop and it is rock solid for all I need it to do (y). Running Windows XP on the same machine, I only *wish* I could say the same hahaha. Between the nVidia drivers, Direct X 9, and Creative Labs + Raven Shield not playing nicely together it loves to get blue screens of death under XP.

At least when a machine has problems with running BSD or Linux, you generally get what you paid for but when Windows has problems, it blows because you got charged by every bastard along the way and his dog too!

So Winucking funny, it’s pitiful !!!

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I honestly don’t know if I should laugh or cry, it’s really that bad but I’m laughing my ass off right now lol.

Like last week I set up Microsofts Services For UNIX 3.5 on my XP machine, configured user/group maps from my Windows XP user account to my account on the OpenBSD server with the NFS shares. I followed the documentation that came with the software to get it set up.

If I try to access \vectrasrvnfs through Windows Explorer I either get an error message or I get the files, or I get BOTH. And trying to even right click to highlight any thing in Windows Explorer causes lock ups for several seconds. If I use the IP address rather then the alias ‘vectra’ that I setup in %SystemRoot%System32Driversetchosts it works slightly faster if I try to use the dir command in the command prompt which is stupid.

When I try to map the share to a network drive in Windows Explorer it dies with an error at \vectrasrvnfs, but I can ‘browse’ for it and then use it some times. It also ignores the maps I set up in the graphical SFU admin program so I can’t access files — and still buggers up when I tell it the login datam.

So finally pissed off after a week of this lag & lock crap, I open a command prompt with SFU’s shell and check the mount commands documentation which tells me to use the Windows Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) syntax for the file paths.

mount \vectrasrvnfs N:

And I get an error message about \vectrasrvnfs being an invalid command line argument to mount. So I for the hell of it I try the unix style host:share syntax to see if that works.

mount vectra:/srv/nfs N:

and BOOM it friging works !!!

I open windows explorer and go to N: in the nav bar and it works QUICKLY just like the NFS Shares mounted on my PC-BSD system do. Now my NFS shares are working through Windows Explorer properly, not like a piece of garbage as it was when doing through the GUI on Windows.

THE IRONY OF IT ALL !?

Microsoft Windows is noted by some people for giving easy, graphical ways to do things that ‘unix’ systems are supposed to lack quality documentation.

I used the ‘easy’, ‘graphical’ interfaces in Windows to do what takes 2 seconds in Unix which is ‘supposed’ to lack documentation and it works like shit or not at all in Windows.

I used the ‘hard’, ‘command line’ like way on Windows, only to find that the ‘supposed’ good documentation is wrong, and guess what — Doing it from the command line on Windows works ____better____ then the GUI once you figure it out.

Time to roll on the freaking floor laughing until my sides hurt !!!!

1.5->1.5.1 update, dead flock’er

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GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

PC-BSD update for 1.5->1.5.1 went smoothly if slowly but broke flock 🙁

Well, at lest they are starting to figure out you don’t have to nuke every installed port/pkg to do upgrades… They however still don’t seem to have fixed the flib’n syntax error in their sound detection systems XML file, which has been there since the new sound detection system hit.

urxvt & utf-8

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Found an interesting problemo tonight with using vim in rxvt-unicode. Since the German umlauts and the old double-S (ä ö ü ß) are a bit tricky for me to make without a copy/pasting then where needed I usually use the alternative (ue oe ue ss) where possible. Since vim 7 has spell checking, I’ve got spelllang set to handle US and British english plus German in the spell checker. Which really works very nice because my spelling is a bit of a hodge podge for those ‘differences’ in English spelling.

While I was working on the translation last night, I employed both Vims spell checker and a translator program to help me with the grammer. Vims spell checker has the lovely ability of being able to correct things, taking the form I can easily get out of a US QWERTY board and replacing with the proper characters (ä ö ü ß), I knew there was some thing I loved about vim xD

The only thing is, trying to open the file again with vim caused it to display weird, all of the umlauts replaced with strange characters. I checked Vims idea of the files encoding and it was UTF-8, just like my system locale settings should be saying.

Yet, (n)vi, cat, and other utilities were showing them fine. Setting the terminal encoding in vim or launching it with LANG=de_DE.ISO8859-1 got them to display properly but still senseless :. My ~/.zshrc sets LANG to en_US.UTF-8, why nothing seemed to work right i dunno. Forcing urxvt (rxvt-unicode) to run with the C locale set (LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″) got it working fine.

I’m not familiar with that end of C++ but I wouldn’t be surprised if it relied on the same setlocale() routine as C apps tend to. The FreeBSD handbook said to set LANG and MM_CHARSET and not LC_* variables for the environment. I’ve fixed it so the system kicks urxvt off with the right locale settings so the problem is fixed.

still a little odd imho lol

Dixie reborn

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and a return to KDE, version 3.5.8 while I’m at it

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

I find the lipstick style that PC-BSD uses by default a little yucky to stare at all day so I set it to my favorite (Keramik). I have installed a ton of colour schemes off kde-look.org but hate most of them….. One that I found was essentially an emulation of Ubuntu’s “Human” setup, which I do like very much or else I wouldn’t be using a modified form of it.

The colour scheme and GTK+ widgets is actually the only good thing I can say about Ubuntu 6.06 when I tested it last year. At first I thought I might try a custom colour scheme with a red title bar, give KDE a nice little FreeBSD flair 😉 But I couldn’t get a shade of red that I could live with, like using, and not be distracted by in the same colour. PC-BSDs default window decor, ‘Crystal’ didn’t match well with the human colour scheme so I changed it repeatidly trying to find one that did match well and I could live with. I couldn’t find one I liked, so as usual I wound up with Keramik haha. No matter what I do I always find that window decore attractive 0.o. I also installed the Human_KDE icon set to match the human colour scheme.

I copied over the KMenu and Konqueror icons from PC-BSDs default theme into a copy of Human_KDE and I made a clone of the Human colour scheme. Then changed the desired portion of the title bar to use PC-BSDs default colours for it instead, adding some contrast. I loved the match up and it is much more appeasing to my eyes 🙂

A bit of both muahuaha !

As far as the screen shot, the background is my ‘choice picture of the day’, rxvt-unicode is running and displays a listing of my home directory and the system versioning. Normally my desktop is some what dominated by a terminal emulator and a web browser with a few IM windows for icing on the cake. Below urxvt is linux-flock open to a live journal page. Lower left hand corner is XMMS blasting music while the lower right hand corner is a ‘KasBar’ which provides a replacement for the usual taskbar. While still giving me some thing similar to how Window Maker solves the problem hehe. There are no icons on the desktop only the panel.

I placed the main panel on top because with a laptop + touch pad I find it easier to use and more comfortable on my eyes with the widescreen display. From left to right on the top panel there is the K-Menu button, System [folders] Menu, Settings Menu, Web Browser (flock), Terminal (~/sh/urxvt big), Network Folders, the system tray applet which shows PC-BSDs battery monitor, Klipper the clibboard app I wish Windows XP had, KMix (volume/mixer control), PC-BSDs update manager, KOrganizer (which may be getting the ax soon), Pidgin (AIM/MSN/YIM/ICQ/XMPP chat), and Konversation (IRC). Over to the righter’ side is a desktop pager, lock/logout buttons, and a clocklet.

I feel the system has a bit of a Gnome / Ubuntu look and feel to it but I’m finding it quite comfortable. Because I like the pleasant feel of it plus it matches my work flow while still being KDE3 and FreeBSD powered instead xD.