Finally, NetBSD Boots in KVM!

Compared to OpenBSD and FreeBSD the NetBSD install was hard, really hard. It wasn't until I stumbled across this that I managed to convince myself to try it again.

The trick seems to be to ignore as much as you can from other Internet tips. NetBSD runs fine in KVM, so if someone says you need to run it in Qemu mode - don't believe the hype. OK, in virt-manager there is no preset defaults for NetBSD, so I went with a generic OS and tried starting the install from there. The kernel hangs before it probes USB, or it segfaults.

What I did was to stop the guest, and in the details view I disabled ACPI and selected the pcnet NIC instead of the default ne2k-pci. Running the default options in the NetBSD 5.0.2 installer, and the bootloader after install, works fine.

Good Luck!

Sunday, 29 August 2010 at 20:44 | /unix | permanent link to this entry

Announcing Minix editline 1.14.0

It is with great pleasure I announce the next release of the editline library by Simmule Turner and Rich Salz! This is a popular library, it exists in several forked versions. This release marks the end of a huge effort where archaeological methods have been applied to recover fixes and improvements developed independently over several decades by the following projects: Heimdal, Festival speech-tools, Debian, and Mr. Steve Tell.

Noteworthy changes and additions:

Online GIT repository and release tarball available at the usual places:

Report bugs to the email found in the README file. See also the Freshmeat page for a more consistent updates.

Thursday, 12 August 2010 at 18:17 | /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Announcing Micro Tetris™ 1.2.0

New release of Micro Tetris™, v1.2.0, available for download now! Noteworthy changes and additions:

Online GIT repository and release tarball available at the usual places:

See also the Freshmeat page for a more consistent updates.

Monday, 02 August 2010 at 00:56 | /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Minix editline moves to GIT

A small heads-up, I've migrated the Minix editline project from Bazaar to GIT. The new URL for keeping tabs on your favourite free readline() clone is:

I'm currently working on fixing up the tree and doing some house cleaning - including making more stuff configurable - before releasing a 1.14.0 later on.

One such item is the integration of libtool with our autoconf friends. This should make it lot more portable (again) and also help smooth a merge with other sources for this library. More on that as well, later, hopefully.

Monday, 19 July 2010 at 02:40 | /hacks | permanent link to this entry

Git Quickie

This is a document I intend to maintain for my own purposes. It serves like a quick reminder to the steps I need to take when creating and working with git repositories.

First setup a bare repository on the server. 

$ git --bare init projectX.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /pub/git/projectX.git/

Set one-liner description, visible in gitweb. 

$ echo "Secret Project-X use ROT13 to decode all source files" >projectX.git/description

Setup a post-update hook so that the server repo is update automatically when you push to it. 

$ cp ~/public_html/programming/post-update projectX.git/hooks/

Change how the "Owner" field in gitweb is displayed to include an obfuscated email address.
$ vi projectX.git/config 

[gitweb]
        owner = "Joachim Nilsson <troglobit()vmlinux!org>"

These steps have become so common to me that I've setup a script to create server side git repositories.

You can now push to the server, after having setup remote location on the client. 

$ git remote add origin ssh://login@example.com/pub/git/projextX.git
$ git push origin master
$ git push --tags

Tuesday, 13 July 2010 at 20:45 | /programming | permanent link to this entry

Simple Guide to Converting from Bazaar to GIT

You need git, and bazaar obviously. Also install bzr-fastimport, it contains the export plugin as well. The rest is a rip off from the folloing URL: http://fthieme.net/en/drupal6/node/77. 

git init project.git
cd project.git
bzr fast-export --export-marks=.git/bzr.mark ~/project.bzr | git fast-import --export-marks=.git/git.mark

That worked for me. The output will likely be something like this: 

01:41:19 Calculating the revisions to include ...
01:41:19 Starting export of 33 revisions ...
01:41:20 Exported 33 revisions in 0:00:01
git-fast-import statistics:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Alloc'd objects:       5000
Total objects:          267 (         0 duplicates                  )
      blobs  :          158 (         0 duplicates         57 deltas)
      trees  :           76 (         0 duplicates         55 deltas)
      commits:           33 (         0 duplicates          0 deltas)
      tags   :            0 (         0 duplicates          0 deltas)
Total branches:          10 (         1 loads     )
      marks:           1024 (        33 unique    )
      atoms:             38
Memory total:          2344 KiB
       pools:          2110 KiB
     objects:           234 KiB
---------------------------------------------------------------------
pack_report: getpagesize()            =       4096
pack_report: core.packedGitWindowSize = 1073741824
pack_report: core.packedGitLimit      = 8589934592
pack_report: pack_used_ctr            =        267
pack_report: pack_mmap_calls          =         73
pack_report: pack_open_windows        =          1 /          1
pack_report: pack_mapped              =     977484 /     977484
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Now just do a simple "git checkout master" to get started working again.

Tuesday, 13 July 2010 at 01:56 | /programming | permanent link to this entry

Syntax Highlighting in less

Yes, it's certainly possible and source code becomes so much easier to read. Try it out by downloading my .lessfilter, save it as ~/.lessfilter in your $HOME.

Then try it out on a C source file: less -R myfile.c, soon you will probably add a line alias less="less -R" to your ~/.bash_aliases file. :-)

Sunday, 09 May 2010 at 19:53 | /unix | permanent link to this entry

HowTo Move Window Controls Back to the Right Side

When you've installed Ubuntu 10.04 you might want to have the window controls back to the right side, where you're used to having them. Use the following simple command: 

   gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Saturday, 01 May 2010 at 16:46 | /ubuntu | permanent link to this entry

Best. Programming. Font. Ever.

This is not only a reminder to myself, it is appraisal to the probably best programming font ever: Inconsolata. Thank you Mr Raph Levien!

On the previous laptop I used ProFont quite extensively, but its screen was only 1280x800, on the new laptop I have 1680x1050 and ProFont just got too small for my aging eyes.

For more tips on fonts, see Top-10 Programming Fonts and KeithDevens.com.

Monday, 26 April 2010 at 22:44 | /programming | permanent link to this entry

HowTo Hide Window Titlebar on Maximized Windows

This is a "reblog" of another excellent post.

Sunday, 18 April 2010 at 00:11 | /gnome | permanent link to this entry