Re: Cleaning system's old ibraries/files after update to next -release or -current
On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 03:44:18PM -, Stuart Henderson wrote: On 2020-07-14, Christian Weisgerber wrote: Old versions of libraries are innocuous. They will simply be ignored. Until you run out of disk space, which is fairly easy in /usr if you installed a couple of releases ago and took the auto disklabel defaults. Another issue with potential security implications: suppose you have built something that linked to old library versions laying around on disk. And suppose a security issue affects one of the old libs, with implications for your binaries linked to it. You won't even be aware of it. My take is to purge old libs after every new release. Once, I had to do it in the middle of a version upgrade, because there was no space left on disk to complete it. My fault only, I had a very tight custom partitioning layout.
Re: XFCE menu does not load with keyboard shortcut
On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 07:33:20PM +0100, Ed Gray wrote: Hi, I have an issue with XFCE on OpenBSD 6.6 and current on an amd64 system. XFCE works fine except for accessing the applications menu with the Alt + F1 keyboard shortcut. Instead of loading the menu it gets highlighted in grey and nothing happens. Clicking the menu loads it straight away. The shortcut is defined in the keyboard settings as the default for xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu which is different from the shortcut for the desktop menu. Sometimes in another application such as firefox when I press Alt + F1 a second time I get the desktop menu appear, even though firefox is maximised and I'm not on the desktop. I can't confirm at the moment if it is specific to OpenBSD or XFCE in general. Does anyone else have this problem? Have seen this on Void Linux as well. Family member needed Netflix on her laptop, so I couldn't push OpenBSD, even though it ran fine. (Had to check, and by the way, it was surprising to see how much slower it ran compared to Alpine or Void.) But this is an older Xfce bug, I remember having similar issues when I last gave it a shot. This used to work reliably in older versions though, back when Xfce was based on GTK+ 2.x. To end in a positive note, one thing I learned on my OpenBSD adventure is "the best desktop is no desktop". cwm never fails to open its menus. Keep it stupid simple.
Re: OpenBSD in the news...from a long time ago
On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 10:27:11AM +0200, Philipp Buehler wrote: Am 13.06.2020 09:29 schrieb jungle boogie: Hi, Here's an old news clip about OpenBSD many folks haven't seen or have forgotten about. I don't know what year it's from or the hackathon that was taking place. Maybe someone can fill us in on the details? I can see a pf2k4 Tshirt as "newest".. might be 2005/2006. May 27, 2005, judging by the computer screen. The 3.7 release from May 2005 is referenced in one message and the mail client shows a list of messages from Fri, May 27. That video needs more re-encoding though. :-] I remembered YouTube has a better version, without the obnoxious music. It's easy to find knowing the above: https://youtu.be/BlgdvSNpi60. More info from https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html: c2k5: General hackathon May 21 - 28, 2005 Calgary, Alberta
Re: dmesg memory not match spdmem and bios
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 12:57:24PM +, man Chan wrote: I just want to know why OpenBSD/i386 have the memory limit to 4G. Thanks for your reply. It is the design of OpenBSD/i386 is 32 bits OS not the hardware limitation. It is ok for me to run OpenBSD/amd64 on a i5 machine. Thanks The 4GB limit is not specific to OpenBSD/i386. It's a hardware limitation specific to the x86 platform (also known as i386). Use the OpenBSD/amd64 installer on your Intel i5 hardware, it will run better, without being limited to 4GB of RAM, among others. Trivia fact: all recent Intel processors use the amd64 architecture, licensed from AMD. Unfortunately, Intel's marketing conceals this as much as possible, thus the confusion from the less tech-inclined people. But you could have easily found all this online, especially after been pointed repeatedly on this list. So please consider not wasting other people's time with such basic questions. OpenBSD developers are few and far between, and two of the most senior ones have already spent time explaining you these basics. Otherwise you risk being ignored even when raising issues actually related to OpenBSD.
Useful cwm patch [was: When will be created a great desktop experience for OpenBSD?]
On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 10:43:26AM +0100, Walter Alejandro Iglesias wrote: I like cwm(1) but it's still a bit green and isn't getting enough attention, I had to insist to get this first patch committed: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=149182817427598&w=2 This second one is still pending (no response from the maintainer so far): https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=155931484124288&w=2 Apologies for resurrecting a dead and buried thread, but this second patch is actually really useful. Have tested it for a few months as a single patch to my 6.6 cwm, it works so good I actually forgot about it. CC'ing cwm maintainer in the hope he'll consider it. Thanks!
Re: OpenBSD VPS hoster with unlimited/limited nonfiltered traffic
On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 09:51:41AM +, Martin wrote: I'm looking for relatively cheap VPS with OpenBSD installation support and with ~1Tb of unfiltered traffic. In any words all in/out VPS ports must be opened by default. Any recommendations? Vultr is close to that. Last time I created a new VPS with them, I think they filtered port 25, but it was no big deal to get rid of that. Still running 2 productions VMs on Vultr, they are cheap, have great support, and reasonable uptimes. Not OpenBSD-based unfortunately, even though they support it officially.
newfs_ext2fs takes lots of time
Hi, Have noticed that formatting large ext2fs partitions take an insane amount of time (about 8 hours for a 50GB partition on a USB stick for me). I know Linux does tricks here, by postponing stuff at filesystem creation and then doing it in the background after first mount. But it didn't cross my mind beforehand that under OpenBSD everything happens when creating the filesystem. Maybe a NOTE to newfs_ext2fs(8) would help in warning about this? Or am I missing something else? Thanks!
Re: Full disk encryption including /boot, excluding bootloader?
On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 04:09:57PM +0100, Julius Zint wrote: I'm not really in a position to reflash my machine but I would still be curious for details. There is no need to reflash your firmware if the system has a integrated and supported TPM 1.2 chip. The prototype uses a Static Root of Trust for Measurment (SRTM) approach where the Chain of Trust is extended from a small immutable firmware part up to boot(8). Every component in the boot chain is responsible for measuring the components, that it hands control over the system. Measuring just means calculating the hash and sending it to the TPM. The following example is the Chain of Trust from my test system Lenovo Thinkpad X240 with OpenBSD. 1: Core Static Root of Trust for Measurment (C-SRTM) (immutable part of the Firmware) 2: Firmware (including OptionROMS) 3: MBR (mbr(8)) 4: PBR (biosboot(8)) 5: boot(8) (residing in the softraid(4) metadata when FDE is enabled) I changed the mbr(8) and biosboot(8) to support measuring their next component. Because there is very little available space left in the 440 byte of the mbr(8) startprogram, you have to choose between CHS and measurement support at compile time. boot(8) got support via a machine specific command to seal and unseal a secret of your choosing to any drive. Sealing and unsealing means encrypting/decrypting data depending on the state of the Platform Control Registers (PCR). PCRs are in the TPM NVRAM and store the measurements. With the laptop being in a trusted state, you can seal a secret and store it on a usb drive. When you want to verify, that the software components are unchanged, you plug in the usb drive and unseal the secret. If the output shows the correct secret and you were the only person knowing it, than there is a very high chance that the early boot components are unchanged. Some feedback from the OpenBSD community on this would also be appreciated. Are there enought people interessted in a Trusted Boot with OpenBSD? That sounds awesome! Hope you are working on upstreaming your changes. Are there any downsides though? For example, would resume from hibernation still work for such a setup? More so, for the less knowledgeable of us, how does this relate to UEFI's "Secure Boot"? I can only hope OpenBSD will support it some day, at least for amd64. Debian has implemented it for the last major release, Debian 10. Thanks!
Re: experience setting up a low memory machine
On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 01:54:56AM +0100, Noth wrote: I wouldn't call 64Mb "small" for memory, it's tiny. Even 20 years ago 64 wasn't really enough. Not really, about 21 years ago I was learning to get XFree86 working, to break free from the console on a desktop with 24MB of RAM. Built that machine with 16MB of RAM in 1998. Around year 2000, prices of memory modules significantly increased because of market troubles in Southeast Asia. So it took me some time to get to 32MB of RAM in the end, definitely less than 20 years ago. To put things in perspective, it was possible to run KDE 1.0 in 24MB of RAM comfortably. Biggest memory hog was Netscape, the only usable web browser on Linux and Unix systems at the time. A screenshot from that era: http://toastytech.com/guis/dvxxserv.png. Obligatory XKCD reference: https://www.xkcd.com/386/ :-]
Re: What are xxxterm users using today?
On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 12:45:56PM -0500, Allan Streib wrote: I used to use xxxterm, then xombrero, and really liked the minimal approach and keyboard driven navigation. Any other former users of this browser, what are you using today to achieve any of this functionality in your browser? Have used Luakit for a while as a secondary browser alongside Firefox. OpenBSD's package is up to date and there are even stable updates for webkitgtk4 nowadays. However, Luakit development has stalled lately, judging by https://github.com/luakit/luakit/commits/develop. Might want to look at https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl or https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key. Have tried the former and didn't quite fancy it. Have just discovered the latter one, giving it a try…
Re: Display flickers after upgrade to 6.6
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:18:51AM -0700, Stanislav wrote: I have got weak flickering of XFCE too (after upgrade to 6.6). Mentioned setting the method for vblank does not fix it. Turning on/off compositor does not help too. Any ideas? Have you tried customizing xorg.conf? This /etc/X11/xorg.conf works for me in 6.6 with the Radeon HD 4200 video chipset from my old desktop: Section "Device" Identifier "drm0" Driver "radeon" Option "AccelMethod" "glamor" Option "DRI" "3" Option "TearFree" "On" Option "SWCursor" "true" EndSection Still getting a bit of glitches when resuming, but mostly just for the current window (the terminal) and it's usually enough to change the active "window" in tmux to get rid of it. Rarely do I have to change to console and back with CTRL-ALT-F1 and CTRL-ALT-F5. Had more issues with the older driver (and default settings), so I'm actually happy with the upgrade in this regard.
Re: OpenBSD and ext2fs (ext3)
On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 04:44:46PM +0100, Stefan Sperling wrote: On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 03:56:00PM +0100, Thomas de Grivel wrote: Hello, I have a few ext3 drives from an old gentoo which mount fine but do not fsck (something about the first alternate superblock not matching values) they mount and fsck fine under linux. OpenBSD ext3 support is limited and read-only. I wouldn't expect fsck to work since fixing errors requires writing to the filesystem. In my experience, ext3 support is fragile, but not limited to read-only access. Had to save some big files on a 10-year old HDD that I used with Gentoo, and it worked mostly fine. Except for a panic, reported at https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-bugs&m=157634364811892. Also, fixing an ext3 filesystem in OpenBSD is handled by the Linux fsck utilities compiled for OpenBSD as the "e2fsprogs" package. This worked beautifully for me after the crash. As far as I can tell, this need not be correlated to the ext2 support in the kernel.
Re: Re-organising partitions without re-installation
On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 10:42:47PM +, rgci...@disroot.org wrote: December 24, 2019 4:42 AM, "Dumitru Moldovan" wrote: On Sun, Dec 22, 2019 at 10:56:20AM +1000, Stuart Longland wrote: So, a few years ago now, I deployed a router VM with OpenBSD 6.1 AMD64. Later that got updated to 6.2, then 6.3, 6.4… Yesterday I updated it to 6.5, then 6.6… now I'm trying to run syspatch: I have a similar issue with my desktop. I tried to outsmart the automatic installer to squeeze as much space as possible for /home on a desktop with an 80GB SSD. Which worked out OK for a few upgrade cycles, always from stable version to next stable version. However, after a couple of years, I had to unbreak an update that didn't fit any more in /usr. To my surprise, I had lots of old libs from previous releases left on disk. Had to manually remove a few of the older unused libs from /usr to be able to redo the update successfully. My understanding is that this is by design. In an update, some libs are overwritten (if they keep the same file name), but others are left on disk (theoretically unused) when lib versions are incremented. I can see a few ways in which this eases updates for people following -current, such as the OpenBSD devs, so it's a small price to pay. one thing that is useful is sysclean(8) my process now after a doas sysupgrade is 1) doas sysclean; and review the output 2) vise /etc/sysclean.ignore; so that sysclean ignores special files i created 3) doas sysclean | xargs doas rm -rf Thanks for pointing out I missed sysclean. I used it myself, at least after the last upgrade, as I see I have it installed and `sysclean -a` only finds my custom x.org config in /etc. Maybe it would be worth mentioning in the FAQ? I could only find it here: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade63.html, but then it was not mentioned for newer releases. Another remedy is to follow the `Files to remove` section in the FAQ, e.g. for 6.6: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade66.html#RmFiles. The FAQ article for the 6.3 upgrade suggests sysclean does that too. This seems to be a byproduct of the design, meaning it doesn't specifically remove those files, but it should remove them, as long as all installed packages are updated and no longer need them. But this is just my reading of the sysclean man page.
Re: Re-organising partitions without re-installation
On Sun, Dec 22, 2019 at 10:56:20AM +1000, Stuart Longland wrote: So, a few years ago now, I deployed a router VM with OpenBSD 6.1 AMD64. Later that got updated to 6.2, then 6.3, 6.4… Yesterday I updated it to 6.5, then 6.6… now I'm trying to run syspatch: I have a similar issue with my desktop. I tried to outsmart the automatic installer to squeeze as much space as possible for /home on a desktop with an 80GB SSD. Which worked out OK for a few upgrade cycles, always from stable version to next stable version. However, after a couple of years, I had to unbreak an update that didn't fit any more in /usr. To my surprise, I had lots of old libs from previous releases left on disk. Had to manually remove a few of the older unused libs from /usr to be able to redo the update successfully. My understanding is that this is by design. In an update, some libs are overwritten (if they keep the same file name), but others are left on disk (theoretically unused) when lib versions are incremented. I can see a few ways in which this eases updates for people following -current, such as the OpenBSD devs, so it's a small price to pay. But yes, it would be awesome if installations that use -stable would not have to pay this price. After all, only libs from current version of the base system should be needed. If you built something linked to an older lib from a previous OS version, it should be recompiled after an updated. This could also be a security issue if you're sloppy and use binaries linked to old base libs that are no longer updated for security issues. If I missed anything, would love to be corrected! And sorry, I don't have a solution for this. Other than the obvious one of packaging the files in base. Is this a heresy?
Re: Running Windows inside vmm/vmd VM.
On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 07:42:39PM +0100, Karel Gardas wrote: not sure what's current status of vmm/vmd hence asking. Has anybody succeed with running Windows 10/Server 2019 inside the vmm/vmd VM? From https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html#Introduction: Supported guest operating systems are currently limited to OpenBSD and Linux. As there is no VGA support yet, the guest OS must support serial console.
Re: Best Practices for growing disk partitions on a server
On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 12:31:25PM +0200, Dumitru Moldovan wrote: On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 03:12:06PM -0800, Lev Lazinskiy wrote: This makes sense, but I was curious what the recommended approach is for a server that you cannot simply reinstall. A humble piece of advice from a fellow system admin... Never ever build a system that "you cannot simply reinstall." There should be at least two ways to redo everything: 1. From scratch using documentation or preferably a modern deployment system such as Ansible, Salt, etc. 2. From backup. This should be drilled from time to time, even without a practical need, just to make sure things work as expected. Yes, practice is not as simple as theory and I admit being guilty at times of every possible mistake in not following the above. :-] But, realistically speaking, as long as a system still functions, it should be reproducible. Document the setup, backup its configs and saved data, etc. May be bad advice for your situation, but this is what I used to do when migrating setups that were not documented or easy to redeploy: 1. Install the same OS on new hardware, in your case with a better partitioned drive. 2. rsync everything relevant to the new machine (but make sure it still boots afterwards and functions as expected, so amend boot manager files, hardware-dependant configs etc.). 3. Update relevant DNS records for affected services AND set packet redirection for services on the old machines until DNS propagation does its thing (which is usually much longer than expected, esp. for public services, even if you lower TTLs well in advance). If you don't have spare hardware for the migration, I guess you could use a spare VM until you repartition drives in your old hardware as needed. If you don't care about service disruption, I guess you could skip redirection. Hope that helps!
Re: Best Practices for growing disk partitions on a server
On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 03:12:06PM -0800, Lev Lazinskiy wrote: This makes sense, but I was curious what the recommended approach is for a server that you cannot simply reinstall. A humble piece of advice from a fellow system admin... Never ever build a system that "you cannot simply reinstall." There should be at least two ways to redo everything: 1. From scratch using documentation or preferably a modern deployment system such as Ansible, Salt, etc. 2. From backup. This should be drilled from time to time, even without a practical need, just to make sure things work as expected. Yes, practice is not as simple as theory and I admit being guilty at times of every possible mistake in not following the above. :-] But, realistically speaking, as long as a system still functions, it should be reproducible. Document the setup, backup its configs and saved data, etc.
Re: pkg_info -Q bug?
On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 11:15:05AM +0100, Antonio Bibiano wrote: Hello, I just wanted to add to this thread that I incurred in the same issue on a fresh 6.6 installation. I also tried with a different mirror in /etc/installurl and receive the same partial response from pkg_info -Q. What makes it even more odd is that pkg_add finds the correct package. Thanks Antonio for double-checking this! I have also tested it on a fresh installation at the time and got the same results. Maybe the behaviour is undefined if PKG_PATH is not set, which is fine by me. But still, it's quite puzzling and against the principle of least surprise.
Re: pkg_info -Q bug?
On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 08:04:45PM +, Raf Czlonka wrote: On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 05:45:23PM GMT, Dumitru Moldovan wrote: Hi misc, I see pkg_info's man page says: -Q query Show all packages in $PKG_PATH which match the given query. Trying in 6.6 to find the Python module "mysqlclient", I get the following puzzling results: $ pkg_info -Q mysql php-mysqli-7.2.24 php-mysqli-7.3.11 php-pdo_mysql-7.2.24 php-pdo_mysql-7.3.11 $ pkg_info -Q py-mysql py-mysql-1.2.5p6 py-mysqlclient-1.4.2p0 Am I doing something wrong? Why is "py-mysqlclient" not matched for the first query? Hi Dumitru, Not only isn't "py-mysqlclient" matched, but also over 40 other packages with "mysql" string. How does your $PKG_PATH look like? Thanks for looking into it! $PKG_PATH is empty here, should have checked it first. I get the expected results with: PKG_PATH=`cat /etc/installurl`/`uname -r`/packages/`uname -m`/ pkg_info -Q mysql But now I don't understand why I got any results at all with an empty $PKG_PATH... Maybe I would have read that one line in the man page more carefully if there was no result at all to begin with. :-]
pkg_info -Q bug?
Hi misc, I see pkg_info's man page says: -Q query Show all packages in $PKG_PATH which match the given query. Trying in 6.6 to find the Python module "mysqlclient", I get the following puzzling results: $ pkg_info -Q mysql php-mysqli-7.2.24 php-mysqli-7.3.11 php-pdo_mysql-7.2.24 php-pdo_mysql-7.3.11 $ pkg_info -Q py-mysql py-mysql-1.2.5p6 py-mysqlclient-1.4.2p0 Am I doing something wrong? Why is "py-mysqlclient" not matched for the first query? Thanks!
Re: Fan spinning constantly on Lenovo X1C and 6.6
On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 08:51:16AM +0200, Josh wrote: After upgrading from 6.5 to 6.6 following the procedure [1], my Lenovo X1C 6G is getting hot all the time. Fan is constantly spinning at 4000+rpm even even if its just editing a note in zim. If I let the laptop idling, it will take quite some time for the fan to stop even if there is no high cpu usage processes (showing top CS processes). Perhaps stating the obvious, but have you tried starting Firefox in safe mode? Or even with a fresh profile? I have two Firefox profiles that work just fine with 69.0.2 after upgrading to OpenBSD 6.6, but you never know... One of my profiles is quite old, have used it over the years in four OS'es (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Could not have done it without weekly backups, which allowed me to restore a sane profile when Firefox went beserk, which happened a few times.
Re: Bad fonts in pdf
On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 08:20:26AM -, Stuart Henderson wrote: On 2019-09-19, openbsd-misc-nos...@riseup.net wrote: Here is screenshot: https://screenshots.firefox.com/LyKbRyGMRT3sDHbu/null I had this problem in the past, but can't remeber what font should I install? It might be helpful to explain what the problem is because it's not obvious. To render that PDF as intended, you need some fonts that are metrically-compatible with Times and Helvetica (or at least similarly looking). OpenBSD has such fonts in the "liberation-fonts" package, and you also get the font aliases set as needed. Stuart is right, there is not enough info in the original request to derive the above, but I enjoyed doing a bit of detective work. The PDF in the screenshot can be downloaded from https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_tr/102200_102299/102216/03.00.00_60/tr_102216v03p.pdf Then "mutool info" will show what fonts are needed in that file: Fonts (8): 1 (73 0 R): Type1 'Times-Roman' WinAnsiEncoding (139 0 R) 1 (73 0 R): Type1 'Helvetica-Bold' WinAnsiEncoding (151 0 R) 1 (73 0 R): Type1 'Helvetica' WinAnsiEncoding (152 0 R) 1 (73 0 R): Type1 'Helvetica-Oblique' WinAnsiEncoding (153 0 R) 2 (1 0 R):Type1 'Helvetica-BoldOblique' WinAnsiEncoding (59 0 R) 4 (10 0 R): Type1 'Times-Bold' WinAnsiEncoding (60 0 R) 5 (13 0 R): Type1 'Times-Italic' WinAnsiEncoding (61 0 R) 6 (17 0 R): Type1 'Symbol' (62 0 R)
Re: 4GB RAM too little for Firefox?
On Sat, Jul 06, 2019 at 01:10:08PM +0200, Richard Ulmer wrote: I have a desktop from 2009 with 8GB of RAM and faced a similar issue with recent Firefox versions. For me, the problem was two-fold: 1. Recent Firefox versions start 8 rendering processes for my system with 2 CPUs. I limited this in the preferences to just 2, ending up with a total of 4 firefox processes at all times. You are refering to the "Content process limit" option in about:preferences, right? I haven't changed it and it was still at 8. I set it to 2 and compared the memory usage with the script I mentioned before. Memory usage went from 1474M to 1188M. That's a 20% improvement, not too bad, but will probably not stop my computer from swapping. Thanks for the tip, I'll keep this setting! Beware that a setting of 2 might hurt responsiveness too much, which translates into hiccups of 1-3 seconds, during which Firefox is unresponsive. I've settled for 4 on my old system with 8GB of RAM and a dual-core CPU. One more thing I've discovered in the mean time... I use Deezer, which is one of those heavy web apps that can't be replaced without lots of hacking and reverse-engineering. So what I do to alleviate the RAM leaks is to refresh the deezer.com web app with Ctrl-Shift-R from time to time. Once every few hours, this frees lots of RAM from a couple of Firefox processes, usually about 2GB. YMMV
Re: 4GB RAM too little for Firefox?
On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 01:25:10PM +0200, Richard Ulmer wrote: Hi all, after having Firefox running for some time (ca. 30min to 2h) my system seems to become slow. I get frequent freezes for several seconds, mpv instances start crashing and things like switching tabs in Firefox become a pain. I've got 4GB of RAM installed and when I look at htop after my system became slow, I can see that OpenBSD started swapping. When I close Firefox it takes several seconds and I can watch how my memory becomes free again in htop. My system is then again responsive. RAM prices seem to be low right now, but I don't want to spend money uneedingly and I didn't have this problem under Linux. Has anyone had similar experieces and noticed an improvement after a RAM upgrade? I have a desktop from 2009 with 8GB of RAM and faced a similar issue with recent Firefox versions. For me, the problem was two-fold: 1. Recent Firefox versions start 8 rendering processes for my system with 2 CPUs. I limited this in the preferences to just 2, ending up with a total of 4 firefox processes at all times. 2. Web apps have grown in size disproportionally lately. You mentioned Reddit, their modern web interface is such a RAM-hungry monster. Consider using old.reddit.com instead or, even better, an app leveraging their API. In the same vein, replace Gmail with a light IMAP client, use git CLI tools instead of GitHub's web interface, etc. Also, beware that Firefox leaks memory, especially with intensive web apps. I usually restart it once a day or so lately. Another workaround for unavoidable monster web apps is to use a dedicated Chromium or Iridium instance per web app, eg. for Deezer's web player: "iridium --app=https://deezer.com";.
Re: Modern browser for OpenBSD powerpc
On Thu, 23 May 2019 10:31:58 +0200, Antal Ispanovity wrote: > 2019-05-23 8:19 GMT+02:00, John Gould : > > Can someone suggest a modern graphical browser for OpenBSD PowerPC? > epiphany, if you need JS Does it work for you? I was so enthused by the idea (and irony!) of WebKit browsers packaged in 6.5 for macppc that I booted up an old and slow PowerMac lying around to update it to latest release. True, Epiphany (and surf, possibly other WebKit-based browsers too) are available as packages, but they won't load even the simplest web pages for me. Eg. "surf -bdgimnps http://ftp.openbsd.org"; opens a blank page with this error: "WebKit encountered an internal error." Not to belittle the work done already, I think this is great progress from the macpcc porters!
Re: Modern browser for OpenBSD powerpc
On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 07:19:25AM +0100, John Gould wrote: Can someone suggest a modern graphical browser for OpenBSD PowerPC? I'm trying to run several G5's and g4 mini's on 6.5 as desktop machines. The basic install works really well but there doesn't seem to be an up to date graphically browser. It's thanks to all the work the devs have put into OpenBSD powerpc that these machine are still very usable. They are hopelessly out of date as far as the Mac OS are concerned! Try netsurf, it's the best one I've found in the 6.4 macppc packages. There is substantial progress in porting for macppc in 6.5, haven't tried the new release, but it seems it hasn't resulted in a better graphical web browser yet.
Re: Blind OpenBSD users
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 11:02:47AM +0200, Marc Espie wrote: As far as I know, the only software we have for blind people (and not just people with very poor eye sight) is misc/brltty. The above might be true only for console applications. GNOME has support both for low vision users and blind users (which should install Orca for reading the screen aloud or in Braille.) More at https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html.en
Re: Blind OpenBSD users
On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 08:05:08AM -0600, Aaron Bieber wrote: Hi misc@! I am looking to understand / enhance the OpenBSD experience for blind users. Do we have any blind users reading misc that can offer any insight into their usecases / pain points / work flows / wants? I am sure OpenBSD is lacking on this front, so use cases in *nix would also be helpful. I've worked for the GNOME project as a translator some years ago. I know from the strings I've translated that they worked hard on a11y (accessibility). I don't use GNOME anymore (except through its most basic libs, such as GTK+), but I think it's usable under OpenBSD. A couple of links to get you going: * https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html.en * https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility KDE has a similar a11y initiative, but it seems less entrenched than GNOME's one: https://userbase.kde.org/System_Settings/Accessibility. Even their tutorial suggests using the KDE apps under a GNOME desktop when using a screen reader: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Accessibility/Screen_Reader_Setup#Screen_Readers Another interesting link I've found, touching on both GNOME and KDE, but also listing alternatives to GNOME's Orca screen reader: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/. Hope that helps! Not a blind user here... Also, was hoping someone more knowledgeable would step in to answer. As far as I can tell, there is no a11y support in OpenBSD's native console, so it seems blind users can only use graphical applications under OpenBSD.
Re: Upgrade procedure (6.4 -> 6.5)
On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 08:15:16PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: On 5/7/19 8:32 AM, Dumitru Moldovan wrote: On Sun, May 05, 2019 at 05:05:11PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: Hi, Consus wrote on Fri, May 03, 2019 at 02:24:10PM +0300: Maybe it's a good idea to note this on the upgrade page? Something like "the upgrade procedure may leave some files behing; you can manually clean them up using sysclean package"? [...] For example, it is definitely useful to remove stale Perl libraries. It is also useful for stale header files if you compile software from source. It is useful (but not terribly important) for stale manual pages. It is usually detrimental for old versions of shared libraries, unless you are *really* short on disk space (which is getting less common nowadays) *and* you are very careful. For most use cases, we do not recommend using sysclean. I think there's a less common scenario not covered in this thread. Suppose you have locally-compiled binaries, linked to previous versions of libraries, belonging to an older version of the OS. Those libs will never get patched after you upgrade, so any vulnerabilities they expose will remain exploitable in the binaries linked to them. Ok, I admire your confidence that the problem in your local binaries are the OpenBSD libraries. :D This swings both ways. When doing an upgrade, if the upgrade deleted all those libraries BEFORE you had a chance to upgrade that binary, it would quit working. While I'm all for "Fail Closed", it might be premature to call it a failure. Or not. It is very hard to please all, and even harder to cover all possible situations. You're mostly right, but just to be clear... Although it's true I'm a purist on this and would prefer that binaries linked to old libs will fail after an OS upgrade, there's no confidence to be admired on my side. This is why I used "I think" and "suppose you have" above. Thanks for the understanding!
Re: Upgrade procedure (6.4 -> 6.5)
On Sun, May 05, 2019 at 05:05:11PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: Hi, Consus wrote on Fri, May 03, 2019 at 02:24:10PM +0300: Maybe it's a good idea to note this on the upgrade page? Something like "the upgrade procedure may leave some files behing; you can manually clean them up using sysclean package"? [...] For example, it is definitely useful to remove stale Perl libraries. It is also useful for stale header files if you compile software from source. It is useful (but not terribly important) for stale manual pages. It is usually detrimental for old versions of shared libraries, unless you are *really* short on disk space (which is getting less common nowadays) *and* you are very careful. For most use cases, we do not recommend using sysclean. I think there's a less common scenario not covered in this thread. Suppose you have locally-compiled binaries, linked to previous versions of libraries, belonging to an older version of the OS. Those libs will never get patched after you upgrade, so any vulnerabilities they expose will remain exploitable in the binaries linked to them.
Re: Firefox bug: 66.0.3 disables all extensions
On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 10:13:39PM +0200, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado wrote: On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 07:01:55PM +0100, Anthony Campbell wrote: After upgrading Firefox today to 66.0.3 in -current, all my add-ons were inactivated. A quick search showed that this is a widespread problem, apparently due to a bug in FF. I was able to fix it temporarily by means of a suggestion on ghacks.net to change xpinstall.signatures.required in about.config to "false". Presumably it will be fixed soon upstream. Disabling signature checks is almost always a bad idea. Open this url with firefox and install the extension. https://storage.googleapis.com/moz-fx-normandy-prod-addons/extensions/hotfix-update-xpi-intermediate%40mozilla.com-1.0.2-signed.xpi Installing random extensions from the big bad Internet is almost always a bad idea. :-D This issue was fixed upstream in Firefox 66.0.4. Use Landry Breuil's repo to keep Firefox updated in -stable or -release. More at https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170425173917. Final result from pkg_add should be: firefox-66.0.2->66.0.4: ok
Re: umb0 ucom0 umodem0 detached
On 03.05.2019 17:07, Malte Wedel wrote: Hello Misc, I have OpenBSD running on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, 3rd Gen, everything is working great, except for the builtin 4G modem "umb0" which detaches and disappears from time to time and needs a reboot to become available again. I found this thread which seems to be exactly my issue: http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/Re-Current-197-Nov-5-umb0-ucom0-umodem0-detached-td330969.html For the record, this can be better worked around with a sleep/resume cycle, no need to reboot.
Re: doas.conf and GUI applications
On Fri, Apr 05, 2019 at 10:10:52AM -0400, Bruno Dantas wrote: There are a handful of GUI applications (file manager, text editor, terminal emulator) that I go back and forth between running as regular user and running with doas root. […] Running GUI applications as root is a bad idea in general. OpenBSD is an OS that emphasizes privilege separation for programs that actually need root access. I think its users should also try to minimize the amount of code they run with administrative privileges. Particularly, why would you want to run a terminal emulator as root? Just launch it without admin privileges and use doas in the shell. This way the terminal and the shell run with your user's privileges. Also, if you need to edit files in /etc, do it with a minimal editor from the base system, like vi, not with a full-blown GUI application. I personally prefer neovim for editing my files, but I trust vi more when I edit system files. As for file management, there shouldn't be a need to manage files outside your home. Just mount (with doas) your USB stick to a sub-dir in your home, and your user should be granted access to its files. If there is need to move around system files, say in /etc, use doas with the CLI tools from base: cp, mv, rm etc. This is the Unix way. I realize right-clicking a program and choosing "Run as admin" might be second nature to Windows users, but it's a nasty habit.
Re: video decoding and playback in OpenBSD
On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 06:05:58PM +0200, Mihai Popescu wrote: Hello, I am trying to find some hardware for an OpenBSD multimedia computer. I plan to attach it on a HDMI TV and play youtube on it, 1080p@30fps or more. No 4K involved. My thinking is to go for an AMD A8-6500 processor, but I am not sure if this is enough.Right now I am using and AMD Athlon II X2 B26 which drops some frames on youtube 1080p. I've read that ffmpeg, mpv and chromium do not use GPU in any way for decoding in OpenBSD. I could not afford to go for performance hardware like Intel Core I7-4770, so if you please could you make some suggestion about what you run as a minimum requirements? Am I on the right track thinking that more powerful CPUs will speed up decoding? Your AMD Athlon II X2 should play 1080p @30 fps on YouTube with no dropped frames. I know because I have a slightly slower X2 processor, the green edition at 2800MHz. I suspect the dropped frames are caused by your browser disabling some acceleration for your video card. Do you use the integrated graphics of your motherboard? I do and that gave me similar issues. But it's possible to force-enable the acceleration in Firefox, with little issues (freezes sometimes for a few seconds with 6.4 and even got a couple of X.org crashes over the last months, hoping for a better outcome with the updated drivers in 6.5, as 6.3 was smooth). On Chromium-based browsers I don't think there's a way to force enable 3D acceleration for these old chipsets. There's a flag that used to work, but not any more. An alternative is to play YouTube videos with mpv using the GL output, which should be the default (not x11, not xv). That works out of the box for my setup. As a general rule for these old chipsets, the decoding is not GPU-accelerated, it's the screen rendering that needs the acceleration. In Linux I had the option for accelerated H264 decoding too in mplayer/mpv (with VDPAU?), but I still preferred software decoding, as it gives more flexibility (eg. for deinterlacing). On a related note, try this in the MPV config file to prevent sound skips when listening to radio: ao=sndio. For 5.1 videos you might also want: audio-channels=downmix. FFMPEG's ffplay is an alternative to try, for radio listening I use: ffplay -loglevel quiet -autoexit -nodisp.
Re: OpenBSD 6.4-stable + current "freezes" after 4h
On Mon, 14 Jan 2019 18:27:56 +0100, Marco Prause wrote: > > > Am 14. Januar 2019 16:40:48 MEZ schrieb Theo de Raadt : > >It sure looks like you have a pile of your own changes which are highly > >unconventional, > >and you are very far away from a stock OpenBSD configuration. > > Well, that's right so far, because I have decided to use the tool resflash to > create images (https://stable.rcesoftware.com/resflash/). > > That's the "only" changes, that made the system away from a stock OpenBSD > configuration. > > But sure, to get this also out of the way of possible causes, I could install > current to the server on the hard disc. I just thought resflash just did some > changes to the boot process and I assume the issue more at the bridge-part. >From https://stable.rcesoftware.com/resflash/ sources: Resflash is not a supported OpenBSD configuration. Please do not email bugs@ or misc@ asking for help. If you have a question or a bug to report, please https://www.freelists.org/list/resflash";>post to our mailing list, https://gitlab.com/bconway/resflash/issues";>submit an issue on GitLab, or mailto:bconway-at-rcesoftware-dot-com";>email me directly.
Re: Polish localization
On Tue, Jan 08, 2019 at 02:52:21PM +, Radek wrote: Hello, I'm trying to set Polish locales in my new desktop (6.4/amd64, xenodm, WindowMaker). […] Don't know about the console, but to set (default) Polish keyboard in X you need to run "setxkbmap pl", eg. in your .xsession file. To have Polish interface displayed (when available) you need to set LANG and LC_MESSAGES as pl_PL.UTF-8 (not sure if both or only one of it). Setting LC_ALL will do that too (and more). For Firefox there is a separate package for the Polish localization: firefox-i18n-pl. For the other program, I don't know… Maybe nobody localized it or the translation was removed? HTH!
Re: Problem with installing OpenBSD 6.4 on VirtualBox
On Tue, 13 Nov 2018 20:51:09 +0100, jean-yves boisiaud wrote: > I 'm trying to install OpenBSD 6.4 on VirtualBox 5.1.38 on a LinuxMint host. > Please note that 6.0, ... 6.3 worked fine, only 6.4 failed. I've been running 6.4 with no issues on VirtualBox 5.0.x (initially) and now 5.2.x. But it's a VM installed with OpenBSD 5.6 and upgraded over the years, not installed from latest stable media. Judging by the latest releases, the 5.1.x VirtualBox series is out of maintenance, and the last 5.1.x version is dated before OpenBSD's 6.4 release (the same is true for 5.0.x). Maybe try latest stable release, 5.2.22 at the moment? And make sure you choose the right OS template when creating the VM? > The boot sequence starts, and restarts forever. > > I recorded the console of the VM, the last message displayed before reboot > is : > > isa0 at mainbus0 > pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5 irq 1 irq 12 These two lines are common on both my VM and my desktop. The next two lines are: pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot) wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard Uneducated guess here, but is there anything out of normal with your keyboard setup in the VM or with the keyboard options chosen during install? Can you try the defaults?
Re: iridium-browser + unveil
On Thu, 8 Nov 2018 09:03:51 +0100, Stefan Wollny wrote:
>
> I changed the 'exec' command in /usr/local/bin/iridium like so:
> - LANG=${_l} exec "/usr/local/iridium/iridium" "${@}"
> + LANG=${_l} exec "/usr/local/iridium/iridium" "--enable-unveil" "${@}"
>
> With this change I can browse the web as before. BUT: My startpage is a
> html-file in the users home directory containing a huge collection of
> links to web sites. I use this file at home and at work where I am
> forced to use the most popular unsafe OS. With iridium unveiled this
> page is no longer accessible instead I get 'ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND'.
With unveil enabled, your browser can only download files to your ~/Downloads
sub-dir, and can only upload files from your ~/Uploads sub-dir. So maybe put
your HTML file in ~/Uploads and use the new location as the start page?
Disclaimer: I am not a user of Iridium or Chromium with unveil, but this is
what I remember from Bob Beck's presentation on the subject at EuroBSDCon in
September. Hope I got the sub-dirs right! Thinking about it, there should be
write access to ~/.cache as well, maybe even /tmp, but these are just extra
details.
Re: EuroBSD Con 2018 1 Free Ticket for Ansible Tutorial and LibTLS Tutorial Thursday
Hi Tom, That is very generous of you... But are you sure those tickets are transmittable? If yes, I would like to attend the Ansible Tutorial. LibTLS is way over my head, as I can't program in C to save my life. Thanks a lot! On 09/19/18 08:24, Tom Smyth wrote: Hello, I have paid for Ticekts for the Ansible Tutorial and the Lib TLS tutorial Thursday in EuroBSD Con2018 Bucharest. I cant attend Thursday and I dont want the tickets to go to waste, so if any of the mailing list subscribers woudl like to go ... please reply directly to me and you can have the ticket for the either or both tutorials ... first come first served, Hope this helps, Tom Smyth,
Re: wifi gui manager
Stefan Sperling wrote: > On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 06:38:11PM -0700, Chris Bennett wrote: > > Well, there are probably additional reasons too, but my father > > happily runs OpenBSD. Of course, he needs to be able to turn the > > computer off. > > I would recommend using doas(1) to grant 'shutdown' to a particular > user. You don't want to run a web browser from an account in the > operator group. An alternative is to just press the power button for half a second. I have yet to encounter hardware running OpenBSD that won't shut down cleanly this way, as APM/ACPI support has been stellar for me. Logging out first would be advisable though, /me thinks.
Re: how to find reason for computer pausing often?
Derek Sivers wrote: > This past month or so, my Lenovo T440s laptop has started doing > strange 2-second pauses at random intervals, sometimes a few times > per minute. [...] > I know it isn't an OpenBSD problem, but any suggestions where you'd > look if it was you? Try changing SATA mode in BIOS from AHCI to IDE to disable what seems to be faulty power saving support from your drive? As per https://odd.blog/2013/11/26/yes-finally-fixed-ssd-freezing-computer/
