jekyll on Polishdub's Dev and Tech Blog

OpenBSD Audio Issues

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 18:34:00 +0000

Apparently, I lost this post from a few years back. I wanted to get it documented again so there was a record for SOMEBODY to possibly have assistance.

I’ve been using a Lenovo T470s for a while. On a fresh install of OpenBSD, I noticed that I would get stuttering or choppy video trying to view anything through a web browser.

There’s two different ways that this is introduced, one is in the bios, but at this moment, the solution escapes me. The other way is through sndiod flags. Setting the sndiod_flags to -m play and then restarting sndiod usually fixes the issue after quitting and reloading the web browser.

Developing with Arduino on OpenBSD

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 21:34:00 -0700

I haven’t touched my arduino in a very very long time. I decided it was time to try again and play.

For OpenBSD, I needed to install arduino and arduino-makefile packages. I found a few snags that had changed since I first attempted to make anything work on arduino.

First up was to install the arduino packages.

doas pkg_add arduino arduino-makefile

Something I either forgot, or never did, was that my code needed to be in .ino

Building the arduino files requires a Makefile:

BOARD_TAG    = uno
ARDUINO_LIBS =

include /usr/local/share/arduino-makefile/Arduino.mk

gmake works for the build once we have that Makefile.

gmake upload will fail though because of the Makefile and more specifically, the include cannot find the avrdude config.

We need to add the following lines to the Makefile:

AVRDUDE      = /usr/local/bin/avrdude
AVRDUDE_CONF = /usr/local/share/arduino/bootloaders/gemma/avrdude.conf

This now allows us to upload the config properly

Single Board Computer Frustration

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 20:15:00 -0700

I’ve been eyeing up several reasonably priced ARM/SBC systems for a bit now. Let me clarify that my definition of reasonably priced. I mean anything around $35-$65 USD. I know what you’re thinking cheap skate. Yeah, okay fine. I’m on a budget and yet you’re still reading this. I wanted something that could have multiple purposes. Something to do retro game emulation, install and play with FreeBSD or OpenBSD, maybe use as a router. None of these would be done at the same time. But just something to try out, learn on, and then maybe put it to good use.

I looked at the Raspberry Pi (RPi), but several things bugged me. First was that it was not an open sourced board and secondly, it is vastly under powered. Okay, I can go towards the Raspberry Pi 2, but then I still have to go back to the board not being open sourced and it could be a real PITA for getting non-blessed operating systems installed. Which all of this is a shame for all the different projects people have done for these boards including game emulation setups.

Beaglebone Black was next on the list. More powerful than the RPi, and only slightly more in price. It does have better support by other operating systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. Unfortunately though, it seems like fewer people are creating large projects with them. They aren’t as popular as the RPi’s, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

ODroid was another option. This board has impressed me. Almost 4 times as powerful as the RPi, but about the same price point as the Beaglebone Black’s. We now have the issue of operating systems. I have yet to see any FreeBSD or OpenBSD run on these. I did see NetBSD mentioned, but then I must go down another rabbit hole and learn that as well. Not as many projects have been pushed to this platform either. Except for Lakka.tv .

So great in the end, I still want one. The only purpose I have for one of these is to install a gaming emulation on two out of the three. But that’s it. I’d like to say router, but they all have single NIC’s, if I’m lucky. So at that point, I might as well save my money and pickup a PC Engine apu1d4 instead. I have a purpose for it, just need to save for it if I’m going that route. Then I hear about the EdgeRouter Lite. Whoa. I just now found a price for the ERLite‑3. I know that I’m able to install OpenBSD on the PC Engine for a router. Hooray, more research!

For now, I’ll just go back to looking into my options without breaking the bank.

Migrating to a Static Blog

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 21:40:00 -0700

What an interesting turn of events. I started writing this blog post with my intentions fully moving away from Ghost , which is written in NodeJS, to Pelican , written in Python. I wrote mostly a whole article about choices I was making. All of which were in the direction of Python. I mostly wrote off Ruby as a “hipsters” language. So I decided to stear clear as much as possible. As is most of my life as of late, something I swore off for so long, eventually comes back and I’m willing to give it a shot. Go figure. Anyway, onward to a slight article about moving to a static blog!

When I started out, I set out to find out what Python frameworks were available for creating static blogs. Since my articles were already written in Markdown and I finally got the hang of it, I didn’t really want to change that. I found that Pelican, Nikola, Crotal and Hyde, Python’s answer to Jekyll. As the plan was to use Python, I wanted to at least be running Python3. This isn’t some hard requirement so much as a personal one. That marked Crotal off the list. Next came Hyde. Unfortunately, their documentation for Hyde was pretty lousy, so goodbye Hyde.

I thought I had narrowed it down between Nikola and Pelican. Pelican is easy to setup. Simple and quick to get running. Plenty of different themes. My biggest issue with was that the metadata info for each post, page, and any configuration options all were dependent on the theme being used. I guess that can be a possibility for all themes and static website generators. I really didn’t want to have to play with the front end much or at all and that was especially true regarding learning how to create or modify themes.

Nikola was much the same as Pelican. I had to make changes to the metadata of my posts, pages, and adjust the configuration files. Again, there were plenty of themes; however they too ususally had some features pertaining to configuration parameters or metadata. Theme maintainers may not have made changes anywhere from 2 years to 2 months, most closer to a year plus. I can’t completely blame them, as once they’ve built something for their own use, they are done, and are only sharing their work for others to be able to use and build off of.

I decided to try out a Ruby static site generator, Jekyll. After scrounging through their documentation for a bit and realized that I wouldn’t need to install Ruby on the server and could just deploy the generated files over to a www directory. Duh, I realized I could do this with the Python static site generators too; I’m just used to running Python code and sites on servers. Back to Jekyll. Configuration was a little more work along with the syntax. I like how I’m able to use either metadata or proper file naming for posts to be either a draft or live. If your files for posts aren’t prepended with ‘YYYY-MM-DD-’ or ‘published: false’ in the metadata of the file then the generator will not build the pages or links.

Between the Nikola, Pelican, and Jekyll, I chose Jekyll. It gives me an excuse to try and learn Ruby (although said knowledge isn’t needed for setting up a site). All three have quite a few options for themes and customizability. There is also pretty much a commonality of pretty much the same syntax to build a new site, create posts, run a dev server for local development, and building or generating the site before deployment.

Technical Blogs

Fri, 20 Feb 2015 20:00:00 -0700

While I may not be seasoned at writing technical blogs, or blogs in general for that matter; I do not want to write a lousy technical articles.

I don’t. Just today alone, I’ve come across at least fifteen technical articles that will say how to do something, but not expalin why. I feel as though that takes away some credibility of the author.

Maybe they found a quick way to get something done and didn’t look back. I don’t get it. This is something that I will be working on in the near future: write knowledgable, concise, technical blogs.

Development and Test Environments - Make Sure They Match

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 20:00:00 -0700

So I made a mistake. I decided that instead of using a virtual image to develop our latest project on, I’d just run what I need locally on my machine. Outside of a VM or clone of our environment.

For the most part, that may not be a bad thing if your desktop Linux of choice is of the same distribution path (ie: Ubuntu based deploying to a Debian server).

Well my problem was particular with RabbitMQ. I used the documentation based from their website. My biggest mistake was that I used the command line help options from my local box to write a few scripts to run and configure properly.

Come to find out, the version installed on Debian 7 was 2.9. A big difference from Mint’s repo version of 3.2.4. So much so that some commands that I needed to run like join_cluster were renamed and therefore not recognized.

Lesson learned. Make sure that what I’m testing against and the documentation that I’m using coincide with each other.

Android vs iOS

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:00:00 -0700

While I’ve been a Linux user for a long time, I’ve been moving myself more towards the BSD systems.

Given being a Linux user, I waited with bated breath for OpenMoko to be released. Then came Android. OpenMoko never made it I was anxious and thrilled when Android finally came out. A Linux phone finally in production.

I’ve used Apple computers since the early G4 Tower’s (late 90’s), I was pleased with OS X but not so with iOS. I wasn’t that impressed with the iPod Touch or the iPhone. I felt as though it is very dumbed down. Specifically when it came to context menu’s (or the lack there of), the layout, control, and feel of everything.

Now I wonder if maybe it is okay to use iOS. Maybe it’s not as dumbed down as I once thought. It’s hard to not think that though as I run CyanogenMod on my current Android device. Where I have so many options and have so much control.

But since I’m moving the rest of my systems to OS’ of the BSD persuasion, maybe my phone should too. Which is why I am taking a second glance at iOS. I’ve refused so much to let my family get or use iPhones. Directing them completely away. I believe that it is ignorance on my part.

I have not moved over yet. And I don’t know if I will switch my phone hardware. But I have started opening my mind to the possibilities.

A Web Backend Developers Migration to FreeBSD

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using different Linux distributions since around 1997. Originally, it was more personal than anything. Although I did learn to setup samba, web servers, databases, etc.. I had made several attempts moving to FreeBSD throughout the years.

Fast forward to today and here I am a Python developer I’ve moved away from Perl scripting at my previous job. I’ve been more and more frustrated with every Linux distributions having so many different ways with so many different locations of where configs and packages are placed. Yes, I’ve jumped, moved, migrated, run from, and run to many different Linux distributions. Timing of my switching is not due to the systemd controversy.

My primary focus is web and backend based applications. So naturally, by default, we have a web server and a database.

Where the web server comes in, I haven’t really tested any of them by setting it up locally on my dev machine. Although I doubt there is much of an issue.

Databases

For relational databases, I’ve used MySQL on Linux, but never professionally. I’ve been using PostgreSQL professionally and much prefer it. You can get a pretty recent version of PostgreSQL through pkgng. Getting the PostgreSQL configuration location is a little different than the majority of Linux locations; however, once you understand the Unix way, it’s less of an issue. One big difference is that the postgresql user created on FreeBSD is actually ‘pgsql’. Where as Linux is usually ‘postgresql’. Performance wise, I haven’t gotten to fully vet it yet.

Recently I decided to take a free MongoDB class for Python developers. Yes, I know; MongoDB, not a real database, eww, etc. I’ve been curious about it for a while, so I decided why not. The class was using MongoDB 3+. As of this writing, I can only get 2.6.7 installed through either pkgng or ports. It is stable; however, if you’re looking for the current version with the latest features, it ain’t happening unless you want to compile from source, which I may or not know exactly what I’m doing with scons and building. Something I’ll have to do more research into to get running.

Virtualization

At my current place of employment, we currently deploy strictly on Debian Stable machines. So while I can do most development locally with the databases and code base, at times I still need a production like system.

I prefer using a VM, specifically qemu, to have a development vm running; however, the removal of the kernel-kqemu has made it difficult. Performance w/o the kernel virtualization makes it painfully slow to run anything. It feels like trying to start something up on a 486!

VirtualBox is a pretty sad excuse, but does work. When I used it on Linux, qemu had much more performance. Hence why I initially went with qemu. Yes, VirtualBox does work; but it doesn’t feel like it’s running at its full potential.

I’m in the process of testing bhyve on another machine. One thing I’ve noticed is that performing a graphical install is impossible at the moment with bhyve. Your Linux distro must have a text installer. Maybe this is something in the works.

Desktop

On to the primary work space. I’ve found what I need for most of my work, I use a combination of Emacs, ssh’ing into my dev box through a terminal, and I have both Firefox and Chromium. Both Firefox and Chromium packages are pretty up to date, so that isn’t an issue.

Unfortunately, my company does use Exchange for email. I’ve been used to using Exquilla, a plugin for Thunderbird, on Linux. Sadly, I am unable to get a copy of that for FreeBSD. I may have to see if I can install a Thunderbird Linux port. Evolution is available; but their GPG integration is hit and miss and won’t always recognize your current working key.

I can be running a pretty solid version of Python(3 or 2) without any problems. Very stable for my uses. I can get a python2 virtualenv working without problems. Pip for Python2 also works as advertised. The tricky part comes to Python3. Most users experiences with Linux and Python3 are exposed to there being individual system packages to Python3’s pip and virtual environments. python3.4 -m venv or even pyvenv-3.4 both work for virtual environments. And once inside a virtualenv, python -m pip <standard command> works the same. I haven’t yet found or truly looked into getting a python3 global package installed with pip. I’m sure there’s a way.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the switch over all. The community is top notch when it comes to assistance. There is some work that needs to be done on my end:

I’ll be trying to get bhyve to do what I need
Get get a better understanding of build tools on FreeBSD
Learn to create bug reports for genuine problems I run into.

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

After being a Linux zealot for almost 15 years, I’ve been getting more and more interested in the BSD systems.

I’ve moved my personal laptop to FreeBSD after trying PC-BSD for a few months and finding performance issues (mostly due to my own hardware and being a cheap ass and not getting memory for the laptop). I’ve moved my fileserver to iXsystem’s FreeNAS and am very pleased with it.

I am a Python developer where I am blessed with the ability to use as much open source software as possible to get the job done at my place of work.

I also want to get into more personal coding projects, it is just slow at the moment while being pulled in many different directions with family and children.

My History with *BSD

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I had at one point decided to move my Linux samba server to FreeBSD momentarily . Back with FreeBSD 4.1. I had not completely understood the conventions of a traditional unix system and being early in high school, I didn’t have the patience, so I switched the server back to Linux. A little later I had decided to try FreeBSD again, this time with 7.1 I kept that around for a while; however package management still befuddled me and trying to move up to 7.2 and eventually 8 became a challenge. I had also noticed a performance hit with FreeBSD at the time with Sam a and I was receiving both nic hard drive messages. Mostly errors with the nic. These things I did not get with Linux. So I switched back yet again to Linux.

At one point I even installed NetBSD on an AMD 333 MHz just to take barely used hard drives and remove the partitions. Yes, I know that using used hard drives isn’t a very good idea. But I did. And they worked. I didn’t have the money to go out and buy new, so when I was able to repurpose hard drives that were useful, I did.