Monday January 15, 2024

installation: woes and joys
now playing: Dave Angel - DA03 and Underground Resistance/Suburban Knight - Live@Groovetech Radio, London 08-06-2001

Installation...

Not being versed in the use of MS-DOS (outside of understanding and appreciating the old C:\DOS\run tshirt), I opted to use the excellent Rufus on a Windows machine to make a bootable disk image out of an .iso file I downloaded from the official OpenBSD page, which in my case was version 7.4 (the 55th release of Theo de Raadt's project) for the amd64 architecture. I had recently bought a relatively inexpensive refurbished ThinkPad T450s (with a 256 gig solid state internal drive) from the fine folks at Computation Ltd. for the purposes of learning this highly regarded descendant of UNIX. I knew that best practices when installing any operating system included changing the boot order (on non-Macintosh/Chromebook, etc.) computers, and also making sure that the computer was connected to the router via Ethernet cable.

Woes

Alas, though my installation worked, my wireless chip was at first not recognized, which I wasn't thrilled about to say the least. Couldn't help but think back to the disaster with the Aspire more than a decade ago came to me. This however, seemed to be mitigated when I started up the installer the second time, still plugged into the router and it found my card. All seemed to be right or right enough with the world but then upon logging in, I found that my resolution was too small! Doing a bit of Googling, I found I could run the following as root to change it:

# xrandr -output eDP-1 -mode 1368x768

 But it didn't take long for that to become tiresome to type every single time I'd boot up, so I learned the absolute most rudimentary basics of scripting and made a script called screenres.sh that had this as its one line and then learned I'd need to put a line calling for the execution of this script in my .xsession file. A kludge if there ever was one! This made me think I would try to install a new window manager so I wouldn't have to look at the default one which with the wrong resolution, and not much set up to speak of felt like a headache, especially for a beginner like myself. I thought I'd give dwm a whack, having seen some really cool looking configurations of it. So off I went to the terminal and ran

# pkg_add dwm

Then I added the following:

execute dwm

 to my .xsession file. Then I installed suckless' web browser, surf. And for maybe a day, I was somewhat happy with how this was working, until I learned that in order to customize dwm I'd need to make it from scratch rather than simply downloading it precompiled from default software repositories. So I tried to clone the relevant directory of OpenBSD's github page but then I stopped being able to download any further. A friend who had/has been helping me with some of my journey into all this UNIX stuff suggested I run a command to show how space was being used and humorously, though annoyingly, one of the partitions was somehow at 106% capacity, though the hard drive as a whole still had more room to spare. My friend and I were puzzling over how we might consolidate the partitions to make it easier to delete unused things, so I just did a new install from scratch with much more minimal partitions, this time as follows: one pointed at /home in the fast file system form, one at / in swap, both of which 100 gigs each, one three gigs unallocated, then the rest for the system stuff (iirc).

Joys

Although my wireless card (the device is named iwm0 was recognized, I needed to learn how to connect to my home Wi-Fi network. Here's what ended up doing the trick:

ifconfig iwm0 nwid MYNETWORK wpakey MYPASS
dhclient iwm0

 Although I didn't want to have to run this every time I boot up. I was this close to making another script for this purpose but I learned that I had to make a hostname.if which is literally just named hostname.devicename and goes in your configuration directory, which felt more or less like a script but it went in a special place. And now it mostly works. After the hassle with dwm, I was not especially feeling like fretting over things around GUI things, and maybe I will later. I followed a YouTube video on installing Xfce in the command line line by line and here I am now! 

               O tessa o
          _\_   o
       \\/  o\ .
       //\___=
          ''

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