jmcunx Tech blog

This will contain personal ramblings about various tech items.

2024-05-24: My lisp tags setup NetBSD pkgsrc emacs29-29.3 and emacs 29 from ports on OpenBSD breaks the menus. Emacs will freeze Xorg when I try and use any of the drop down menus. On NetBSD I reverted back to Emacs 28, all works good. That is not an option on OpenBSD. I will check to see why that is the case in an emacs forum, but I suspect it is something in "~/.emacs".

2024-04-03: This has been a "fun" week. It was discovered that a backdoor was put in library liblzma starting version 5.6.x. This backdoor added a hole to sshd with many distros using systemd. I know the BSDs and Slackware was not affected. Do a WEB search and you will find more information then you will need. As of now, I believe all affected distros have been patched.

2024-03-28: Updated the T420 to NetBSD 10.0 from RC6. All went well and no major issues. But if I run a heavy Hash Analysis Program I created, after ~1 hour, X will get corrupted. I may create a PR for that, but for now I am running that on my Slackware System since it executes 10x faster then on BSD.

2024-02-24: I had more time, seems ksh(1) and csh(1) is pledged on OpenBSD, so since I really like pledge(1)/unveil(1), I stopped using tcsh(1) on OpenBSD :( For a fun activity on OpenBSD, you can issue this command to see what ports have been pledged: "find /usr/ports/ -name pledge\*". Of course you need to install ports, see the FAQ for that.

2024-02-22: I finally examined OpenBSD's ksh using objdump(1). Seems ksh(1) and csh(1) is not pledged or unveiled, which makes sense based upon how it is used. Because of that, I am decided to use tcsh(1) on OpenBSD. I was using csh(1) only because I prefer its interactive use compared to "sh type" shells. I have always used tcsh(1) on Slackware and still do. I was exposed to it when I used Coherent 386 on a 386sx.

2024-02-06: For the last few years, I have been playing with using the original csh(1). I am a tcsh(1) user so all that is really missing is cursor movement to edit commands. Right now, I decided to use the original csh(1) for an undetermined period of time to exercise my memory. Over the years I have become very dependent on using tab completion for some commands. I was exposed to csh(1) decades ago on SunOS, at the time I did not like it too much. But now I see an elegance I missed back then.

2024-02-05: I played with git again with a couple of new utilities. But when you sign commits with gpg, OpenBSD and NetBSD has issues. This is due to pinentry, gpg2 needs that for a GUI prompt. Why the the gpg people "broke" gpg2 forcing a GUI on us is beyond me. So, that reinforces my use of RCS and ftp distribution of my things. gpg (not 2) is no longer available on Open/Net and I kind of expect support to stop for it. But, Slackware still ships it :)

$Id: tech_2024.gmi,v 1.14 2024/05/24 15:18:27 jmccue Exp $