Eponymous

X11 Mouse Cursor Themes
Starting after installimg the binary nvidia drivers on both my laptop (Quadro K1100M) and my workstation (GeForce GT 630) Blackbox was defaulting to a mouse cursor that was suboptimal, a black, notched triangle.

The settings in the Xresources for the mouse cursor theme are honored by XDM at the graphical log in, but when Blackbox or Fluxbox start, the cursor would change to the black notched triangle. TWM honors the settings in Xresources, but TWM is just a little too minimalist, even for me.

But there's a simple fix!

Create a file in your home directory (if it doesn't already exist) .icons/default/index.theme. In this file, add the following lines:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits = polarblue

where polarblue is the name of the X11 mouse cursor theme you wish to use. FreeBSD installs many of the X11 cursor sets into /usr/local/lib/X11/icons/, your Unix flavor may be different. In theory, you can also install new themes of your choosing into ~/.icons/ and use those without the need for any elevated privileges.

Additionally, there's the option of creating a .Xdefaults file in the home directory and adding the line

Xcursor.theme: polarblue

Again, where polarblue is the name of theme you want to use.

Eponymous

	About My Infrequently Updated Blog. The web-based journal of M. Forde, computer nerd, endurance athlete, and DeLorean owner contact Subscribe Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS. Flavors There's more than one way to view this weblog; try these flavors on for size. index circa 1993 Sections main musings running DeLorean code unix album TBM Archives 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 Disclaimers, Copyrights, Privacy, Etc. ToS Copyrights Links olix0r.net netmeister.org Giraffes Eat. Run. Sleep.	20 Jul 2016 Trouble opening aterm in FreeBSD? Here's a soltuion! https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/44941/ [/unix] [permanent link] 08 Jul 2016 X11 Mouse Cursor Themes Starting after installimg the binary nvidia drivers on both my laptop (Quadro K1100M) and my workstation (GeForce GT 630) Blackbox was defaulting to a mouse cursor that was suboptimal, a black, notched triangle. The settings in the Xresources for the mouse cursor theme are honored by XDM at the graphical log in, but when Blackbox or Fluxbox start, the cursor would change to the black notched triangle. TWM honors the settings in Xresources, but TWM is just a little too minimalist, even for me. But there's a simple fix! Create a file in your home directory (if it doesn't already exist) .icons/default/index.theme. In this file, add the following lines: [Icon Theme] Inherits = polarblue where polarblue is the name of the X11 mouse cursor theme you wish to use. FreeBSD installs many of the X11 cursor sets into /usr/local/lib/X11/icons/, your Unix flavor may be different. In theory, you can also install new themes of your choosing into ~/.icons/ and use those without the need for any elevated privileges. Additionally, there's the option of creating a .Xdefaults file in the home directory and adding the line Xcursor.theme: polarblue Again, where polarblue is the name of theme you want to use. [/unix] [permanent link] 18 Jun 2016 FreeBSD Unix on Dell Precision M4800 I installed FreeBSD 10.3 on the laptop I recently acquired and almost eveything worked out of the box. The gigabit ethernet and wi-fi coards worked fine and by setting the BIOS to discrete graphics only, the nVidia Quadro was recognized. I installed the binary driver from nVidia, because they support FreeBSD because they're awesome like that. The nvidia-xconfig(1) program was useful to streamline the process of getting X.org to use the Quadro. There were a few things that did need some tewaking though. First there's the sound card. Because the quadro supports HDMI (in addition to VGA and DisplayPort), it includes an HDA-compliant sound card. This card is recognized before the primary HDA-compliant sound card in the machine, the one that's actually connected to the speakers. I did some research and there were some suggestions about using sysctl(8) to control soundcard GPIO pins to connect the nVidia sound device to the speackers but what ultimately worked was using sysctl(8) to change the default primary sound device to the dedicated card. There were a few ways to make this happen but the one I found that actually worked was to place sysctl(8) command lines in /etc/rc.local. First I found the device I wanted as the default: mforde@gaz:~> cat /dev/sndstat Installed devices: pcm0: (play) default pcm1: (play) pcm2: (play) pcm3: (play) Device pcm2 was the one I wanted so I added the following lines to /etc/rc.local sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=2 sysctl hw.snd.default_auto=2 Now when boot completes pcm2 is set to my default and sound "just works" and sndstat shows pcm2 as the default. I found ACPI support has some weirdness as ACPI support often does. What I found was that Suspend works from console, but resume doesn't... HOWEVER After I start X ACPI suspend and resume work just fine. Normally I prefer to boot into a console and only start X if I really need it, but because I want suspend and resume to work "by default" I've enabled X to start at boot by allowing the xdm console in /etc/ttys. But this had one last issue. See, when manually starting X, I added the -dpi 143 option to get graphics and text to be appropriately sized for my screen. XDM needed to know about this. This probably wasn't the best place to do it, but I edited /usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/XServers and modified the call to X(7) to add the -dpi 143 option. Now when Xdm loads at start up, the DPI is set correctly. The function keys for adjusting the screen brightness don't work; however, xbacklight(1) works just fine. Similarly the volume keys don't work but I can adjust the volume quite easily with aumix(1). I've submitted my dmesg output to NYCBUG's dmesgd repository. I suppose I've posted this for two reasons. The first is so I have a record of how I eventually got these little things working in case I have to do it again. The second is in case anyone has similar issues with their hardware; if they happen to stumble upon this, it might give them some hints. [/unix] [permanent link] 25 May 2016 Remapping Keys in Vim While I love the keyboard on my relatively new Dell M4800, I'm not particularly fond of the placement of the Page Up and Page Down keys to the left and right of the Up arrow, and above the Left and Right arrow keys. I find myself accidently hitting those keys too frequently while editing code and jumping all over the file. So I remapped them. It was quite simple, because Vim is awesome. I added the following lines to my .vimrc file: map <PageUp> <Up> map <PageDown> <Down> This turns Page Up into a second Up arrow, and Page Down into a second Down arrow. For now, I'll leave it like that. I may remap them to the Left and Right arrows in the future. Or not. [/unix] [permanent link] 19 May 2016 How to Make VMWare suck less Tip #273 Find the .vmx file for your VM and add a line bios.bootDelay = "15000" That gives you 15 seconds before the virtual machine launches the boot loader, giving you plenty of time to do things like change the boot order so you start from a recovery CD. [/unix] [permanent link] 03 Nov 2014 Things I love about vim Tabbed interface in the 7.x line Macro recording Built-in sed :make Not needing to remember a thousand key combinations that require seventeen fingers to properly execute [/unix] [permanent link] 14 Aug 2014 Resetting Vim On occasion while I'm coding, I'll mistype something and vim's code autoindenting will stop honoring my settings. Likely, I've done something stupid that has disabled or modifying the settings from the defaults I set in my .vimrc file. If (when) this happens, Vim can be reset without exiting the procces by going into command mode and typing :source $MYVIMRC This reloads the settings of the .vimrc file without forcing you to restart the process, thus losing your place in your code. [/unix] [permanent link] 17 Oct 2013 ... On man pages, a mini-rant I really despise the linux man pages. They're useless at best and wrong at worst. From the man page for setsockopt: "The include file <sys/socket.h> contains definitions for socket level options, described below." 1) The options are not "described below." 2) No, that file actually doesn't contain those definitions. On the other hand... The FreeBSD man page for setsockopt does actually describe the options and under FreeBSD the <sys/socket.h> file does indeed contain the definitions. [/unix] [permanent link] 16 Oct 2013 [mini-rant] I hate bash. I hate it. I hate how it bastardized bourne by adding half-assed implementations of features from ksh and tcsh. [/unix] [permanent link] 12 Oct 2013 Problems with loader.conf First the background. The story of how I got into this mess: I'm trying to get ACPI working on my laptop under FreeBSD. Specifically, I'm trying to get Resume to work properly. Suspend works, and resume seems to partially work. The fans spin up, the keyboard's backlight comes back on, but no screen. And without video, it's a little hard to figure out what's going on. ACPI works great on my server. It's running the same FreeBSD 9.1 x86-64 build that the laptop is, but the biggest difference is that it's an intel motherboard. The laptop is an Alienware, for our purposes, I might as well just call it a Dell. I started comparing the ASL output from both machines and noticed some things. First, the Alienware's ACPI implementation looks for the OS to be various forms of Windows or "Linux." The intel ACPI implementation also looks for these Windows variants and "Linux" but it has an additional OS string. It has an entry for "FreeBSD." I figured the easiest next step was to use iasl co compile the intel ASL source and load that DSDT onto the laptop. *I calculated the odds it would work vs the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid... and I went ahead and did it anyway...* I compiled the asl and I set /boot/loader.conf to override the DSDT with the intel one I had just compiled and I rebooted. At first everything was good. The machine went down, I got the boot loader, and the FreeBSD kernel started to load. Seconds into the kernel load, it rebooted itself. After the second time, I powered off and tried a cold boot. Same problem just as I had feared. Now i was in a situation where I couldn't successfully boot because of an error in loader.conf I needed to find a way to edit it. And here's the solution: The FreeBSD bootloader, like many others, works in stages. At a certain point, it can be interrupted at which point it provides a set of simple yet powerful commands to control various aspects of the loading process. If you still have that default menu at load, I beleive the option to chose is 6. I disable that menu so during a brief countdown I hit escape before the boot loader turns control over to the kernel. Once in the boot loader prompt, I entered the following commands: unload load kernel boot Pretty simple right? The unload command does what it says, it unloads the kernel and any modules loader.conf had pulled into memory. The load kernel command grabs the kernel and loads it into memory... but only the kernel thus ignoring the broken DSDT in loader.conf. And of course boot tells the boot loader to continue booting the system. Once booted, I removed the bad DSDT from loader.conf. [/unix] [permanent link] 21 Jun 2013 Excluding directories while using pax(1) My primary disk is failing. There are large segments that are generating low level IO errors during read or write operations. Most of the files written to the bad area were under /usr/ports/ where the FreeBSD Ports collection is installed. A few files were under the web server's root. Figuring I'd take care of things prior to the disk actually failing to the point of it being irrecoverable, I purchased a new disk early. I installed it, partitioned it, and formatted it. To copy the data over, ignoring the areas that were causing the IO errors, I used mv to "move" the files from the web root under /usr/ports and used the following command as root: pax -rwvpe -s':/usr/ports/.::gp' -X / /mnt/newdisk/ The -X prevents pax from traversing into mount points that have a different device ID than the one on which it was started. This prevents an infinitely recursive loop from happening when the new disk's mount point would have been hit. It also prevents data on the non-failing disks from being copied as well. the -s option allows for sed search and replace scripts to be run. In this example, the : is used as the delimiter and any path matching /usr/ports/ is replaced by a null string. With this replacement all directories under /usr/ports are excluded from the copy. [/unix] [permanent link] 28 Aug 2012 freebsd-update I'm attempting to update my laptop from FreeBSD 9.1-Beta1 to 9.1-RC1. The freebsd-update(8) utilitly was reporting an error finding the public key. A quick search found this thread. As per tangram's suggestion, I used env UNAME_r=9.0-RELEASE freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.1-RC1 and then the update began working. [/unix] [permanent link] 01 Jun 2012 Fun little alias I use a console based RSS reader written in Ruby. It crashes often and will delete my list of feeds in the process. It also has a tendency to not fully exit, leaving a ruby process sitting in the background soaking up close to 100% CPU time. For such occasions, I've added the following alias to my .cshrc file. alias killraggle kill -9 '`ps ax\|grep raggle\|grep -v grep\|awk '\''{print $1;}'\''`' [/unix] [permanent link] 01 Dec 2010 FreeBSD 6.4 EoL As of yesterday, FreeBSD 6.4, and with it the entire 6.x branch, has reached its End-of-Life. It's time to upgrade (or maybe upgrayedd, for a double dose of something-or-other). So herein lies the problems. Months (years?) ago, I attempted to upgrade tak to FreeBSD 7.2. I plugged in a SATA disk into my workstation, installed the OS, reconfigured all the daemons, services, and functionalities tak has running, copied over a snapshot of all the data, and then edited the fstab to match the device names as they'd exist on tak. I removed the IDE root disk and installed the new SATA disk and tak and watched the kernel fail to find the root disk. Or the other SATA disk in tak. Based on the bug reports in the FreeBSD Gnats system, and various conversations in the mailing list, it seems Asus, who made the motherboard in tak, used a slightly non-standard SATA implementation on this particular board. Between the 6.x and 7.x line, some work had been done on the SATA drivers in FreeBSD and mad them more standards-compliant (a good thing). This, however, broke SATA on this Asus board. Tak is about 6 years old now, and other than some over heating issues, serves its purpose well. So do upgrade to FreeBSD 8.x on an IDE disk and replace the other SATA disk with another ATA disk, or do I build a new, lower-power, higher-performance system? If anyone actually reads this, feel free to use the new comments feature to give me feedback. I think it's working. [/unix] [permanent link] 18 Nov 2009 SATA Weirdness update A BIOS update from Intel corrected this issue. [/unix] [permanent link] 02 Oct 2009 Gmail and mutt I like mutt. Of all the mail clients I've used over the years, it sucks the least. It works well with my mail server. Despite having my own domain and mail server, I still use gmail for certain things; things I don't mind being retained for 3 years after I delete them, or more specifically, things I want retained for 3 years after I delete them. I don't like the gmail web interface. I find checking my gmail to be annoying because of this. I remembered gmail offering POP and IMAP. I figured I could use that to get my gmail. Shouldn't be too hard right? A quick search of Mr. Yahoo and Mr. Google gave me two good starting points: Lifehacker.com and MattCutts.com. I read the sites and the getmail man page and figured out what I needed to do. First I enabled IMAP for my gmail account. Next, I created the .getmail directory in my home directory then created a getmailrc file there. I want all gmail mail to be delivered to a specific mbox file without going through my normal mail delivery channels. The contents of the getmailrc file are quite simple: [retriever] type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever server = imap.gmail.com username = username@gmail.com password = usernamespasswordgoeshere mailboxes = ("inbox",) [destination] type = Mboxrd path = /usr/home/mforde/Mail/GMAIL The retriever section defines how getmail will retrieve the mail. In this case it uses IMAP over SSL to connect to imap.gmail.com. The mailboxes setting can be used to specify only certain gmail labels to retrieve, but I want anything in the inbox. The destination section tells getmail what to do with the mail once it has grabbed it from gmail. This configuration dumps it into an mbox file I've named GMAIL. I chose IMAP over POP because of the slightly-less-than-documented "feature" of gmail only allowing 99 messages at a time over POP. So to get the initial batch of 7000+ emails, I ran > getmail -vvv -l to get verbose output and to leave messages on the gmail server. When that was done I pointed mutt at the GMAIL mbox and like magic, there was my gmail, organized nicely in my terminal. Now, I want to check to get the latest mail fairly often, and I don't want to download messages already copied over. To accomplish this, I added a crontab to run every 10 minutes and invoke getmail -l -n -q This tells getmail to leave copies on the server, only get new messages it hasn't already retrieved, and be quiet about it. This has worked out well for me. If you're interested in setting up something like this, I highly recommend reading the article at matcutts.com. That article also links to several sample getmailrc files. [/unix] [permanent link] 25 Aug 2009 FreeBSD 8 Beta 3 Available FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 3 is now available for download. The final release is expected in about a month. [/unix] [permanent link] 27 Oct 2008 BSD v. GPL Jason Dixon gave a talk at this year's NYCBSDCon entitled "BSD v. GPL (a.k.a. not the sequel to "BSD is Dying")." It's a humorous look at the differences between the licenses and their supporters. Despite the humor, he made some good points. You can find a copy of the presentation at The Dixon Group website. [/unix] [permanent link] 17 Sep 2008 Mailman The other night I installed mailman on my server. I integrated it into the apache configuration and restarted that. The mailman web interface became available as expected. I used the web interface to subscribe to the one list I had set up and I received an email asking me to confirm my subscription. I went to the included link, and all seemed to be good. Another person joined the list successfully, then sent an email to the list. This email never arrived in her inbox. She told me about it, and I checked only to find I did not have a copy either. I sent a mail to the list and promptly received a message saying that [listname] was not a valid recipient at the domain. That's when I realized I had forgotten to tell the mail server (postfix) about mailman. I had told apache about mailman, and mailman about postfix, but not postfix about mailman. I used mailman to create an alias database for its single list, then updated postfix's configuration to use that as one of its alias maps. All seems to be working now. In conclusion, I learned two things. One is always test your configuration before telling people it's ready. The other is, "I'm an idiot." [/unix] [permanent link] 18 Aug 2008 ~~FreeBSD 7~~ SATA Weirdness Over the weekend I installed the x86-64 build of FreeBSD 7 on my workstation, dib. I haven't had time yet to configure everything to my liking yet, but almost everything works. The one really annoying issue centers around a SATA DVD burner. When this device is attached to the primary SATA controller (ICH7), the system refuses to boot from the hard drive. It reports that no system disk has been found. I've tried all of the SATA settings options in the BIOS and none work. If I connect the SATA burner to the secondary Marvell "RAID" controller the system boots from the hard drive without issue. In Windows, this requires another driver (which for some reason installed a copy of apache along with it). Under FreeBSD 7; however, this second controller seems to be currently unsupported, leaving me with only the IDE burner available. I may spend the $20 and get another IDE burner and just forget about the SATA issue, but I really would like to know what the problem is. If any one has any idea why the system would fail to boot from a SATA hard drive when a SATA optical drive is attached, please email me and give me some insight into this issue. Maybe the Unix category wasn't the best for this. I spent more time discussing the hardware/BIOS weirdness than the installation or configuration of FreeBSD7. In fact, FreeBSD 7 isn't a very good title for this either. I'm going to change that. [/unix] [permanent link] 13 Dec 2007 chdir(2) So today at work another developer many years my senior, with many more years experience than I, came to me with a Unixy problem. "When I have a program, how can I have it so the current working directory for all processes it starts isn't the one that it started in?" "chdir." "No, I want so that if this process starts something like ls, when ls stats 'dot' I want 'dot' to be the directory that process wants it to be, not the directory that process was started from." After about 15 minutes of me suggesting chdir while he said that's not what he wanted but then describing chdir, I finally wrote something along the lines of the following #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> int main (int argc, char argv[]) { system("/bin/pwd"); system("/bin/ls"); chdir("/tmp"); system("/bin/pwd"); system("/bin/ls"); chdir("/etc"); system("/bin/pwd"); system("/bin/ls"); chdir("/"); system("/bin/pwd"); system("/bin/ls"); return 0; } I compiled that, ran it, showed him the output. He said, "Yeah, that's what I want to do." I showed him the code. "chdir does that?" [/unix] [permanent link]* 08 Dec 2007 Alpha Due to the power failure, there was the loss of several hours of work. Last night I installed FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE on an old DEC AlphaStation 200 I have. I had started building a new, smaller kernel for it around 23:30 last night. It had not completed by the time of the power outage. I have restarted that build. Any one reading this would reasonably ask, "Why are you not as confused/angry/annoyed with a compile that was not finished in 7 hours as you were about one that took 3 hours?" The answer is simple. This AlphaStation is powered by a 100MHz DEC Alpha EV4 CPU and has 64MB of RAM. To the best of my knowledge, DEC made this machine around 1994 or 1995. I expected the build to take a long time; the machine is around a dozen years old. [/unix] [permanent link] 06 Dec 2007 How long does it take to build a linux kernel? It has been a number of years since I built a linux kernel. Slackware 9.1 was the last GNU/Linux distro I used before switching back to BSD. Tonight I put together a machine from some old parts (1.2GHz celeron with 256KB cache, 256MB RAM, 20GB hard drive) and installed Slackware 12. I customized a kernel configuration and attempted to build it. I don't remember the 2.4 kernel taking as long to build as this 2.6 kernel. It took nearly two hours. Granted, this machine is fairly old, but 2 hours? After I complete the tasks for which I needed this setup, I'm going to install an older Slackware with the 2.4 kernel and build that. I may also install FreeBSD and NetBSD and build their kernels. I'd like to get an idea how long it takes to compile other kernels on this rig. [/unix] [permanent link]

First the background. The story of how I got into this mess:

And here's the solution: