Update PEM FVWM2 theme for OpenBSD

By Strog

So an email comes in the other day asking about PEM’s theme that I tweaked for FreeBSD. He was asking about running it on OpenBSD and wasn’t having much success. The problem is OpenBSD is using an older version (another oldish version in ports) and the theme requires some things from the “unstable” 2.5 series. OpenBSD has integrated the last version (2.2.5) before the license change so it hasn’t been updated. There’s a 2.4.x port since that’s the “stable” branch. OpenBSD doesn’t import beta software into ports/packages. This is a great idea but unfortunately some things are in perpetual beta. FVWM 2.5.0 was released in Jan ’02 so it’s only a month or so younger than my son and he started school this year. heheh

The first obstacle to overcome is getting 2.5.x on the machine. I found an an unofficial 2.5.21 port but it was giving me some errors on my OpenBSD 4.1 laptop. I look around some more but didn’t find a more recent port. I did find directions for compiling 2.5.16 on OpenBSD 3.8/3.9 so I pulled some configure options and hacked together a rough port of my own using version 2.5.23 since it’s current. My build errors went away but I had some errors on install while it was building the package. It was basically some man pages that existed but were in a different directory than it was looking for and a defaults file. I copied the man pages to the right working directory and created an empty defaults file. It installed fine and created a package. I used this package on a clean install since this laptop has been upgraded a couple times to be sure it was working cleanly. I upgraded both machines to OpenBSD 4.2 today and FVWM is still working fine. I’m going to do a fresh install of 4.2 on the test machine and give the port another look to see if I can get it to compile and install cleanly.

Download and install the theme and it looks like it’s supposed to but the scripts for wifi, battery and volume aren’t working since it’s trying to pull values from FreeBSD’s sysctls. This was to be expected since the original scripts were on linux and pulling stuff from /proc. A little fiddling with wicontrol, apm and mixerctl using awk, cut, etc. and I had working scripts again. I just added the FreeBSD portions of the scripts back in and used uname and some if statements to determine which to run. I guess I could add the linux version back in for completeness.

I did notice I was missing a couple things on the fresh install since it was pretty minimal. I needed to add ImageMagick, imlib and Esetroot (from eterm port) to get everything working. If you already have a fairly complete desktop then you likely already have it all but just double check before you decide it’s not working. You’ll also need to edit ~/.fvwm/config to set the path to your icons and set your preferred apps. I’m using aterm for the terminal and aumix for the volume but you can change it easily enough in the config file.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Downloads:

fvwm2-devel-port.tar.gz
fvwm2-devel-2.5.23.tgz
fvwm2 configs ver 1.1

The port file is hackish but I’ll add checksums if/when I clean it up. The pkg was compiled on a 4.1 box but it’s working on a couple of upgraded 4.2 boxes now. You are welcome to it but use at your own risk. :^)

Website back up and updating again

By Strog

The webserver that I hosted my websites on died and the backups were dated. That poor old Sun box decided it couldn’t take anymore and imploded. The box belongs to a friend of mine and he let me and another friend host our sites on it. It was in a colo facility in a rack that his worked owns. He changed jobs and they allowed him to keep his stuff there but the future looked uncertain for a while. I debated on moving off the box but as time went on, it seemed that everything would be fine where it was. That’s why there hasn’t been a lot of updates on any of my sites. I should have made a new backup anyway because I started updating everything right before it died.

All my website stuff has been moved to another box in the same rack but it’s much more powerful. The bad news is that it’s a production box so I can’t do whatever I want. It’s not that bad since basically everything I need is already installed and I was keeping an eye on a website running on it anyway. I already have a full backup saved offsite and will be setting up regular syncs to keep it going.

Unfortunately Google forgot me in the month of downtime. I used to have the top result for shrauger and strog. Now I can’t even find the main pages in the first several pages of results. Oh well, I don’t know of anyone who was acutally trying to find me that way. We are back on track and will be updating with some kind of frequency now.

FreeBSD Splash Screen

By Strog

I usually run without login managers (xdm/gdm/kdm/etc.), splash screens, etc. on my main desktop but I like to have my BSD laptops looking a bit nicer when I pull them out at work or wherever. So let’s talk about adding a splash screen to FreeBSD. The format of the picture needs to be a bmp or pcx file that’s 1024×768 or smaller and 256 color. Put the following in your /boot/loader.conf, copy splash.bmp to /boot and reboot.

splash_bmp_load="YES"
splash_pcx_load="YES"
vesa_load="YES"
bitmap_load="YES"
bitmap_name="/boot/splash.bmp"

You should see your splash screen after the bootloader hits the bitmap_load command. If you don't then more than likely it's larger than 1024x768 or more than 256 colors. If it's pcx format then you still need to have the splash_bmp_load for it to work. You can press a key to get the boot process so it doesn't have to get in the way. There's a splash screen page back from the 3.x days and I still like a couple of the splashes from there. Probably about time for someone(s) to come up with some new ones base on the new logo.

FreeBSD GDM Theme

By Strog

I put this GDM theme together last fall and posted it on Screaming Electron but thought I post it here since I was doing some desktop work. I originally found a theme I liked called Tobacco Sky. It was based off an earlier theme and had a new background with some tweaks. I just took that and made it into a FreeBSD theme from there since I didn’t find any good FreeBSD themes for GDM that I liked. I grabbed the graphics right off freebsd.org. All the real work was done by those who came before me.

I see that SLiM has been ported to FreeBSD. It’s a simple lightweight login manager derived from Login.app. I might convert this theme to SLiM sometime if I get the notion.

Download it here