jwm

i seem to have come full circle, through quite a lot of de/wm back to the rather humble jwm. and i'm quite pleasantly surprised. jwm replaces my current openbox + tint2 setup quite well, perhaps even better.. more efficient, quicker, smaller, faster, simpler and very customisable. jwm gives me everything i use in openbox and tint2 combined. i think this is the end of my openbox saga.

kernel compile debian way

1. prepare your system

verify you have sufficient diskspace. about 1g or so.
you do not need root. normal user can compile.
you do not need to compile on your own system. another system, with faster cpu, more memory, spare demand, etc can compile your kernel.

using tmpfs

i find my ram usage doesn't go much over 512k. apart from some of my trusty older friends, most of my systems have ample ram left over. how do i make more efficient usage of extra ram?

ram is fast. disk is slow. move more operations from disk to ram, depending on how ram is spare.

partition table recovery

my last tryst with openbsd left me in tears.. my partition table destroyed! but thankfully, i gained my wits before any data was written to disk. so now i need to recover partition table back.. any tips?

gparted gave me a great big warning that it will take too long. it didn't take too long, and it couldn't recover my partition table either.

gpart took a bit longer, but failed as well.

testdisk seems to be making progress, but it is awfully slow.. much slower than either of the above. i have spent the entire night watching it count each cylinder as it attempts to recreate my partition table. it is still counting, and now it is early morning. i should catch a few winks, or i'll be wasted today.

update: all is well :)

openbsd install ends in tears

my last adventure with openbsd 5.1 was very positive. so i wanted another look, and decided to install openbsd to multi-boot my main computer.

what should have been a realtively quick & easy task last night, has runover :'( alas, i spent the rest of the night trying to recover my partitions. openbsd wiped my partition table and replaced with it's own version, without even confirming!!

lesson learnt.. no playing with unknown toys in live production systems!

update: to multi-boot openbsd, create a partition of type openbsd, before starting openbsd installer. otherwise, openbsd installer just assumes that the whole disk belongs to it. no questions asked!