Gentoo – The Mashallah Edition

Thomas Osadzinski

So, did you guys hear about the arrest of a 20 year old DePaul University student, Thomas Osadzinski in Chicago yesterday? It was all over the tech news circuit. Apparently, the dude is an Islamic nutbag who was into Python scripting to automate fetching videos from the social media handles of ISIS, saving and sharing them on other platforms. In addition, he was also developing a minimal Linux distro based on Gentoo for ISIS. His intention was to make it fast, lean and solely focused on the social media aspect of their operations. He wanted to remove a lot of packages and programs and according to him that would make his OS difficult to hack and take control of. All well and good goofball, but you did the age old mistake of talking to an undercover FBI agent, I am guessing in the dark or deep web. Not one, but to two agents, divulging his Gentoo fork plans. As he found out later, it was certainly not easy to fork Gentoo the way he wanted and FBI busted his sorry ass and as a result, will spend the next 20 years in the slammer.

Normally, I am no fan of convicting hackers who just did something stupid due to their curiosity. Remember Iceman? Poor dude is staring at a longer sentence due to his recent exploits. To this day, I wonder what would have been the case if he had never been convicted after his very first hack. But this case is different. Dude’s obviously a Muslim convert and based on some of his social media posts, was a big time ISIS fanboy. So, the punishment is kinda deserved. Still, the nerve of forking Gentoo? That alone deserves 5 years rigorous imprisonment. LOL! Instead of Larry the cow, it would be Lathif the camel.

Source, not Sauce + A Piece of Magic Mix

I just realized that I had completely forgotten to mention CRUX. Any hardcore BSD user ought to love CRUX. I used it occasionally back then and may be I should give it another shot. It was the legendary kmandla who persuaded me to give CRUX a shot. Due to my growing collection of older hardware back then, CRUX was a perfect choice. Anyhoo, time is ripe to install CRUX again.

Now, getting back to Gentoo, I am sure some of you might be aware of the famous Gentoo dance, courtesy of InstallmanGentoo on the tube. If not, here are a few clips. They capture the essence of every late night coder who is completely overawed with himself after compiling or installing some shit successfully. I have performed this ritual quite often with pants, without pants, you name it. These clips are for the ages. Sort of lets you know what’s on the other side that can only be accessed after a successful installation (its not just cookies!).

Without further ado, here they are. Marvel at these gems.

1. How to install Gentoo in less than a minute – LOL!

The song is called A Piece of Magic Mix by Lizardking. Remember the golden age of Amiga music? A huge collection of such songs are also available on YouTube. Great listening material for a night long hacking experience.

2. Install Gentoo for the first time – Oh that feeling!

3. My favorite – Getting some ass after installing Gentoo

4. Unrelated, but totally worth it – Fighting off filthy Mac fags

Modern Magic Nostalgia

Hey guys. Work and some health related things kept me out for a while. Anyway, let us get back to business. So, a relative of mine asked my help in setting up a Gentoo installation for college. He has been using Ubuntu for a year or so right now and he felt that he wanted to explore more. I advised him to use BSD, but he wasn’t ready for it, not just yet. He wanted help with Gentoo as he was focused on source based distributions. Most of my readers know about my love-hate affair with Gentoo. Still, I wanted to help him out. It was no hassle of course, but he was sort of confused after the whole thing. Gotta see how long he sticks with it.

When it comes to Linux, nothing beats the awesomeness of source based distributions. But time and other constraints have almost put them out of business. Gentoo is still the go to source based distribution and for a good reason. The other choices from back then are either dead or dormant, with very little to no active updates. If you checked out some of my earlier posts, I had spoken a lot about Lunar Linux, a fork of Sorcerer GNU/Linux (later Sorcerer OS). At a time, it was my Linux distro of choice. It is still under development, but not as extensively as it used to be. Source Mage is another fork of Sorcerer. It had a larger team back then, but their latest updates, at least in their webpage dates to 2017. Both Lunar and Source Mage are git managed right now, so you could pull the sources and build your own. But I wonder how many people still do it, at least in comparison with the much more straightforward installation of Gentoo.

Personally, I really loved Sorcerer and its forks Lunar and Source Mage. The simple philosophy of using nothing more than bash scripts to fetch, install and update a package was a testament to KISS, instead of using complex programs and tools other distros used to manage packages. Even the installation routines were pretty simple compared to Gentoo. That’s why it was pretty easy to sort of shift between Sorcerer and Lunar for me. Kyle Sallee’s Sorcerer was way ahead of its time back then and it is a shame that it is dead now. Anyway, while I was recuperating, I had time to put an older iso on another one of my Thinkpads and was able to hack a few shit and cast a few spells here and there and was finally able to set it up for use right now. It was awesome and took me back to that time when I used to do this kinda shit at 3AM in the morning with some bullshit still overdue at 8 in the morning. Exciting times.

Anyway, seen above are a couple of obligatory screenshots. I went for CRT green for this machine, as I initially used back then. WM is xmonad with my old config and the font is Monaco. Wallpaper is Pinstripe from my old collection. If you guys need anything else, please ping me.

P.S. Right click on the images and open them. If original size is compromised, please delete the width parameter following ? towards the end of the image address and reload. You will have the original size.

I ThinkPad therefore I am

As usual, how about a screenshot of one of my work machines? It’s a Thinkpad T420 with pimped up specs – i7 processor, 16 gigs RAM and coreboot (I should probably document my experience with implementing this in a separate post). Nothing beats the badassery of ThinkPads in my opinion, especially the older ones. I was given a brand new thin laptop with all the bells and whistles at work. I couldn’t survive a week with it. Hustling is a major aspect of my job these days and my boss was of the opinion that a thin laptop will help me with traveling light. Sure, but it ain’t no fucking Thinkpad. I was using this machine as my primary development box as well and not just for presenting shit. The backlit keyboard with the MacBook like flat keys was downright criminal and I could never get used to the fucking clear screen.

Thinkpad T420

So after a week trying, I returned this abomination back and told the boss I will find my own machine. She just had to pay. Long story short, found a fantastic dealer dealing exclusively with refurbished ThinkPads and got my current machine. It had been used very lightly and it looked and felt like it was brand new. Pimped it up as I had mentioned earlier and it has been my greatest companion ever since. Wife comes a close second.

I am running Debian Bullseye on it. It definitely wasn’t my first choice. But other devs are insistent on using it, so I had no other choice. Also, in spite of a being a coding heavy job, I am senior management and naturally some devs look at me as a code monkey. I don’t really care about it as long as the job’s done. Anyway, as I was saying, Debian was not my choice. Actually, I didn’t even want to use Linux. I put FreeBSD on it. Linux is better in this case, said top management. Wanting to get around systemd, I went back to Gentoo, after so so many years. Emerged out pretty quickly as time was becoming a constraint. Then I found Void. It was what I believed to be exactly what I wanted. But there were some strange issues with it after a few updates. WiFi used to drop quite consistently and a few other minor annoyances got me worked up after a while. Never really figured out a proper reason for this behavior. So, I finally relented and knocked on Debian’s doors again, after ages. It is my base OS now. I still run OpenBSD, FreeBSD on a couple of other machines, OpenIndiana Hipster and Illumos on my other laptops. I will post shots from those machines soon. For the moment, here’s Debian Bullseye on a ThinkPad T420.  KDE for a change. I alternate between xmonad and KDE.

KDE on Debian Bullseye -ThinkPad T420

KDE theme is Carl from jomada and also includes the wallpaper. Urxvt colors are just ported from Carl konsole color scheme. Icon theme is Candy icons. UI font is Roboto Condensed. Window Font is Fjalla One. Urxvt font is Pragmata Pro Mono.

If you guys need any other information, please comment.

Dash X11 Font v2.0

It’s time to update one of my fonts, Dash. I will push it to my github tomorrow. But, for the time being, I am uploading it over at omploader. As I had mentioned earlier, the only difference between v2.0 and v1.0 is the letter “l”. It should be evident from my NetBSD screenshot from a few pages earlier and the shot in this post. Just click on the image below to download. As usual, you can push it to /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/Dir-of-your-choice/, and update your font cache. That’s just about it.

Dash X11 Font - Version 2.0: Direct Download (Thanks Omploader)

Here is another screenshot with dash in action. This is my first Linux shot after a long long time. Was testing some optimizations coupled with few other tests and new grimoires on my Sorcerer box. KDE after a long time as well. Just click on the image for full view.

KDE on Sorcerer OS

If there are any further questions, please feel free to ask by using the Comment feature. I will update my Github with Version 2.0 tomorrow.

Beep X11 Font – Another Mod of Neep

Let us continue with the X11 font series. This font is called Beep. Again, it is a mod of Jim Knoble’s Neep. A few characters modded according to personal taste, like, “a” and “i”. This is a pixelsize 11 font and comes only in medium version. So don’t try to use it in the bold form or another pixelsize. It’s a bit bigger than Dweep and can be used on a relatively higher resolution screen without any issues. As usual, I have uploaded the font to my github. Please click on the image to get to my github.

Beep X11 Font - Mod of Neep

This is a screenshot of the font in action on a 1600×900 screen. Click on the image for full view.

Beep in action FreeBSD 9.0-Release

As it must be evident, most of my fonts are just minor mods here and there. I will release a font that I have made right from scratch next month. I have to think about a kickass name first. If you need any other information, please let me know using the comment feature.

Dweep X11 Font – Mod of Neep

This is my second font release. I call it dweep. No particular reason for the name though. I took the amazing Neep font from Jim Knoble, which is one of the favorite fonts of programmers, and modified a few characters, namely, “a”, “i”, “f”. May be some more, but it eludes me at the moment.

I did this specifically for my netbook. Small enough and readable at the standard EEE resolution. As usual, I have updated my github with this font. You can get it from there. Just click on the image to directly go to my github page.

Dweep - Mod of Jim Knoble's Neep Font

Posting an old screenshot with the font in action on my OpenBSD powered netbook. Gives you an idea as to how it looks on a dark background. Click on the image for full view.

OpenBSD 4.8 + EEE 1000H + Dweep Font

I will release another font tomorrow. Till then, folks.

Dash X11 Font

As I had mentioned earlier, I modify fonts at will. Some I like, some I don’t. I have decided to share all modified fonts that I use from time to time. The first one in that series is Dash, which is a mod of the awesome font, Smooth from the Misc. foundry. The latest version of the font is on another machine, so I will update this submission coming Saturday. Apart from simple changes here and there, the only big difference between Smooth and Dash are the letters, ‘a’ and ‘i’. The newest version that I currently don’t have access to also has a different ‘l’. See NetBSD screenshot from a few posts earlier.

The font is available on my Github page. Just click on the image to get there. The image should give you an idea about the font as well.

Dash X11 Font - Available on my GitHub

Till later folks.

Omploader – SOPA

I see that omploader also went dark protesting SOPA. I have updated my github with the foobar-solarized fluxbox theme. Just click on the image to go to my github page. You can get the theme from there.

Foobar-Solarized Fluxbox Theme

 If there are any questions, please feel free to comment.

Solarized

Solarized by Ethan Schoonover

From my screenshots here it would be clear that I like light on dark color schemes. Although I am aware of the solarized palette for quite some time now, I was a bit reluctant to use it. Not anymore. I gave the Solarized-Light version a try, and consider me sold. This one works perfectly with a good ttf font, ideal size and hinting. This is also the first time that I am using a ttf font (Envy Code R in this case, size 8). Another plus in favor of solarized is that there are a lot of editor specific themes already available that makes the computing experience uniform across the spectrum.

So, I just hacked a quick fluxbox companion theme to go with solarized light colors. This theme is a mod of tenr’s foobar theme. I call it foobar-solarized. I also found a perfect wallpaper from wallbase.  Being a fan of comic books and Justice League, this is the perfect wallpaper. I just modified the color a bit and threw the FreeBSD logo on it. You can download both the wallpapers here as well.

Anyway, here is the screenshot. Click on the image for full view.

Solarized Desktop - Fluxbox

Here are the wallpapers.

Justice League Solarized

Justice League Solarized with FreeBSD Logo

You can download the Fluxbox theme from omploader. Note: Direct Download

Foobar-Solarized Fluxbox theme