this'll also work on Linux but there's options like FreeTube there

FYI, for those of us on #NetBSD with older hardware that struggles with playing back video files in web browsers because ow, the bloat, I've found the Minimalist Play in MPV extension along with an install of yt-dlp (configured to use nodejs as the EJS backend) works pretty well at letting you open web videos in an actually performant video player.

I would love a tool like Gentoo's portage that integrated these two functions. Portage is really neat especially once you realize it's a riff on BSD port build systems.

Likewise, is there a way to get pkgsrc to install dependencies that it can from pkgin so I don't end up with a pkgsrc build trying to compile LLVM from source?

On #NetBSD I've had issues keeping pkgin (binary packages) and pkgsrc (building libraries from source) synced up with each other so they try to install the same package versions and don't conflict. Is there a good way to do this?

Wrote a python script for #NetBSD to allow manipulating audio setups where one percieved audio output is a mess of a half-dozen mutes and volume levels behind the scenes and according to mixerctl: https://codeberg.org/gourd753/mixermetactl

Also it allows setting a maximum volume it will ever attempt to increase something up to. This is useful to avoid headphones being WAY TOO LOUD at volume level 255.

Hopefully other people will find it useful. I recognize coding this in C/Rust or such and calling the OS function calls used by mixerctl directly would have been a cleaner solution, but I code a lot of C in my day job and I just wasn't feeling up to doing more in my spare time.

If anyone's having problems getting Rust applications to load dynamic libraries from the right locations, this page on the #NetBSD wiki has some flags to set in ".cargo/config.toml" that helped me get a program to successfully load libraries from '/usr/pkg", the base system, and "/usr/local" simultaneously.

Said program didn't work entirely once it launched, but that's a different issue.

Does anyone with #NetBSD experience know why manipulating outputs.master with mixerctl (tested both directly or via aiomixer) wouldn't affect volume? outputs.master3 does do something, but it's a weird shifting of the audio to only some of the speakers. None of the others do anything.

The other funny part of working with building your own NPNM: not only does it have a circular bootstrap, it also then refuses to do anything with an error that it's not an official NPNM binary until you set a flag (that I don't have my notes for me right now, sorry) in the project settings. Just an extremely hostile ecosystem to doing any work on a nonstandard OS/arch where every step yells at you for building it yourself.

I managed to build pnpm, the build tool used by Signal, on NetBSD using the wip package (which gets around pnpm needing pnpm to build), fired it up and... it promptly errored out because it couldn't find a prebuilt electron for NetBSD.

lol :ac_sighing:

Electron and NodeJS, folks!

One thing I've run into on NetBSD that's both surprising and unsurprising: when using pip to install Python packages, there's no prebuilt wheels as far as I can tell so there's a lot of time spent building the native code extensions.

This plus decade old laptop just requires some patience. :ac_disagreement:

It is amazing how without fail search engines respond to searching for #NetBSD resources with pages related to FreeBSD. Also it's hilarious how bad slop pages for NetBSD are. Just referring to Linux and FreeBSD commands, configuration, and packages that do not exist on NetBSD.

Also the location of bash on NetBSD is /usr/pkg/bin/bash, which trips me up every time I write the location at the beginning of a bash script lol

...I wonder if this terminal glyph issue happened because I have my login shell set as bash, which is nonstandard on NetBSD? (It's not shipped as part of the base system, although you can install it quickly with pkgin.)

The solution ended up being the set of .Xresources and .profile edits in this UnitedBSD thread.

For anyone struggling to set up WireGuard on #NetBSD, I found a script here called wg4-quick that does the basics of wg-quick on NetBSD! :)

Whenever I run a program on #NetBSD with non-ASCII characters like fish shell or the QR code generated by the gurk Signal client, I get garbage question mark characters in their place. Any ideas on how to fix this?

This happens in the VT when X isn't running, xterm, and xfce-terminal.

Final boss: change one word in fstab with vi

fuck

I can't make heads or tails of the manual for setting up encrypted partitions in NetBSD...

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-cgd.html#chap-cgd-example

oh, just noticed the post (on the NVIDIA Optimus thing) is flagged Awaiting Approval and isn't showing up outside my account...

...I really wish there was a NetBSD wiki open to more contributers...