I just moved to this account after having used Hachyderm for almost one year. I enjoyed the energy of the *BSD community more than what I had experienced on Hachyderm, and as such have moved back here after such a long time. Something similar happened with another account of mine which ended up with me moving it to @amada. A lot has changed in a year, so I'll reintroduce myself.

My name is still Artur Manuel. I regrettably still touch computers, but I also enjoy creativity through drawing, writing, and whatnot. I've been very interested in networking software such as IRC, ActivityPub, XMPP, etc as of recent. I've also taken an interest in the Yggdrasil network and the Tor Project, and have been looking into ways to contribute to Debian to improve the project as well as get a better understanding behind the operating system powering Tails OS.

I still love the BSDs, and have worked a little bit more in FreeBSD ports since then. Should I not have been preoccupied with college, this laptop would be running NetBSD, and my main desktop would be using FreeBSD. I use Debian nowadays, as I want to work as close to the Tails OS base as I can to contribute to it at a later date. I would absolutely still recommend BSDs to those willing to try out new operating systems.

I prefer to be contacted over Email or instant messaging platforms, so please refer to https://amadaluzia.is-a.dev for contacting me.

Been a while, huh?

I'm currently reworking my profile to match my current information, it's been almost a year since I used this profile and it shows. I'm on my phone at the moment but I'm going to log in on my desktop later, where I can actually do most of my changes.

Keep a look out, I'm making this my main profile again. :)

Have you ever wanted to have Theo de Raadt give you his fortune in your GNU Emacs session? I made a package some time ago which serves exactly this purpose. You can find the package, as well as it's history on Codeberg with the following link. It is currently my only Emacs package, but I plan to make more when it becomes useful to.

https://codeberg.org/amadaluzia/theo.el

Appending to the history after the package was published onto Codeberg, I ended up in a call where me and @izder456 were talking about theo.el. I believe in that call, it was also reposted in the OpenBSD room on Matrix. I also remember being suggested to put it on MELPA, so that is exactly what I did.

After creating the pull request and fixing all of the issues that stopped it from being pushed into MELPA, it couldn't make it on as it was a pretty repetitive package, and there were about 5 other `fortune`-esque packages with much more customisability. However, I now have a better package because of MELPA's guidelines, and I believe that I can still give attention to the package, even if not through MELPA.

That's why I wanted to talk about it here, because maybe you are interested in having a fortune package for your GNU Emacs. If so, and assuming you have straight.el, you can simply copy the following snippet into your init.el. After that, you should have it installed.

https://gist.github.com/amadaluzia/be96e325326a9d66619543af410e4bf4

Let me know how the package goes for you. I would love to improve the GNU Emacs ecosystem further, as a GNU Emacs user.

#opensource #foss #emacs #openbsd #bsd #runbsd

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@amadaluzia/115689658057664955

@amadaluzia@hachyderm.io

It's finally here, feel free to follow this one if you want Linux, cybersecurity, or generally other kinds of posts aside from just *BSD. :)

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@amadaluzia/115656963205209673

Thought about this a bit more, and I realize now that I almost entirely forgot that alternate accounts solve this issue. Although, I don't have a main account, but I will make one soon. In the meantime, this will be refurbished into a *BSD page. This way, my self-conscious is satisfied, my mental state remains preserved, and I still keep you all up to date with my adventures now regarding *BSD.

I want to remind everyone that everything has been great between me and bsd.cafe so far, and I would recommend this community to *BSD users of all types. The main reason I went through with this was and still is that I believe the spirit of why I was even in the community was lost from months of using Linux and Windows, and posting about anything but *BSD. I do have a little bit of spirit regarding *BSD, that along with the motivation from @stefano caused me to change plans and keep this account posting under the new conditions in the above paragraph. As such, I apologise for pity-baiting and going back on my word, I work in very weird ways.

Again, I am thankful for everything that has been given to me so far. It has been a gift to be given a platform here. Furthermore, thanks for reading, there will be more *BSD posts in the future. <3

I'm conflicted; I love the *BSD operating systems, and bsd.cafe, and still use NetBSD on at least one device, but I don't really represent a *BSD user anymore. This wouldn't be an issue regarding me using bsd.cafe if I wasn't as self-conscious as I am, but I honestly just don't feel like I belong in a *BSD space just to be repping Fedora. I do not mean to say that bsd.cafe is a toxic and unfriendly place, as I have nothing but good things to say about the community so far, but I feel like I have fulfilled my presence in the *BSD community, and I should try to represent FOSS in a space for FOSS as a whole instead.

For the people I have come to know from here, I greatly value your presence. Thanks for everything you have given me, even if it isn't a lot. I would also want to extend my thanks to the bsd.cafe community and administration for making me feel like I belonged in the first place. I wouldn't be where I am without you.

Viva les cafés! ☕

I wanted to write this post because I want the Fedora project to have better security throughout their operating systems. I believe the first step to doing that, is to use another memory allocator that mitigates heap memory corruption and use-after-frees, alongside lots of other features to harden one of the most important functions in all modern systems as far as I am aware. hardened_malloc[1], by the GrapheneOS project, fits this description perfectly. Using this benefits not just the Fedora project, but it will also push other distributions to using hardened_malloc, and then the Linux ecosystem will benefit as a whole from the provided security. Good security is an essential part of good privacy, so this will also benefit the privacy of all Linux distributions.

Given the above paragraph, I want you to promote this thread[2] to anyone who is interested in security and privacy. You can also help by testing hardened_malloc on your own Linux systems and sharing your results with me through any means of contact, so that I can replicate the behaviour and make bug reports where necessary. For that, please see this page[3] for my preferred methods of contact.

I don't think I'll be able to attract a lot of people with this post on my own, so boosting will be massively appreciated. Thank you for reading this until this point. This isn't my longest toot yet but I feel like this is my most passionate, as I deeply care about security, GrapheneOS and the Fedora project. Again, thank you! (^_^)

[1]: https://grapheneos.org/features#exploit-mitigations
[2]: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/migrating-to-another-malloc-implementation/173172
[3]: https://amadaluzia.is-a.dev/contact

#fedora #grapheneos #security #privacy #linux #tech

My favourite experience regarding Wii homebrew so far has to be NetBSD. I wanted to use my Wii as a computer for a while now, and NetBSD being available as an operating system you can install and get going on an SD card and a Wii with the HBC is definitely the highlights of my Wii homebrew experience. I don't use my Wii much at the moment, as I don't even have a monitor I can use for my Wii yet, but I have used it for a while on a TV and it was nice.

Networking is a bit hard, at least on the Wii however. I tried to get WiFi included in as a Wii image of NetBSD to burn, this was during my time on FreeBSD, and I just couldn't compile it. I was doing something weird where I would alternate between GCC and clang but that would have been a waste of time once it got to booting.

Other than that, it was nice writing a fetch program entirely written in C using vi and man pages to get by. It was a nice break from writing things without an LSP to help, although I still love using modern features many editors provide, obviously excluding AI, so I will stick with that. I also found that Lua existed on it which definitely helped whenever I didn't want to write C.

First *BSD post in a while, as I forgot to talk about the time I used NetBSD. I'll probably talk about Linux more at some point but I wanted to talk about *BSD a little again. Try NetBSD if you get the chance!

#netbsd #homebrew #wii #tech #computers #programming

What do you think of using Google in your life?

I use a Google Pixel 7 Pro at the moment, but I use GrapheneOS instead of OEM, and I think it is the best Android line of phones I have used so far. Their bootloader is lockable after installing custom operating systems which is much better than all other offers at the moment. The build quality, battery and design of the phone is solid as well. This phone has a lot of merits going for it which other Android phones are not replicating for the sake of a false sense of "security" or profits. I will appreciate Google for giving me a great phone to install GrapheneOS on, alongside Android for being a secure base for an operating system.

I appreciate the Chromium browser more than other browsers in the market. While Google Chrome is junk regarding user privacy, as well as shoving AI in your face, Chromium itself is actually pretty solid. It is also the most secure option, offering a malloc() implementation better than Firefox's mozmalloc, although not as secure as hardened_malloc, by GrapheneOS. Firefox is also implementing AI features into their browser, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. MV2 is deprecated, sure, but you win more than you lose in security, as a lot of API features were exploitable. Chromium does a lot of good things, while Chrome gives the base itself a lot of bad blood. I would like to see what Servo can do, but I appreciate Google for making a secure browser.

I generally despise a lot of what Google offers, however. I feel like they lean heavily on the deception of convenience, where Google gives really good results while it uses your data for the sake of advertising. This applies with the Google Suite (Mail, Office, and Drive among others) as well. I would much rather use FOSS or nonprofit alternatives, such as Tutanota, or LibreOffice. Google is essentially the serpent from The Book of Genesis, selling you the benefit of their convenience for the sake of having your data stolen for their use. As such, I will choose not to follow Google convenience promise for my security.

Feel free to leave your opinions, and why I should consider other avenues rather than accepting a bit of Google in my life. As much as I love privacy, your privacy can't be guaranteed if there is no good security. Google may be known for piss-poor privacy, but their open source projects have a lot of security merits as well as good privacy. Do not use this as advice, but make your own conclusion.

#google #privacy #security #grapheneos #chromium #technology #FOSS

I've done some frontend stuff with Astro, Svelte and TailwindCSS for a bit. Astro's server-side magic mixed with Svelte's reactivity makes it a really fascinating experience to create webpages, like my own site that I host on Vercel. Honestly, while HTML is really good for making basic websites, it's not designed for reusable code which makes it really frustrating to refactor multiple components especially if they are used 10+ times. Web frameworks like Vue, Svelte, Astro and whatnot are kind of needed for good DX, at least for those wanting to do *some* frontend dev.

I wanted to try creating a backend using something like Rust, Crystal or Haskell, so that I can understand and how create REST APIs, write a full-stack application, learn how to manage DBs and whatnot. Though I realised I wasn't sure how to proceed in actually making something useful, so I spoke to my IT professor and he suggested a REST application for parking spots, which DID intrigue me enough to actually go ahead and make something. So now I'll just do that.

However, I still need to focus on other courses I'm in, including one where I may have to use my frontend abilities which will be interesting. Maybe I could use this as a way to show my expertise in development, which I've wanted to do for a while. I'm somewhat uneasy with all that I may have to take on, but I think I can balance all that, and college preparation for exams. I'll hope I can at least.

#astro #svelte #webdev #programming #backend #rust #crystal #haskell

Hello, decided to log back into Mastodon as the bus to my town seems to have stopped a minute away from here for 20 minutes now. I have a few status updates regarding my tech adventures to share.

Firstly, I installed postmarketOS on a Samsung Galaxy S9 a few months ago, and with it, I moved to Alpine Linux on my laptop and desktop. The experience has been wonderful, but bumpy. It works really well on my laptop, but my desktop has faced some issues which I am happy to post on their mailing list once I am back home.

I also installed Arch Linux alongside my Alpine Linux installation as a redundant backup option in case one ends up broken by an update, or a mistake of my own. This has proven handy twice now, the second time ending up with my main system still under maintenance as of today. I also have a reserve Linux Mint USB, if it gets really bad, but I remain hopeful that it won't get that bad. Just for assurance, my ego has not inflated after installing it.

I still love using OpenBSD and FreeBSD when I can, but I deemed it more logical to use the operating system based off the kernel I want to develop for in the future. I plan on using OpenBSD on systems that I find to be not essential to use all the time, such as my brothers desktop, but I'm kind of bringing myself to use Alpine Linux on my daily drivers.

Sorry for disappearing for a while, this is a new phone which I forgot to install Mastodon on. My old phone drowned after my water bottle leaked during a walk, which meant I had to start over from scratch. I'm still addicted to Pixel phones however. Thanks for making a great operating system, #grapheneos team.

#OpenBSD #freebsd #alpinelinux #archlinux #BSD #Linux #technology #postmarketos

I seem to have left a comment in there which doesn't actually portray reality. Apologies, it will happen again knowing how clumsy I am. If you are really curious, you can try it for yourself.

For anyone interested in how I calculated the size of an initial OpenBSD system, here is the Python code I used. I hope it isn't particularly bad. :D

There was another version of the script which was manually parsed using an Emacs macro before I rewrote the code to *just* be parsed from a text version of the CDN instead. This returns the same result however, so it's fine. I hope it is, at least.

https://bpa.st/AEXA

I've been using OpenBSD on my main desktop for a while now. Honestly, I would probably say this is my favourite OS at the moment. There are a lot of points going for it which I appreciate about it, as well as some negatives which I'll address.

I really like how efficient OpenBSD is. On average, a Linux installation image is around 800 megabytes in size, the mini-memstick image for FreeBSD requires 500 megabytes in size, and OpenBSD with miniroot uses 5MB. Insane. Additionally, the full operating system with everything you could ever want installed is ~782MB, literally 781.568832MB. This number was summed using https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.7/amd64/ and Python.

I do wish that Git was adopted in place of CVS for development though. FreeBSD moved to Git from SVN with pretty much no issues as far as I'm aware. You would also get the benefits of having branches, as well as the ability to commit changes without instantly pushing to origin, alongside the benefit of being able to author your own patches because of the two reasons above. There isn't really a reason to use CVS in the modern age is what I believe.

There are also many projects I want to work on that require some tooling which only works on Linux. My idea was to create an Alpine virtual machine using VMM and enabling OpenSSH with X11 forwarding but I have yet to see if that even works. Wish me luck. :P

I still love FreeBSD and would recommend it to anyone willing to start using *BSD operating systems, but as for now, I plan to main OpenBSD. I'll try and maintain my own ports for FreeBSD in the meantime using virtual machines as well but I don't guarantee it's success. Thanks for the fun, FreeBSD. :)

#openbsd #software #computers

Found the repository, it uses Java. Honestly, I can bare with it anyway. I will see if I can get a PR in. It's a feature I cannot just think of and not take action on it. :P

One thing I always wished that Mastodon on Android had was the ability to click on replies to see the full reply. I usually have to close a reply to recheck what I am replying to since I forget after addressing points I can actually see. It feels really inefficient and annoying, but something I could add to improve the experience.

I'm aware other apps (and Emacs) exist and probably handle this behaviour already but it not existing on the official app kind of feels like a missed opportunity. Some I have seen is Husky, mastodon.el, and whatever else but that's pretty much it. I think I would still prefer the official experience unless a serious bug shows.

I think what I am doing by simply talking about it probably doesn't do anything, and I should just learn the language used by the app. I want to guess it uses Kotlin, but maybe it's Java or Dart. I would be interested to see a way to setup Android Studio on the following OSes:
- FreeBSD (I've seen an approach that uses the Linuxulator, I'll think about it)
- OpenBSD
- NixOS (Probably the easiest)

I'll post any updates on if I find anything. On the road right now so I don't really have time to research until 4-8pm likely. See you then.

I recently had to do some Docker related things which meant that it was time to retry Linux. My first idea was to install Debian SID and Void Linux - using dm-crypt and LVM on a spare laptop, and I wanted to tell the story of my time using each, as maybe you can get something out of it. Let'a get on with the story now.

# 1. Setting up Debian

I had no idea if the GUI installer for Debian was going to cause an issue, so I went for the next best thing: a KDE image and debootstrap. I was pretty confused by a lot of things, examples of which being setting rd.luks.uuid, locales, and I thought I install systemd in the initramfs as if it were Arch but I eventually gave up and used /etc/crypttab with it working. I had a Debian with full KDE setup in 2 days.

# 2. Setting up Void

I also set up Void while booted into Debian because I had prepared LVM for that when setting up Debian. I had to variate from the Void Linux disk encryption setup because using LUKS1 just felt weird. But I did borrow the crypttab setup from Debian which worked with a caveat: I had to decrypt twice. This was fixed by someone in the voidlinux libera channel thankfully. I had a nearly fully working Void with KDE setup at the end.

# 3. Issues with Void

With everything setup so that PipeWire could start with D-Bus, it did not start. I had another issue related to wireplumber and pipewire-pulse because I forgot to link their configs to `/etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d`. Other than that, no notable issues with Void.

# 4. Issues with Debian

I really like packaging things, and thought of adding a package I really wanted to Debian, but I really cannot wrap my head around packaging for Debian. I get it somewhat, use the `dh-*` set of tools to make a package for Meson, cargo, etc. but I'm still kind of stumped outside of that. I really like FreeBSD ports, NixOS packages and XBPS templates from Void as they are really simple to work with. I won't say that it's awful to work with Debian's packaging as I really have not had enough time to understand it.

# 5. Next stop, NixOS

I was previously a NixOS user, and I really need to revisit it as I used to really like it and haven't used it in a while. Additionally, I am also a maintainer for a few nixpkgs packages myself, so it would probably be a good idea for me to use NixOS to have the nicities of it while also contributing back to nixpkgs more. I like it for the same reasons as everyone else.

# 6. Why not FreeBSD

I love FreeBSD, and would like to put it on everything I own, but I had to use Docker. Installing Docker in FreeBSD looks really messy. I had no choice other than to set up Linux, on thankfully a spare laptop and not my main machine. I'll be honest, if I didn't need Docker, I would just use FreeBSD on that laptop.

# 7. The End

That's my chaptered semi-rant about my journey with 2 Linux Distributions, and any options I may also pick. Honestly, FreeBSD is not as complicated in my opinion due to documentation, tooling and ease of use of said tooling. Jails, bhyve and other nicities are also pretty cool. Tha ks for reading.

#voidlinux #debian #linux #lvm #luks #freebsd #nixos

Oh, hello. First time really using Mastodon to post something.

I usually am on instant messaging platforms or Email but Mastodon also works as instant messaging (I had formerly used it to initiate a reply comversation with someone) so I decided to make a Mastodon account with intentions to fully use it this time.

I haven't introduced myself yet so I'll not waste anymore time. I'm Artur Manuel, preferably referred to as "amadaluzia". I live in Cambridgeshire, England as a developer and speedrunner of sorts. You may have seen me from a mailing list or talking in a tech-related channel/room, an off-topic room for a tech related community or through various Vim speedruns. As for code, I have contributed to various projects most notably nixpkgs, with intent to contribute to upstream FreeBSD when I can.

I moved to FreeBSD after I had become increasingly overwhelmed with solutions for Linux in terms of userland, init system, package managers and everything else that would have been filled in at an OS-level. Not to say Linux and tools in that ecosystem are rubbish, but I do not need to think about if I want to use BusyBox+OpenRC/Linux or GNU+systemd/Linux, when I could just use FreeBSD. It's all too ambiguous, subjective and cluttered there. FreeBSD is a full operating system and therefore fills the holes that the Linux ecosystem couldn't agree on filling one specific way, being therefore easier to understand.

As for my plans, I wanted to write a tree-sitter grammar workflow for FreeBSD ports as it would significantly improve the ecosystems using it such as GNU Emacs, Neovim, and any tool using tree-sitter. I would have to write a port for tree-sitter cli though since the ecosystem is starting to move over to that. I've managed to actually write quite a bit of the port but got caught up during trying to cd into `crates/cli`.

Want to get in touch? I would prefer communication through the platforms listed on my atl.wiki page: https://atl.wiki/User:Amadaluzia. That's the post, folks! Thanks for reading.