Hardware is a HP Pavilion g6 laptop. Not particularly new or fancy
but quite sufficient for my usage.
Full disk encryption (FDE) is covered in faq14. Went with auto
disk layout and full software set selection.
The builtin wifi (Ralink RT3290) works without drama. Also builtin
SD card reader.
## System Setup
The default boot prompt hangs around a while; the timeout can be
changed eg
/etc/boot.conf
set timeout 2
This results in a quicker auto boot while retaining the ability to
specify a different kernel etc.
Installed the current favourite suite of software which includes
mutt, offlineimap, msmtp, irssi, sxiv and mupdf.
Other tweaks: enabling apmd, adding 'xset b off' and xsetroot to
Xsetup_0 while removing xconsole.
cwm is my current favourite for a light and responsive window
manager, having previously enjoyed i3 on Linux distros. cwm comes
with xenocara so just need to tweak ~/.cwmrc and ~/.Xresources and
~/.xsession to one's liking and bingo! ready to go.
Backlight keys stopped working with a recent change in the OpenBSD
kernel source. Appears that sys/dev/acpi/acpivout.c was changed
to resolve brightness keys on a different laptop model with the
result that this g6 is impacted. Because I like being able to
change screen brightness, I locally reverted the changes and compiled
a custom kernel with a leaner set of modules too.
## Fonts
Despite initial excitement upon discovering 'IBM Plex Mono', the
font just does not render nicely - neither on my OpenBSD laptop or
in PuTTY on Windows. Font of the week is currently 'Fira Mono'.
Xresources
XTerm*faceName: Fira Mono:style=Regular:size=12
cwmrc
fontname "Fira Mono:style=Regular:size=10"
## Email
While not visually fancy or intuitive to the uninitiated, the
combination of mutt & offlineimap & msmtp is just _fast_. In the
time that Microsoft Outlook takes to start, hang, crash, restart,
freeze then start to sync mail, I can have fetched new mail and
begun reading. Even responded to some mail.
For Google Mail, use of application passwords are recommended.
