I turned 47 four days ago. We didn't really celebrate, as Mrs.
IPX was sick with a nasty gastrointestinal bug that's been going around
the city. Our daughter had it last weekend, and it's a small miracle that
I haven't caught it yet.
At any rate, I've had some successes since the last update back in
January. I set my Coco 3 up and managed to get the CocoSDC card and
Drivewire working, which was nice. The CocoSDC is a cartridge-based SD
card reader that allows the Coco to mount virtual floppy and hard drive
images from the card. Drivewire is a serial based system that allows a PC
to act as a server for virtual floppy or hard drive images, and also
allows limited network connectivity.
The first thing I did was to download the latest release of the NitrOS-9
EOU edition, and copied the .vhd file to my SD card. The Coco booted it
without complaint, and I was soon mucking about in NitrOS-9. The first
thing I did was to ensure Drivewire was enabled in NitrOS-9 (which meant
tweaking the boot files), and was soon telnetting into SDF.
Briefly, anyway. Telnet doesn't stay connected for long, the client craps
out after a minute or so of activity, and I'm not certain what's causing
the error... FTP is the same as well.
I'm not giving up, I really want to sort out the telnet issue, as
communication is key. I wanna be phlogging away on the Coco 3 soon.
In other news, I've made the decision to ditch Linux for good in favour of
OpenBSD. I won't go into a lot of detail, the reasons are many and
myriad, but chief among them is I'm getting a bad vibe, and my gut is
telling me not to invest much more time and effort in Linux. And my gut
is never wrong.
I've been running OpenBSD on my old Presario 2100 laptop since 2018,
although it hasn't seen a lot of use since late 2018. I *might* have
fired it up once or twice since, but not for anything productive, until
last weekend.
I'd been wanting to check out sysupgrade, but it wasn't available on 6.4.
I thought about grabbing the 6.6 image and doing a full reinstall, but
that would be taking the easy way out. No, I put a LOT of work into
getting my 6.4 system running how I wanted (and spent a LOT of time
researching and editing dotfiles and menus in vi), and didn't want to
waste the effort.
Besides, if I went with a reinstall, I wouldn't be learning anything. So,
I read up on upgrading 6.4 to 6.6... which involved first upgrading to 6.5
as OpenBSD won't let you skip a release.
It was actually quite easy: put the 6.5 bsd.rd image in my root directory,
reboot from the image, and select upgrade. Tweak or change a couple of
files, and BANG! - this newbie had done his first upgrade!
After that, I looked into installing sysupgrade which, as I found out,
isn't a package to be added, but a patch to be installed with syspatch.
So I syspatch'ed, then sysupgraded. A half-hour, a reboot, and a pkg_add
-u later, I had a fully updated 6.6 install on my 18 year old laptop!
Firefox-esr was the only casualty, but I don't do much graphical browsing
anyway. For that, I've resigned myself to SeaMonkey as Epiphany, Midori,
and Iceweasel keep dumping core and crashing. I could research why (and
very well might), but for now I'm sticking with lynx.
In the last week, I've been trying to multitask in OpenBSD by opening
several xterms (as I did on my namesake Sparc IPX) and working in multiple
windows, however two of my Mastodon buddies @claudiom and @pkotrcka
recommended tmux and the abduco+dvtm combo instead. I *really* like
these, and wondered why I never installed them on my previous *nix
machines? I certainly knew of them...
This weekend's project was to install OpenBSD 6.6 on an older 64-bit HP
tower that came with the house when we bought it (left by the previous
owner). It'll be nice to run OpenBSD on a more powerful system... I might
not get to it this weekend as Mrs. IPX is still sick, but it'll be done
this week.
