Openbsd - EZ Aquarii Notepad

Puffmatic - OpenBSD Autoinstall Generator

This article covers automatic OpenBSD installation over the network and from USB thumb drive.

First part briefly discusses the problem at hand and motivations.

Second part discusses the procedure to manually prepare images and file sets, diving in the methodology.

Third part introduces puffmatic - a script that automates above steps.

If you are familiar with unattended installation, you can skip intial discussion and jump stright to puffmatic.

If you are curious how it works, I recommend going through whole article, so you can troubleshoot if anything goes sideways.

On OpenBSD, Gtk applications use Emacs key bindings by default. I find this frustrating, as I expect C-a to select the entire text.

To revert to the default key theme, I needed to modify some configuration files.

For Gtk 2, include the following in ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

gtk-key-theme-name = "Default"

For Gtk 3, make the following edit in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini:

[Settings]
gtk-key-theme-name = Default

Now it feels better.

OpenSSH is an amazing piece of software that continually surprises me.

Did you know that you can run a SOCKS proxy with just a single command?

ssh -D 9090 example.com

To configure your browser (I'm using Firefox as an example):

Then, you can visit:

This is a software monopoly but at least it was written by people who care about security, so it's not like Microsoft's monopoly.

I often accidentally touched the touchpad while typing, which led to the unintended activation of various UI elements.

I generally dislike touchpads; they feel like a useless invention, much like touchscreens in cars.

After some searching, I found a useful utility that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad while typing:

  syndaemon -i 1 -K -R -d -t -p /tmp/syndaemon.pid

Since I use i3, I added the following to my i3 configuration: