Void Linux Bhyve Image on OmniOS
Posted by Dave Eddy on Sep 19 2022 - tags: techThis guide will show how to install Void Linux as a guest on OmniOS using hardware virtualization with bhyve.
Configure the system
To get started, first install zadm
on OmniOS inside the global zone.
This tool makes creating and managing zones simple and is reminiscent of the
vmadm
command on SmartOS.
Install zadm
:
pkg install zadm
pkg install zones/brand/bhyve
I personally use this config for zadm
(shoutouts to
@papertigers for this), but feel free to customize this as you
like.
Programmatically Generated Piano Music
Posted by Dave Eddy on Dec 17 2021 - tags: techI wrote a computer program to generate piano music on the command line. The generation is done with a simple algorithm to create patterns in MIDI format, which is then imported into my DAW to process the data and turn it into music. There is no AI or Machine Learning in this algorithm - the music is programmatically generated and this video covers the algorithm that I created in detail.
I Made a Computer Program to Generate Piano Music
Plex Media Server on Void Linux
Posted by Dave Eddy on Nov 15 2021 - tags: techHow to install Plex on Void
Download plex-install-manager
from:
https://github.com/bahamas10/plex-install-manager
Install deps:
xbps-install -S binutils tar curl xz
Create user and directories needed:
useradd -s /bin/false -d /var/empty _plex
mkdir /opt/plex /opt/plex/src /opt/plex/data
chown _plex:_plex /opt/plex/data
Install Plex:
sshp Rewrite from JavaScript to C
Posted by Dave Eddy on May 20 2021 - tags: techIn 2013, I wrote a program in Node.js called sshp. This was right
around the time I was investing heavily into learning node, and
honestly having a blast doing it. Node is quick and fun to write, and with
only a couple hundred lines of code, I was able to write node-sshp
.
node-sshp
is a command line utility that acts as a parallelizer for ssh
.
It works by taking in a file containing a list of hosts to connect to and
looping over each host firing off an ssh
command in parallel (with a
configurable maximum number of concurrent processes). The tool’s description
is:
sshp
manages multiple ssh processes and handles coalescing the output to the terminal. By default,sshp
will read a file of newline-separated hostnames or IPs and fork ssh subprocesses for them, redirecting the stdout and stderr streams of the child line-by-line to stdout ofsshp
itself.
Writing this tool in Node was an obvious choice at the time: the company I was working for was using Node heavily, and this tool was written specifically to be used at my job. Managing multiple concurrent child processes and IO streams also made Node the obvious choice.
Super Mario 64 Decompilation on Void Linux
Posted by Dave Eddy on Sep 09 2020 - tags: techSuper Mario 64 is one of my all-time favorite games. Last year, the source code for the decompilation project was made available to the public. I won’t go into detail on the decompilation project itself (see this post here for more information), but instead will focus on getting Super Mario 64 compiled on Void Linux.
Getting Started
A couple of dependencies will need to be installed that will be used throughout
the installation process. Note that root privileges are only required in
commands where sudo
is used - the rest of the commands can be run as an
unprivileged user.
sudo xbps-install git
sudo xbps-install make
sudo xbps-install wget
mkdir ~/dev ~/src
For this guide, the sm64 source code will be checked out into ~/dev
, and the
required dependencies that are installed manually will be in ~/src
, of which
there are 2:
qemu-irix
binutils-mips64
qemu-irix
To install this package, I found it easiest to take the qemu-irix
release as a
.deb
file from the n64decomp
GitHub organization and extract the deb
myself.
SmartOS COAL on Linux KVM with Virt Manager
Posted by Dave Eddy on Feb 12 2019 - tags: techCOAL, or Cloud-on-a-Laptop, is an
easy way to run and test SmartOS and the Triton
Stack in a self-contained VM meant to be run
on a laptop. The sdc-headnode
repository makes a lot of assumptions when building a COAL image about using
VMWare for virtualization on an OS X laptop. However, with some modifications
it is possible to run COAL on Linux via KVM managed through virt-manager
.
To get virt-manager
setup and running on Void Linux, you can follow my guide
KVM Virtualization with virt-manager on Void
Linux.
Nested Virtualization (optional)
Before getting started with the COAL building process, you can choose to enable
nested virtualization if your hardware supports it. This is required if you
would like to run bhyve
zones on your COAL setup. Note that this setup
assumes an Intel CPU.
You can check if your CPU supports nested virtualization by running:
$ grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo | grep -c ' vmx '
8
KVM Virtualization with virt-manager on Void Linux
Posted by Dave Eddy on Feb 11 2019 - tags: techRunning and managing virtual machines on Linux is very easy using the virt-manager GUI program. Under the hood, the virtualization technology takes advantage of KVM (Kernel Virtal Machine) in the Linux kernel. The result of both of these together is fast and efficient hardware virtual machines with a really easy and straightforward GUI to manage them.
For this post, I’ll be using the following tools I’ve talked about in my blog post Using Void Linux as my Daily Driver:
Installation
Install the following packages to get started:
sudo vpm i virt-manager libvirt qemu
Start the services that are created by these packages:
sudo ln -s /etc/sv/libvirtd /var/service
sudo ln -s /etc/sv/virtlockd /var/service
sudo ln -s /etc/sv/virtlogd /var/service
Use vsv
to check the status of the services:
sudo vsv status virt
Running a Bitcoin Full Node on SmartOS
Posted by Dave Eddy on Jan 20 2019 - tags: techRunning a Bitcoin full node is a great way to ensure the health and integrity of the decentralized Bitcoin network. This blog post is meant to be a guide for compiling, running, and monitoring a Bitcoin full node on a server, and as such won’t delve too much into the specifics as to what the node does, or why it’s important to the network health. If you want to know more check out 6 Reasons To Run a Bitcoin Full Node.
Put simply, running a full node will add to the large number of full nodes running across the world to support the Bitcoin network. The nodes ensure the rules of the protocol and consensus algorithms in place are upheld and enforced, which is what fundamentally allows Bitcoin to work and function the way it should.
Miners create new blocks and submit them to the network for verification - it’s the job of the full nodes to verify these blocks (groups of transactions) and ultimately accept or reject them based on their validity. Every full node will verify the validity of any and all blocks submitted to the network and, for each block, decide if it will be the next new block in the chain or whether it should be thrown out in the case that it is invalid (by either a bug in the mining software or a bad actor trying to undermine the network). Full nodes are the final arbiters when it comes to determining which transactions are valid or invalid.
Provision the VM
I provisioned a fresh SmartOS 16Q4 LTS instance with the following JSON payload:
Run User Scripts on Suspend and Wakeup on Void Linux
Posted by Dave Eddy on Oct 01 2018 - tags: techWhile using Void Linux on my laptop, I wanted some way to trigger scripts as my user when the machine went to sleep and when it resumed. The main goal of this was to be able to lock my machine using i3lock on suspend.
I currently use xss-lock to register i3lock
to be called whenever
the screensaver is activated with this command (run at session start):
xss-lock -- ~/bin/i3lock-retry -enfi ~/Pictures/lock.png
With xss-lock
running, I set my machine to lock automatically after 600
seconds (10 minutes) of inactivity with:
xset s 600
And locking my machine can be done manually by activating the screensaver with:
xset s activate
Note: i3lock-retry is a simple wrapper-script that calls
i3lock
continuously until it exits successfully (i.e. when the correct
password has been entered). I’ve had some issues with i3lock
crashing in the
past and I just have this wrapper in place because of paranoia over ensuring
my system locks correctly.