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Public Domain Software

See my public domain software projects. Mostly implemented by me, but some code taken from other public domain software.

Zoranix Linux

A linux distribution built for system administrators. At zoranix.net

Big Sur Setup

Sat Mar 20 23:59:57 2021

I just picked up a 13 inch M1 macbook pro. Blogging what I had to do to make it sane.

Case sensitive file system for my home directory

I used disk utility to create a new apfs partition that was case sensitive.

Then vifs to add the following to /etc/fstab

UUID=7B0BF555-DE9E-406A-A3E4-A514B20D31BB /System/Volumes/Data/home apfs auto 0 2

from there, a reboot into recovery mode to move the existing home directory out of the way and rsync the new one

in /Users the home directory should be symlinked to /System/Volumes/Data/home/dir/

I did this from recovery mode, where it's then under something else.

SSH Key

I copied my private and public ssh key from my main server. Then ssh-add worked to install the key or password there to into the mac os keychain.

System Preferences

The clowns at mac think that the wrong direction is "natural" for scrolling, so in the trackpad I changed the scroll direction.

I like the dock on the left, so I changed that in the Dock and menu bar. I also set the dock to autohide, because then it's not in the way.

Display set to scaled/more space. Theme set to dark.

Terminal

The default terminal has rounded corners. In fact everything does.

In the terminal preferences, I changed the default profile to "Pro", and set the window size to 80x35. Under the "Shell" I changed the window to close when the shell exits.

The default background color is set to 85% opacity, so change that to 100%.

The font defaults to Monaco at 10 point, which is too small for me, so I changed that to SF Mono at 18 point. That sounds huge, but with the screen scaled to more space, it's about right.

Set the shell to close the tab or window when it exits.

Firefox

Ugh. So, use Safari to download and install firefox. Then, find your old profile on your old machine and tar it up. It should be in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles

Copy it to your new machine in the same directory path and untar it.

I kept firefox closed while doing this.

Firefox won't find the new directory, because it wants to use a .ini file instead of reading the directory. So edit Library/Application Support/Firefox/profiles.ini to make firefox aware of your new directory. You'll probably need to rename it in the ini file as well.

Then start firefox and go to about:profiles. From there you can set your old one as the default. Then quit and restart. Clicking on the 'Restart Normally' button didn't work.

In System Preferences / General, change the default web browser to Firefox

Adium

Adium hasn't been re-compiled for the M1 processor, and needs Rosetta. Adium also doesn't scroll down automatically.

XCode and MacPorts

xcode will be needed for macports

https://www.macports.org/install.php https://trac.macports.org/wiki/BigSurProblems

xcode-select --install

ports to install

Fonts

FontBook appears to install the extra fonts in /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font6 where they can't be found. Copy them from there to ~/Library/Fonts

Turn off Emojis

Under the keyboard of system preferences, set the emoji/function key to do nothing.

Posted in / hardware

Sierra

Sun Mar 5 15:37:01 2017

I recently bought a early 2015 macbook pro, and there's a lot of issues.

http://superuser.com/questions/974714/previous-commands-wrapped-with-square-brackets-in-os-x-terminal#975295

Apparently the Retina displays actually suck. Since the programmers at apple are apparently not talented enough to change the font size on the menu bar, if you use the actual resolution of the screen, it's too small to read. So their "solution" is to default to doubling each pixel. This actually give me less screen resolution than I had on my 2011 macbook pro. They also don't allow you to even set the screen to the maximum resolution, but do allow for some scaled resolutions. Which is going to make it blurry. The whole point of having more screen resolution is to use it, instead I get to pay for a screen that I don't really get to use. They could have just made the laptop cheaper, or even wrote a way to set the title font size.

Some other things to do, if in the future I should have the mis-fortune of having to set up a mac laptop again.

Posted in / hardware

Building a computer

Sun Nov 27 15:23:51 2016

In high school, some friends and I had a project to build a computer ourselves. We didn't get very far at the time. I've been playing around with an arduino the last few days and the idea has come back to mind.

So I started looking around at how I might build a computer from relatively discrete components. Not down to the transistor level, but ideally with each major subsystem being separate. We had a 16 bit computer in mind, as we'd had Commodore 64's, and thought a 16 bit computer would be cool.

I've looked around, and there don't seem to be all that many actual 16 bit processors around. Several 16 bit microcontrollers. I'd like to be able to use external ram, which means that the CPU chip will need to have external memory address pins. So for this post, I'm meaning microcontroller to mean that there is no direct support for external memory.

I'd also like everything to be available in PDIP packages to make the design and prototyping easier.

What I've found so far:

Processors

http://www.ip-extreme.com/IP/16bit_microprocessors.shtml

CR16: doesn't seem to be actually available

Looks like one is available: http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Texas-Instruments/CP3BT26Y98NEP-NOPB/?qs=7X5t%252bdzoRHBr3m4jqM4nLQ%3d%3d $27

C166S: possibly available, a hybrid processor, with embedded ram, but an external databus. Seems to be from $10-$25. These are available in TQFP or LQFP packages.

http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/16-bit-c166-microcontroller/xc2200-family-body/channel.html?channel=ff80808112ab681d0112ab6b655c0807#ispnTab3

documentation terrible

[W65C816S]: This is a 6502 with extensions for 16 bit registers and a 24 bit memory bus. It seems heavily banked into 64K regions. I'd also like to use a cleaner 16 bit CPU.

The following have no support for external memory

Posted in / hardware