Quinn Diggity quinndiggity

Running Ubuntu on a Macbook Air

You don't have to be a slave to OS X! Here's a guide to a sane dual-booting setup with Ubuntu 12.10 on your shiny MacBook Air. This is written and tested for a MacBook Air 5,2 (Mid 2012), but likely works the same with any modern Macbook.

Install according to instructions at this URL:

Update (2015-12-04): This document used to be very lengthy as there were many manual steps required to get OpenBSD and Mac OS X working together through Boot Camp Assistant (BCA), which created a hybrid MBR and enabled a legacy BIOS emulation mode which older versions of Windows (and OpenBSD) required. Newer Macbooks stopped supporting older versions of Windows through BCA and now only support Windows 10 since it uses GPT and UEFI. However, now that newer versions of OpenBSD support GPT and UEFI, Boot Camp Assistant is no longer needed at all to boot OpenBSD.

###Mac OS X FileVault encryption and OpenBSD encrypted softraid on a Macbook Air/Pro

OpenBSD works pretty well on at least the Mid-2011 Macbook Air (A1370, SandyBridge) and Mid-2013 Macbook Air (Haswell). The new KMS code in 5.4 brings up the MBA's eDP display in 1366x768 with backlight control. ACPI works as expected for battery/AC status, CPU throttling, and full suspend/resume support. The Broadcom wireless card does not work, so I am using

FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

Since 2008 or 2009 I work on Apple hardware and OS: back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001), and switched to something that Just Works. Six years later, it less and less Just Works, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system. I am finding myself turning away from GUI programs that I used to appreciate, and most of the time I use OSX to just run a terminal, Firefox, and Emacs. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. Again, this is from a sysadmin/developer ki

How to mount a qcow2 disk image

This is a quick guide to mounting a qcow2 disk images on your host server. This is useful to reset passwords, edit files, or recover something without the virtual machine running.

Step 1 - Enable NBD on the Host

modprobe nbd max_part=8

	# Install NVM manually (https://github.com/creationix/nvm)
	# Install bass (https://github.com/edc/bass)
	# Add code below to your config.fish

	function nvm
	bass source ~/.nvm/nvm.sh --no-use ';' nvm $argv
	end

	nvm use default --silent

	# 0 is too far from ` ;)
	set -g base-index 1

	# Automatically set window title
	set-window-option -g automatic-rename on
	set-option -g set-titles on

	#set -g default-terminal screen-256color
	set -g status-keys vi
	set -g history-limit 10000

	# kudos to dzaku at consolechars.wordpress.com

	### MOUNT qcow2 image with lvm partitions

	# ensure nbd can handle that many partitions
	sudo modprobe nbd max_part=8

	# present image as block device through NBD
	sudo qemu-nbd --connect=/dev/nbd0 <image.qcow2>

	qemu-img convert -O vdi gnome.qcow2 gnome.vdi


	#if its a raw image then:
	VBoxManage convertdd opnstk.raw VBox.vdi --format VDI

	#!/bin/sh
	mkdir -p certs
	openssl req -x509 -days 365 -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -sha256 -out certs/domain.crt -keyout certs/domain.key -subj "/C=DE/ST=Berlin/L=Berlin/O=IT/CN=docker.local"