Sunday, April 29, 2007

First things first...

If I'm going to be working on NetBSD I might as well get comfortable.
  • Base Install:

    Followed steps 3, 4 and 5 of a standard installation of NetBSD 3.1

  • Base Packages:

    Mounted pkg CD (/mnt/cdrom/packages/i386/All) and did a

    pkg_add bash-3.2.tgz wget-1.10.2nb1.tgz
    

    Then I did a wget and pkg_add of emacs from the FTP site.

  • X:

    Again from the pkg CD:

    pkg_add fluxbox-0.9.15.1nb1.tgz
    echo "exec startfluxbox" > ~/.xinitrc
    

    logged in and did a startx and it worked. Note that I had modified my /etc/X11/XF86Config before.

    My mouse wheel didn't scroll at first. At the boot prompt I did a boot -c to get into userconf. I then did a disable pms and it's working now.

  • Firefox

    Again from the pkg CD:

    pkg_add firefox-2.0.0.1.tgz 
    

    The binary firefox package for NetBSD 3.1 seems to chmod your preference/profile files so that they are not writeable. So, none of my preferences were saved and I couldn't bookmark anything.

    In ~/.mozilla/firefox/fo6yv9d7.default/ I saw:

    > ls -g bookmarks.html
    -r--r--r--  1 users  9764 Apr 25 20:10 bookmarks.html
    >
    
    

    After chmod'ing them 644 I was able to bookmark pages. Other files had the same issue:

    > find . -perm 444 -print
    ./chrome/userChrome-example.css
    ./chrome/userContent-example.css
    ./localstore.rdf
    ./mimeTypes.rdf
    ./search.rdf
    ./bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2007-04-11.html
    ./bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2007-04-12.html
    ./bookmarkbackups/bookmarks-2007-04-25.html
    >
    

    Easy enough to fix what I have:

     find . -perm 444 -exec chmod 644 {} \;
    
    The initial preference files are copied from the package's defaults, which have the wrong modes. It's been fixed in pkgsrc since March 31st so the future binary package should not have this problem.