5.2 amd64 K43U: Conky not showing correct cpu core's load.

Well, I'm getting more comfortable with cwm. In fact I installed conky again because of cwm. Currently cwm is my main window manager and although spectrwm is still my favorite, I've been using cwm more.

I just found out something interesting today. I'm interested in playing with conky again after I found cwm. Thinking that it will be a great combination. Installation went fine, although I noticed that there's more dependencies needed to install conky now (or I didn't notice it earlier in previous versions).

Then I noticed that the graph and load percentage for 2nd core of my cpu is zero. Nil. Nada. Reading about updates of 5.2 tells me that that version have much more improvements on SMP handling, so obviously OpenBSD is not the issue here. Then I use xstatbar and found that both of my cpu cores are displayed and working as usual. I double check the man for conky and it's confirmed that cpu0 is for all cores, cpu1 is for 1st core and cpu2 is for the 2nd core. So, something wrong with conky again huh. Ok. I know it's not written with OpenBSD in mind so I'm not complaining. Gonna find some sort of workaround for this.

I might try dzen and see if it's any good. Later.

p/s: Oh, this is my 200th post for this blog-o-mine. Hah!

amd64 K43U: Upgrading to 5.2-current (via FTP) & cwm - Calm Window Manager.

Hi,

Currently I'm upgrading my K43U to 5.2-current. Using FTP install. But that's not my main point.

Calm Window Manager, or cwm has been in OpenBSD's base install since 4.2. But only now I have the privilege of knowing about it. Sheesh. I'm currently testing it and I can say that it's as fast as spectrwm. But I haven't configured any of it yet. As always, man is the way.


Upgrading 5.1-current to 5.2-current:

Most of the steps are the same as 5.1 amd64: Following -current & radeon 6.14.3 installation topic I posted before. The only thing that's different is the method I'm getting the snapshot files and updating the packages. For this one, I used my Celcom Broadband connection and retrieve all the essential files via ftp.

So first of all, I fired up the Celcom connection, you can check the 4.8 - Script to connect to Celcom 3G link. Bolded is my input:

# celcom3g connect
Connection Celcom3G...

Then it's time to get the files. My fav server is ftp.OpenBSD.org. I make sure I'm in the dir that I want to store all the files first:

# cd /mnt/snapshot/amd64/
# ftp ftp.OpenBSD.org
Connected to openbsd.sunsite.ualberta.ca.
220 openbsd.srv.ualberta.ca FTP server ready.
name (ftp.OpenBSD.org:karl):

Ah. Login name? Err. I just hit Return and got this:

530 User karl access denied.
ftp: Login karl failed.

Now it's getting interesting. After reading the manpage, I found that I should use "-a" to login anonymously. So back to ftp:

# ftp -a ftp.OpenBSD.org
*** Login successful printout ***

Great. Now to get the files.


ftp> cd pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64/
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> mget bsd*
ftp> mget *.tgz
ftp> quit

After this the steps are the same as my previous post. After I done upgrading the OpenBSD to 5.2-current, I updates my packages online (without downloading to local dir like I've always do before).

# export PKG_PATH=http://ftp.OpenBSD.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/amd64/
# sudo pkg_add -vui

Then enjoy, wait, it'll take some time depending on how many stuff you installed already. After a brief testing last night, noticeable improvement is the radeon driver which is updated to 6.14.6. Previously playing 720p mkv movie will stutter like mad but now it's smooth although tearing effect is there. I still have to explore more to comment more on 5.2-current.

Oh, regarding cwm. What's the different between cwm and spectrwm? Short answer:

cwm = stacking
spectrwm = tiling

But cwm is already in base, and spectrwm is available in package. I still need to explore cwm more. Later.

Bitrig, fork of OpenBSD.

Hola,

There's another *BSD forked emerge now. It's Bitrig. Notice that there's no "BSD" in it's name? Well I guess there's a first time for everything. Bitrig aims to be OpenBSD with newer PC hardware.

Hopefully the fork can benefit all the other *BSDs in the family.

Oh, I noticed that OpenBSD 5.2 is coming soon. Yeah!