👨‍💻 Wesley Moore

I use Chimera Linux as the primary OS on my laptop (as opposed to my desktop, which is still running Arch Linux for now). Chimera was created in 2021 and reached alpha status in June 2023. Chimera was built from scratch and as the name suggests it comprised of a motley crew of components:

• Kernel: Linux
• Toolchain: LLVM
• libc: Musl with Scudo allocator
• Core userland: FreeBSD (with some NetBSD and OpenBSD too)
• Init: Dinit
• Package manager: apk
• Package builder: cbuild

The project and its development is proving very useful to me for seeing how a Linux distribution is built and evolved over time. Watching it progress (and helping a little by maintaining some packages) has helped expose some lesser known (to me) components that make up a typical Linux system, and their role.

Recently systemd-sysusers was introduced. Some folks might find this surprising as Chimera does not use systemd for the role of pid 1/init. As mentioned above it uses Dinit for this. Some standalone parts of systemd are used though. Currently:

• udev
• systemd-tmpfiles
• and now, systemd-sysusers

I had not encountered systemd-sysusers previously (even though it’s probably used on the systemd based distros I’ve used before), so I thought I’d jot down what I learned about it and how it’s used (at the time of writing) in Chimera.

I tried creating an OpenBSD 7.3 virtual machine on my new computer (Arch Linux host) and the installer kept crashing with the error:

dc_atapi_start: not ready, st = 50
fatal protection fault in supervisor mode trap type 4 code 0 rip ffffffff810089d9 cs 8 rflags 10282 cr2 287eb3000 cpl 6 rsp ffff800014fd11a0
gssbase Oxffffffff818fbff0 kgsbase Ox0
panic: trap type 4, code=0, pc=ffffffff810089d9
syncing disks...12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 _

I decided I wanted to add some more local folks into my YouTube subscriptions. I put the call out on Mastodon for suggestions for folks doing videos about machining, woodworking, electronics, software, that type of thing. I received a number of helpful replies and thought it might be useful to collect the list (as well as ones I’m already subscribed to) on this page in case others are looking for new channels to check out.

Instead of using my funemployment to build useful things I have continued to build things for old versions of Mac OS. Through some luck and a little persistence I have actually managed to get Rust code running on classic Mac OS (I’ve tried Mac OS 7.5 and 8.1). In this post I’ll cover how I got here and show a little network connected demo application I built—just in time for the end of #MARCHintosh.

After my post on trying to run Rust on Classic Mac OS post I continued trying to find a modern language that I can use to build classic Mac OS software. I’ve had some success with Nim and built a little temperature converter application. As part of this I wanted to be able to use ResEdit to edit the layout of the dialog. The problem was that I need a way to convert the modified resources back into the textual representation used in the source code. In this post I describe how I did this with DeRez.