Back to life

I've just bough a computer (more details in following posts). It took me a while to make FreeBSD 8.1 and Windows 7 coexist on the same (and only) hard drive. I tried to boot Windows with GRUB2 without luck, and then I retried the other way round... I mean, booting FreeBSD from Windows boot-loader.

I was googling to know if the old-copy-stage1-trick was still available in Windows 7, and I found an excellent application called EasyBCD (from NeoSmart Technologies) that allows you to friendly manage the Windows 7 (& Vista) bootloader.

I simply told EasyBCD to add a new entry (3rd button on the left), then chose FreeBSD type, chose the partition to boot and changed its label, that's all! And it worked flawlessly!

Adding TTF fonts to the X server

This is a little survey on how to add fonts to your Xorg server. I did this on my FreeBSD 6.2 running Xorg 6.9 and I hope that doing the same on Xorg 7.x will be quite similar.

I installed my TTF (TrueType) fonts on /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts. So in order to get Xorg using it, edit your /etc/xorg.conf and modify it to look like the following

Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
FontPath "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts/"
...
EndSection

Once /etc/xorg.conf has been saved. Run the following commands

# cd /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts
# /usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontscale
(on Xorg 7.x this could be /usr/local/bin/mkfontscale)
# /usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontdir
(on Xorg 7.x this could be /usr/local/bin/mkfontdir)

The last step is giving the users the oportunity to choose from the added fonts on their font chooser dialogs. Just edit /usr/X11R6/etc/fonts/local.conf (or /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf if you're using Xorg 7.x) and the directory to the configuration as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "/etc/fonts/fonts.dtd">

<fontconfig>
<dir>/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts</dir>
</fontconfig>

Restart X, and voilà!

Upgrade from gnupg1.x to gnupg2

I'm a regular user of Thunderbird+Enigmail+gnupg on my FreeBSD box.

Until now I used gnupg 1.x, but I wanted to upgrade to gnupg2 (2.0.4).
Why? Because of a combination of envy and fun. No more to tell. The former version filled my needs.

So how to upgrade? First of all install gnupg2 (it's on /usr/ports/security/gnupg) and pinentry (it's on /usr/ports/security/pinentry). gnupg2 cannot be run without pinentry, so the latter should be added as a dependency of gnupg, but it's not. So you need to install both by hand.

Once you've installed both packages, you have add the gpg-agent.conf on your ${HOME}/.gnupg. Mine contains:

pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-gtk-2
no-grab
default-cache-ttl 600

(see man 1 gpg-agent just to know what these options do).

And that's all! Thunderbird+Enigmail runs like a charm with gnupg2. My gnupg1.x keys work correctly with gnupg2.0.

Environment: FreeBSD 6.2, thunderbird-2.0.0.0 (installed from ports), thunderbird-enigmail-0.95.0 (installed from ports), gnupg-2.0.4 (installed from packages), pinentry-0.7.2_5 (installed from packages).