User:Flexibeast
About me
i've been using Linux since late 1997, with my first distro being RedHat 5.2 ("Apollo"). i subsequently used Mandriva, Ubuntu, Debian, and Void, before moving to Gentoo in late 2021. i've also been using OpenBSD since 6.2, around late 2017; i maintain a couple of OpenBSD servers.
i run Gentoo on my laptop, my primary machine. It's a Dell Latitude 7490, with a Core i7 (8th gen) CPU, Intel UHD graphics, and 32G of memory (4G of which is allocated to a Portage TMPDIR). Previously i was running Gentoo on an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U laptop, with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx, and 12G of memory (2G of which was allocated to a Portage TMPDIR).
My system is OpenRC-based, and i currently use Wayfire as my window manager (though in the past i've happily used Sway, i3, Fluxbox, and others). Some of the software i use in my Wayland setup includes:
- Waybar, a status bar.
- Mako, a notification daemon.
- Wofi, a dmenu-style menu provider.
- imv, an image viewer.
i use Emacs as my primary editor - though i regularly use Vim as well - and as my platform for email (mu4e), IRC (ERC), Web bookmark management (Ebuku), etc.
Documentation
i have a particular interest in demystifying the standards / specifications / software related to desktops on *n*x-ish systems, e.g. those of freedesktop.org and POSIX, so that users can make informed decisions about whether they want to use them, and implement their own custom usages should they wish to do so.
My contributions to the Gentoo wiki can be found here.
Guides
i maintain some Gentoo-specific guides:
- A minimal Gentoo kernel for your hardware
- Desktop notifications of emerge progress
- Making man pages usable after switching from man-db to mandoc
as well as a small collection of ICT guides outside of this wiki, including:
- D-Bus: The essentials
- D-Bus and X sessions
- D-Bus reference
- Writing man pages with mdoc(7): a quickstart guide
The s6 ecosystem
i'm the porter and maintainer of mdoc(7) man pages for:
- S6 : s6-man-pages, app-doc/s6-man-pages
- dev-lang/execline : execline-man-pages, app-doc/execline-man-pages
- sys-apps/s6-rc : s6-rc-man-pages, app-doc/s6-rc-man-pages
- sys-apps/s6-linux-init : s6-linux-init-man-pages, app-doc/s6-linux-init-man-pages
- net-misc/s6-networking : s6-networking-man-pages, app-doc/s6-networking-man-pages
- sys-apps/s6-portable-utils : s6-portable-utils-man-pages, app-doc/s6-portable-utils-man-pages
- tipidee : tipidee-man-pages
- shibari : shibari-man-pages
Software
i'm the author of several Emacs Lisp packages, including Ebuku, an Emacs UI for the buku bookmark manager, and pulseaudio-control, an Emacs UI for PulseAudio.
i'm also the author of some small POSIX shell scripts which focus on portability, such as qemu-start, for starting QEMU VMs from the command line, and epub-create, for creating minimal EPUBs. Both are available in the 'flexibeast' overlay.
i'm comfortable with Perl, and as part of my work on the Void Linux documentation, contributed some simple Perl scripts: mdbook-latex, to generate a LaTeX (and thus PDF) version of the Void docs, and mdbook-gemini, to generate a gemtext version.
Other programming languages with which i have at least a basic familiarity include C, Zig, Haskell and Ada.
Bug wrangling
My contributions to bugs.gentoo.org.
Resources for using s6/66
On this wiki
- S6 (or my draft overhaul of this page)
- S6-rc
- S6 and s6-rc-based init system
- Capezotte's "s6 on Gentoo" guide
External to this wiki
Gentoo-oriented resources
- forums.gentoo.org discussion: "From OpenRC to s6: Any tips?"
- alecStewart1's "gentoo-s6-scripts" repo
- Adib Saad's "66tools-overlay" repo (cf. Adib Saad's "66" page)
- architekt's "66tools-overlay" repo
General resources
- How to convert systemd unit files to an s6 installation
- The "S6" page on the Artix wiki
- Artix s6 services
- s6-overlay - s6 init and supervision for Docker images
- Capezotte's zsh completions for s6