This post will guide you through installing isc-dhcpd on OmniOS inside a zone (software virtualized container).

Configuring the system

To get started, first install zadm on OmniOS inside the global zone. This tool makes creating and managing zones simple and is reminiscent of the vmadm command on SmartOS.

Install zadm:

pkg install zadm

I personally use this config for zadm (shoutouts to @papertigers for this), but feel free to customize this as you like.

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Check it out, I made an appearance on the Ship It! podcast! It was a great time chatting with Justin and Autumn and I hope this will kick start my podcast-era 😎.

Dave Eddy has learned systems programming the traditional way with books and man pages. Now he’s sharing what he’s learned, starting with bash.

Ship It! 124: You suck at programming – Listen on Changelog.com

In late 2022 I started a new series on TikTok called You Suck at Programming. In it I mostly talk about really cool Bash and Unix tricks and pitfalls and just general advice.

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This guide will show how to install Void Linux as a guest on OmniOS using hardware virtualization with bhyve.

Configure the system

To get started, first install zadm on OmniOS inside the global zone. This tool makes creating and managing zones simple and is reminiscent of the vmadm command on SmartOS.

Install zadm:

pkg install zadm
pkg install zones/brand/bhyve

I personally use this config for zadm (shoutouts to @papertigers for this), but feel free to customize this as you like.

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I wrote a computer program to generate piano music on the command line. The generation is done with a simple algorithm to create patterns in MIDI format, which is then imported into my DAW to process the data and turn it into music. There is no AI or Machine Learning in this algorithm - the music is programmatically generated and this video covers the algorithm that I created in detail.

I Made a Computer Program to Generate Piano Music

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How to install Plex on Void

Download plex-install-manager from:

https://github.com/bahamas10/plex-install-manager

Install deps:

xbps-install -S binutils tar curl xz

Create user and directories needed:

useradd -s /bin/false -d /var/empty _plex
mkdir /opt/plex /opt/plex/src /opt/plex/data
chown _plex:_plex /opt/plex/data

Install Plex:

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In 2013, I wrote a program in Node.js called sshp. This was right around the time I was investing heavily into learning node, and honestly having a blast doing it. Node is quick and fun to write, and with only a couple hundred lines of code, I was able to write node-sshp.

node-sshp is a command line utility that acts as a parallelizer for ssh. It works by taking in a file containing a list of hosts to connect to and looping over each host firing off an ssh command in parallel (with a configurable maximum number of concurrent processes). The tool’s description is:

sshp manages multiple ssh processes and handles coalescing the output to the terminal. By default, sshp will read a file of newline-separated hostnames or IPs and fork ssh subprocesses for them, redirecting the stdout and stderr streams of the child line-by-line to stdout of sshp itself.

Writing this tool in Node was an obvious choice at the time: the company I was working for was using Node heavily, and this tool was written specifically to be used at my job. Managing multiple concurrent child processes and IO streams also made Node the obvious choice.

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Super Mario 64 is one of my all-time favorite games. Last year, the source code for the decompilation project was made available to the public. I won’t go into detail on the decompilation project itself (see this post here for more information), but instead will focus on getting Super Mario 64 compiled on Void Linux.

Getting Started

A couple of dependencies will need to be installed that will be used throughout the installation process. Note that root privileges are only required in commands where sudo is used - the rest of the commands can be run as an unprivileged user.

sudo xbps-install git
sudo xbps-install make
sudo xbps-install wget

mkdir ~/dev ~/src

For this guide, the sm64 source code will be checked out into ~/dev, and the required dependencies that are installed manually will be in ~/src, of which there are 2:

1. qemu-irix
2. binutils-mips64

qemu-irix

To install this package, I found it easiest to take the qemu-irix release as a .deb file from the n64decomp GitHub organization and extract the deb myself.

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COAL, or Cloud-on-a-Laptop, is an easy way to run and test SmartOS and the Triton Stack in a self-contained VM meant to be run on a laptop. The sdc-headnode repository makes a lot of assumptions when building a COAL image about using VMWare for virtualization on an OS X laptop. However, with some modifications it is possible to run COAL on Linux via KVM managed through virt-manager.

To get virt-manager setup and running on Void Linux, you can follow my guide KVM Virtualization with virt-manager on Void Linux.

Nested Virtualization (optional)

Before getting started with the COAL building process, you can choose to enable nested virtualization if your hardware supports it. This is required if you would like to run bhyve zones on your COAL setup. Note that this setup assumes an Intel CPU.

You can check if your CPU supports nested virtualization by running:

$ grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo | grep -c ' vmx '
8

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Running and managing virtual machines on Linux is very easy using the virt-manager GUI program. Under the hood, the virtualization technology takes advantage of KVM (Kernel Virtal Machine) in the Linux kernel. The result of both of these together is fast and efficient hardware virtual machines with a really easy and straightforward GUI to manage them.

For this post, I’ll be using the following tools I’ve talked about in my blog post Using Void Linux as my Daily Driver:

• vsv - Void Service Manager
• vpm - Void Package Manager

Installation

Install the following packages to get started:

sudo vpm i virt-manager libvirt qemu

Start the services that are created by these packages:

sudo ln -s /etc/sv/libvirtd /var/service
sudo ln -s /etc/sv/virtlockd /var/service
sudo ln -s /etc/sv/virtlogd /var/service

Use vsv to check the status of the services:

sudo vsv status virt

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