BSD Cafe Billboard

At work we are uing BSDs extensivly for almost all aspects, except as hardware crypto modules (HSMs). We are also using BSDs as workstations for the daily toil. This of course require a set of usage policies to formalise what is accepted and not.

I'm glad we managed to get NetBSD into the official company policy with the following condition

Must run on workstation/laptop hardware. Coffee brewers, 
toasters or other household appliances are explicitly forbidden 
from accessing production network.

On a sader note, OpenBSD is no longer allowed access, when 7.7 goes out of official support in a few weeks time, due to the decision to remove yubikey-otp keyboard support in the kernel from 7.8.

Oh well

Cheers and RunBSD!

Test 123 æøå ÆØÅ

One of my biggest "frustrations" when migrating from OpenBSD to FreeBSD as my daily driver, was the loss of of working media keys on my Das Keyboard - especially the very convenient volume jog wheel.

After some poking around i confirmed that the usbhid driver was working - and also default enabled in FreeBSD15 kernel. Xev tool printed the correct keycode events

keycode 122 = XF86AudioLowerVolume 
keycode 123 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume 
keycode 172 = XF86AudioPlay

The problem narrowed down to how to map these event to something useful

I found a working solution in this discussion thread, by using the x11/sxhkd daemon to pass the events to mixer(8)

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-enabling-multimedia-keys-gamepads-joysticks-for-desktop-usbhid.84464/

I had to tweak the sxhkd config a bit to work properly with mixer

~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc

XF86Audio{Play,LowerVolume,RaiseVolume}         
         mixer {vol.mute="toggle",vol="-3%", vol="+3%"}

Then I invoke the sxhkd daemon from my ~/.xsession file

sxhkd &
exec /usr/local/bin/fvwm3

Viola!

#FreeBSD #Solved #X11 #FVWM3 #Xorg #AskFedi

Shitty pictures, but running FVWM3 in a dual screen setup. Secondary HDMI screen is close to 15 years old now. Gkrellm and xclock. Steaming radio in xterm using mpv

FreeBSD 15-STABLE, Intel core i5 with 8GB RAM.

Same desktop as I used to run using OpenBSD