Random notes & tips

• Change or disable keyboard beep
• Shutdown
• Leave X and come back
• Vi – Show lines
• Vi – Jump to a line
• Show and change hostname
• Error – database too small: /var/db/locate.database
• Change repository, package mirror

Change or disable keyboard beep

Shutdown

$ doas shutdown -p now

Leave X and come back

You have logged into the X server, but want to quickly jump to a regular terminal? You can type this shortcut with an F key, depending on the number, you will either be dropeed to ttyC0, ttyC1, ttyC2, ttyC3, ttyC5 or ttyC6.

• Ctrl + Alt + {F1,F2,F3,F4,F6}

To go back to the X server, pres Ctrl + Alt + F5 to go back to your X session, which will be left as it was before.

Also make sure to log out of the other terminal ttys because anyone will be able to switch back to them and you don't want to be logged in when that happens.

Vi – Show lines

To show lines in a file opened in vi, press Esc to enter Normal/Command mode and type :set number.

To make this persistent = show lines by default when you open any file, create a file called .nexrc in your home directory and put set number on the first line of it.

$ cd ~
$ touch .nexrc

.nexrc

set number

Vi – Jump to a line

In Normal mode, type :{line_nubmer}, e.g :20.

Show and change hostname

Show

To show your hostname, you can conveniently type hostname into the terminal:

Example output:

Desktop.domain.local

To omit the domain information from the output, type hostname -s

Desktop

Edit

Hostname information is located in /etc/myname and it's read during the startup. Edit the content of the file to change hostname.

$ doas nvim /etc/myname

This will however propagate on the next reboot, to change the hostname immediately, type:

$ doas hostname new_hostname

$ hostname
new_hostname

Error – database too small: /var/db/locate.database

Locate is a cool utility that allows you to search through your filesystem quickly thanks to an index database it maintains. It should update this index automatically at midnight (at least on Linux), but sometime you want to do that manually to have an up to date database index immediatelly. Also, if you run into the database too small: /var/db/locate.database issue, you can fix it with the following command as well:

$ doas /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

Afterwards, locate should execute normally.

Change repository, package mirror

Mirror information is located in /etc/installurl file. Unlike on Linux, where package managers usually offer extensive features like multiple repositories with different priority settings etc., on OpenBSD, there's just a single file with a single URL.

Open the /etc/installurl file in an editor and put a single URL from this mirror list into the file.

$ doas vi /etc/installurl

There's no need to update repositories like on Linux, it will automatically use the new repository when installing or updating packages, which you can try with pkg_add -u -v