Wesley Moore

👨‍💻 Software Developer
🌏 Sunshine Coast, Australia

Hi I’m Wes 👋. I like warm weather and tinkering with computers; ranging from small microcontrollers, up to large servers and the operating systems that run upon them. I’m a Rustacean with a fondness for mechanical keyboards. Read more on the about page →

Recent Posts

systemd-sysusers and Chimera Linux

I use Chimera Linux as the primary OS on my laptop (as opposed to my desktop, which is still running Arch Linux for now). Chimera was created in 2021 and reached alpha status in June 2023. Chimera was built from scratch and as the name suggests it comprised of a motley crew of components:

The project and its development is proving very useful to me for seeing how a Linux distribution is built and evolved over time. Watching it progress (and helping a little by maintaining some packages) has helped expose some lesser known (to me) components that make up a typical Linux system, and their role.

Recently systemd-sysusers was introduced. Some folks might find this surprising as Chimera does not use systemd for the role of pid 1/init. As mentioned above it uses Dinit for this. Some standalone parts of systemd are used though. Currently:

  • udev
  • systemd-tmpfiles
  • and now, systemd-sysusers

I had not encountered systemd-sysusers previously (even though it’s probably used on the systemd based distros I’ve used before), so I thought I’d jot down what I learned about it and how it’s used (at the time of writing) in Chimera.

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Fixing OpenBSD panic dc_atapi_start: not ready in KVM

I tried creating an OpenBSD 7.3 virtual machine on my new computer (Arch Linux host) and the installer kept crashing with the error:

Screenshot of the installer crash.
Screenshot of the installer crash.
dc_atapi_start: not ready, st = 50
fatal protection fault in supervisor mode trap type 4 code 0 rip ffffffff810089d9 cs 8 rflags 10282 cr2 287eb3000 cpl 6 rsp ffff800014fd11a0
gssbase Oxffffffff818fbff0 kgsbase Ox0
panic: trap type 4, code=0, pc=ffffffff810089d9
syncing disks...12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 _
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Australian and New Zealand Makers on YouTube

I decided I wanted to add some more local folks into my YouTube subscriptions. I put the call out on Mastodon for suggestions for folks doing videos about machining, woodworking, electronics, software, that type of thing. I received a number of helpful replies and thought it might be useful to collect the list (as well as ones I’m already subscribed to) on this page in case others are looking for new channels to check out.

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Building a Classic Mac OS App in Rust

Instead of using my funemployment to build useful things I have continued to build things for old versions of Mac OS. Through some luck and a little persistence I have actually managed to get Rust code running on classic Mac OS (I’ve tried Mac OS 7.5 and 8.1). In this post I’ll cover how I got here and show a little network connected demo application I built—just in time for the end of #MARCHintosh.

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How to use DeRez

After my post on trying to run Rust on Classic Mac OS post I continued trying to find a modern language that I can use to build classic Mac OS software. I’ve had some success with Nim and built a little temperature converter application. As part of this I wanted to be able to use ResEdit to edit the layout of the dialog. The problem was that I need a way to convert the modified resources back into the textual representation used in the source code. In this post I describe how I did this with DeRez.

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Creating a Podcast From a Mastodon Account With XSLT

I recently discovered the ATPrewind account on Mastodon. It’s an account sharing “gems discovered while re-listening to @atpfm from the very first episode. By @joshua”. ATP is a tech Podcast that’s been running for about 10 years. Each post (so far) from ATPrewind includes a short clip from the show in the form of a little video.

This post describes how I was nerd sniped into creating a podcast from the ATPrewind posts.

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Trying to Run Rust on Classic Mac OS

I recently acquired a Power Macintosh 9500/150 and after cleaning it up and building a BlueSCSI to replace the failed hard drive it’s now in a semi-operational state. This weekend I thought I’d see if I could build a Mac app for it that called some Rust code. This post details my trials and tribulations.

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Debugging a Docker Core Dump

On my main machine I use an excellent cross-platform tool called Docuum that automatically cleans up unused docker images. This allows me to use Docker without the need to periodically wonder why I’m out of disk space, run docker system prune and recover half my disk.

I installed Docuum via the AUR package (although tweaked to build the latest Docuum release) and ran it via the bundled systemd service definition. This worked great for a while but some time back it started failing. Every time Docuum would try to check for things to clean up I’d see the following in the system journal:

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Projects

A selection of projects I've built or contributed to:

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