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Gemlog
The Neunix Gemlog is all about tech. Its articles cover mostly software-related topics (a lot of *BSD, a bit of illumos and some Linux) as well as everything else about the IT that I find time and motivation to write about. Focus is on FreeBSD as that is my daily driver OS but I try to touch on a lot of interesting things.
(November 2024) EuroBSDCon 2024 report (2/2) - Main conference and trip home
In the second part of my trip report I cover the main conference days of EuroBSDCon 2024, the social event as well as my trip back and a conclusion.
(October 2024) EuroBSDCon 2024 report (1/2) - arrival & tutorial days
The first part of my trip report of EuroBSDCon 2024 in Dublin covers my arrival and the two tutorial days.
(July 2024) Exploring the CBSD virtual environment management framework - part 8: Customizing CBSD
Part 8 covers configuring CBSD to better match your needs and preferences. It discusses customizing the color scheme, command output, custom facts, defaults, custom profiles and update hooks.
(March 2024) Exploring the CBSD virtual environment management framework - part 7: Updating and help
Part 7 is about updating CBSD to newer versions and how to take backups beforehand. It covers using the help system as well.
(February 2024) Exploring the CBSD virtual environment management framework - part 6: Jails (IV)
The fourth and final article on basic jails management discusses executing commands in jails from the host, changing a jail's configuration, updating the jail userland and managing snapshots of jails.
2023 began like a pretty standard gemlogging year. I managed to write four more articles in the CBSD series until May when disaster struck (multiple family-related incidents) and instantly made the year a horrible one for me personally. Despite thinking about letting EuroBSDCon pass, I eventually decided to attend after all. Since the event for me meant the positive highlight of 2023, I was able to write a two part trip and conference report. At the end of the year I decided to finish an article that I had started almost three years ago and finally review the ergonomic keyboard that I'm using these days. 7 articles in total is far from being great but not my worst performance, either.
The gemlogging year started very late for me in 2022. After a very successful 2021 I took a long break to work on coordinating the Advance!BSD project and drive that forward. Therefore I only wrote 5 articles in total and nearly missed the first half of the year entirely. What I got done are all articles that I'm proud of, though: An article about revisiting the original FreeBSD 1.0 (from 1993!) in two parts; the summary of my thoughts about EuroBSDCan in Vienna after attending; and finally the first two article in a (surely longer) series on the CBSD tool for virtualization management. So 2022 was different but fine overall.
The year 2021 has been incredibly productive and despite the additional work for bi-posting most of my articles, using my Gemlog has put the fun back into writing. I've published _three_ post series with four or more articles each. One was about PXE-booting various operating systems from a FreeBSD server, another about using OPNsense to get rid of my ISP-provided router and the last one about package building on FreeBSD with Synth. I've written two articles about Advance!BSD, a project idea to build a not-for-profit, community-based hosting provider and two more about a comparison of Pkgsrc and Ravenports. In two articles I explained my stance on why I think the Stallman drama was a pretty bad campaign and why that position does not make me a women hater at all. I've also written on a dangerous trend in Open Source to not let smaller projects participate and on re-learning touch-typing a second time with another keyboard layout.
Overview of post-EerieLinux posts 2020
There are only two post-"EerieLinux" posts in 2020, because the decision to re-organize my blogging activity by re-basing things on Gemini space happened only in the last quarter of the year. Those two posts are about quite different topics: The first one celebrates my first addition to the FreeBSD Ports Collection and is related to Gemini, the second is about IBM killing the classic CentOS Linux distribution and some thoughts on what could be done with a BSD-inspired Linux distro.
I've decided to take some of the old articles from my former Weblog and make them available on Gemini as well. As a bonus you'll get to read slightly improved versions.
This is the first part of my 2020 posts; the year is split due to me moving on from the old form of my blog (Web-only "EerieLinux") to my new platform (Gemini-based 'Neunix' which is only "mirrored" on the Web). This year was weird in other respects, too. Thanks to all the fuss with COVID-19 hitting the world and impacting all our lives, I didn't get around to post articles even after writing them. And just as I was getting back on track, I grew so sick of Wordpress that I decided to finally make a change. These are the posts that were still written on WP.
After the exceptional 2018, year 8 of my blogging activities fell just slightly short of the great year 2017. I wrote Articles about FreeBSD on ARM hardware, using FreeBSD ports with tools, a series on various operating systems on ULTRA SPARC hardware and my first series on programming (daemonization on FreeBSD with Python). Single posts include a rant against GPL supremacy, one more article about Ravenports and a return to OmniOSce among other things.
Year seven of my blogging activity meant the pinnacle of EerieLinux: While I published less posts than one year before, the page hits further increased after an already incredibly good year 2017. In the end over 25,700 visitors accounted for more than _46,700_ hits! I published two controversial articles about permissive licenses vs. copyleft and FreeBSD's adoption of a feminist COC. A series on email did not receive much attention and I got distracted after writing part 2. What distracted me was a new cross-platform package system: Ravenports. I wrote multiple articles about it. That year also saw me getting into Solaris land for the first time, taking a look at OpenSolaris derivative OmniOS.
Over year six my visitor count skyrocketed: In all years except the first one, my blog had had around 7,000 page hits. 2017 saw over _32,000_. This was due to two series of articles that were very well received: One about an experiment of exploring and updating an ancient FreeBSD 4.11 system and one about building my own little home router. With 8 posts straight, the latter was also my longest up to this point. I also wrote about jails as well as package management and ports on FreeBSD and a couple of other things.
Year five of my blogging career meant writing about various topics such as compression and version control. I did not deliberately choose BSD-related topics, but my interest in these systems simply never vanished after I had started exploring them. And so 2016 saw me digging deeper with articles on dual-booting, an overview of the four major BSD systems as well as Vagrant and Bacula on FreeBSD. It was an interesting time when I also wrote about comparing Linux and BSD: Regarding documentation differences in one article and eventually in general. The year ended with a well received article about using TrueOS as a daily driver for 3 months.
My fourth blogging year started out with posts about touch-typing, but then I completely went down the BSD route. OpenBSD at first, then mostly FreeBSD. The year ends with some thoughts about a game studio giving away the Linux version of their game for free.
The beginning of my third blogging year was dedicated mostly to the E5 distribution experiment. After that follows articles on various topics: Licenses, RISC-V hardware, the incident known as "shell shock" and more on the light-weight side of Linux. I also published my first kind of "political" article despite never wanting to do that on a tech blog - but when there's danger to the freedom on the net I surely had to make a stand for sanity, didn't I?
In my second blogging year I mostly continued with more preparation for building my experimental Linux distro: A lot of applications that use various toolkits were tested and reviewed (I did not bring those posts over, though). Other than that I began to be interested in the broader *nix family, peeking at some non-Linux operating systems and finally got my hands dirty digging into Linux systems and then beginning to build my own.
My first blogging year (or actually half year since I started in the second half of 2012): I'm writing about the Linux distribution experiment that I had in mind and evaluate available software to find good light-weight components to pick for the distro.