💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › users › kraileth › neunix › eerie › 2015 › things_i_m… captured on 2024-05-10 at 12:58:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-05-24)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from December 2015. The article has been slightly improved.
Another year of blogging comes to an end. It has been quite full of *BSD stuff so that I'd even say: Regarding this blog it has been a BSD year. This was not actually planned but isn't a real surprise, either. I've not given up on Linux (which I use on a daily basis as my primary desktop OS) but it's clear that I'm fascinated with the BSDs and will try to get into them further in 2016.
Despite being a busy year, there were quite a few things that I would have liked to do and blog about that never happened. I hope to be able to do some of these things next year.
One of the most "successful" (in case of page hits) article series was the _desktop comparison_ that I did in 2012. Now in that field a lot has happened since then and I really wanted to do this again. Some desktops are no longer alive new ones have become available since then and it is a sure thing that the amount of memory needed has changed as well... 😉
Also I've never been able to finish the toolkit comparison which I stopped in the middle of writing about GTK-based applications. This has been started in 2013 so it would also be about time. However my focus has shifted away from the original intend of finding tools for a light-weight Linux desktop. I've become involved with the EDE project ("Equinox Desktop Environment") that uses the FLTK toolkit and so people could argue that I'm not really unbiased anymore. Then again... I chose to become involved because that was the winner of my last test series - and chances are that the reasons for it are still valid.
And then there's the "Desktop Demo DVD" subproject that never really took off. I had an Arch-based image with quite some desktops to choose from but there were a few problems: Trinity could not be installed alongside KDE, Unity for Arch was not exactly in good shape, etc. But the biggest issue was the fact that I did not have webspace available to store a big iso file.
My traffic statistics show that there has been a constant interest in the article about creating an Arch Linux live-CD. Unfortunately it is completely obsolete since the tool that creates it has changed substantially. I'd really like to write an updated version somewhen.
In fact I wanted to start over with the desktop tests this summer and had started with this. However Virtual Box hardware acceleration for graphics was broken on Arch, and since this is a real blocker I could not continue (has this been resolved since?).
I wrote an article about HURD in 2013, too, and wanted to re-visit a HURD-based system to see what happened in the mean time. ArchHURD has been in coma for quite some time. Just recently there was a vital sign however. I wish the new developer best luck and will surely do another blog post about it once there's something usable to show off!
The experiments with Arch and an alternative libc (musl) were stopped due to a lack of time and could be taken further. This has been an interesting project that I'd like to continue some time in some form. I also had some reviews of interesting but lesser known Linux distros in mind. Not sure if I find time for that, though.
There has been a whole lot going about both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Still I would have liked to do more in that field (exploring jails, ZFS, etc.). But that's things I'll do in 2016 for sure.
I've played a bit with a Raspberry 2 and built a little router with it using a security orientated Linux distro. It was a fun project to do and maybe it is of any use to somebody.
One highlight that I'm looking forward to mess with is the RISC-V platform, a very promising effort to finally give us a CPU that is actually open hardware!
There are a few other things that I want to write about and hope to find time for soon. I messed with some version control tools a while back and this would make a nice series of articles, I think. Also I have something about devops in mind and want to do a brief comparison of some configuration management tools (Puppet, Chef, Salt Stack, Ansible - and perhaps some more). If there is interest in that I might pick it up and document some examples on FreeBSD or OpenBSD (there's more than enough material for Linux around but *BSD is often a rather weak spot). We'll see.
Well, and I still have one article about GPL vs. BSD license(s) in store that will surely happen next year. That and a few topics about programming that I've been thinking about writing for a while now.
So - goodbye 2015 and welcome 2016!
Happy new year everyone! As you can see, I have not quite run out of ideas. 🙂