Welcome to decuser’s blog
Topics on this blog include computing, retro-computing, operating systems, math, and whatever other technical subjects I happen to be exploring that I find interesting enough to take and share notes about.
Posts
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Installing and running DragonFly BSD 6.4
This note is about installing and running DragonFly BSD 6.4
DragonFly BSD from https://dragonflybsd.org is a BSD :). As such, it is a rock and the userland is sane. It was forked from FreeBSD long ago and is renowned for its HAMMER FS. I started the exploration with the intention of learning more about HAMMER and have enjoyed the journey.
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Installing and running Fossil on TrueNAS Core
This note is about installing and running Fossil SCM on TrueNAS Core.
Fossil is brought to us by the same people who developed SQLite. It was created to serve their needs, but is useful to everybody with a similar set of needs (pretty much any dev team). According to the fossil folks over at https://fossil-scm.org, “Fossil is a simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management system…” To mme, it’s my git-killer.
I have been running Fossil for about a year to see if it was worth replacing git for my own use. After this year, while I still like git and I will continue to use it for disposable repos, I have completely jumped ship for my own repos and won’t be going back to hosting them on anything else anytime soon. Fossil is very lightweight, fast and responsive, has a fantastic server side ui, and is slightly more intuitive to use. It is also easier to recover from when things go wonky.
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Sculpt 22.10 - A Truly Alternative OS
This note is about installing and running Sculpt OS 22.10 in VirtualBox.
SculptOS is an operating system built out of components provided by the Genode Operating System Framework and as such it qualifies as a truly alternative operating system. These days, that’s quite a feat. Most ‘alternatives’ are linux distros or flavors. This OS runs on a microkernel - Nova or any one of several other choices. It is decidedly not unix, windows, linux, haiku, beos, os/2 or any other mainstream os.
Sculpt OS is made so that it is relatively straightforward, if not easy, to provide a secure computing environment where applications and services are built on a Trusted Computing Base… that is an application is provisioned explicitly to depend on a tree of components that are known to be trustworthy, and are sandboxed. It is similar in some ways to Qubes OS, but significantly different in others.
The learning curve is steep. So, as I explore the environment and learn more about it, I’ll post more of these notes.
Here’s the OS running stuff.
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Building Sculpt 22.10 on Debian 11.6 Bullseye without a Desktop
Sheesh, live and learn. I didn’t pay any attention to system requirements in the prior note Building Sculpt 22.10 on Debian 11.6 Bullseye. I just glibly provisioned using a small portion of my available resources. In this note, I’ve corrected this oversight. The system requirements are much, much more modest than what I originally provisioned. There is no need for the overkill.
This note is about building a bootable Sculpt OS 22.10 image using a Debian 11 “Bullseye” Guest OS running in VirtualBox without a desktop. If you were to include the desktop, expect that the system requirements would increase, but not by lot. I expect it would work with these same provisions, but would work better with more CPUs and RAM, as well as with a bigger allocation of hard disk space.
Bottom line - The image can be built comfortably, in a reasonable amount of time (call it 15 minutes to download the toolchain, and source code, and do the build), on a system with 512 MB RAM, 1 CPU, 12 GB HDD, but it’s faster with more resources provisioned, where CPU seems to be the biggest factor - more is better letting us use parallel threads in make.
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Building Sculpt 22.10 on Debian 11.6 Bullseye
This note is about building a bootable Sculpt OS 22.10 image using a Debian 11 “Bullseye” Guest OS running in VirtualBox. This is useful as a starting point for building a custom image. My Thinkpad T430 runs Sculpt just fine, but wifi doesn’t work, so I would like to add the needed firmware. This is work in that direction.
The note also applies, leaving out the VirtualBox specifics, to building Sculpt OS 22.10 on a Debian instance running on metal (confirmed working 12/28).
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Warren Toomey Awarded 2022 USENIX Flame
Warren Toomey, the founder and maintainer of all things related to The Unix Heritage Society (TUHS) https://www.tuhs.org/ has been awarded the 2022 USENIX Lifetime Achievment Award (“The Flame”).
Without TUHS, it would hardly even be possible to enjoy retro unix explorations. This is a well earned accolade by an unassuming and very hard working individual.
Congratulations, Warren!
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dircmp.py - a plan to improve and extend
dircmp.py
A plan to improve and extend
This note pertains to dircmp.py a program that I wrote to give me information about two directories for the purpose of deciding what to keep and what to remove and to learn about python. The note is a draft note and as such it’s not very refined and it may lack in many ways, but I thought it might be interesting to put it out there and let anyone see it. Email me if you have comments or suggestions.
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Site Update for Thursday, December 8, 2022
The Blog is completely migrated! It’s good to be over that google blog experience. Too little control. It’s like I stopped having to take lyft and got my own car with a free parking pass.
We are live! Of course, if you see any issues, just shoot me an email. Yeeha!
Oh, and I added search :).
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Creating a github pages jekyll minima themed site with pagination
A note about creating a github pages jekyll minima themed blog site and about adding pagination after the fact. This note captures what I learned when I created this blog.
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Site Update for December 3, 2022
Added pagination. Whew, took a bit of work, but seems more manageable on the whole. I’ll add a post about it :).