I upgraded my server from OpenBSD 4.3 to 4.4 a week or two ago and it was
simple, quick, and painless. I really enjoy using OpenBSD on the server, and
have spent a fair amount of time with it on the desktop as well. With recent
additions of WPA, DRI for Intel and ATI chipsets using free drivers, and other
enhancements, there is really nothing I cannot do on OpenBSD that I could do on
other *nix operating systems. For those that need java, there are now java
packages available in -current. About the only thing missing is Flash, but to
me that is not a negative since I have absolutely no use for Flash. If I want
to watch a YouTube video, I just download it using any one of the many scripts
or Firefox extensions and then watch it in mplayer or VLC. In any event, that
one negative is far outweighed by the positives of using a completely free
operating system that is arguably one of the most secure. If you have not
spent time with OpenBSD, I highly recommend checking it out.
So, I finally got my blog back up and running again after taking a
year-long hiatus. I must admit, part of what got me motivated to get
the blog rolling again was the cool LinuxPlanet blogs site
organized by Dave Yates
and Linc Fessenden. Great idea,
guys and Linc, thanks for adding in my blog, cobwebs and all. Hiya,
LinuxPlanet. :-)
Anyway, it's been a busy year, to say the least, and I have a lot of catching up to do:
After two years of podcasting, I ended the Linux Reality podcast in March, 2008 at
episode #100. It was a great run and I really, really enjoyed doing it. I
have been so appreciative of all the kind words people have said about the
podcast, and it's nice to know that it helped introduce so many people to
Linux. According to my Libsyn stats, the number of downloads of LR episodes is
truly staggering and there are _still_ thousands of people subscribed even
after the last episode was posted more than six months ago. I would also like
to thank O'Reilly for being a great sponsor
of LR. I had several opportunities to have other sponsors, but O'Reilly was
the only one I took on as they seemed to be a good 'fit' for LR. Since ending
LR, I have been honored to appear on several other podcasts, including The Linux Link Tech Show twice, The Bad Apples, and BSDTalk. That's been a lot of fun and I
look forward to doing more.
I started up the sbopkg project and it has
seen some nice adoption among Slackware users. There was even a
feature article written up about sbopkg in Linux.com which, I was
told, led to it being mentioned and talked about in some internal IBM
developer communications. Pretty cool stuff! I have been lucky to
have several well-known Slackware community members and developers
contribute to sbopkg which has made it a much better tool than I ever
could have made it on my own.
One of my home systems has been running Debian for a very long time (since 2.2
'Potato,' I believe) and it has gone through several upgrades. About
ten months ago, I upgraded this box to Lenny and have been keeping it updated
along the way. Debian Lenny is shaping up to be a really great release for
Debian. It's fairly up-to-date and _extremely_ stable. Debian is, of course,
an excellent choice on the server but I believe it makes for a very solid
desktop as well. I encourage anyone who is interested in Debian to
check out either a weekly snapshot or a daily build of the Debian Lenny netinst
disk available from the Debian Installer
website.
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this year's Ohio Linux Fest due to a personal
conflict -- my wedding anniversary. And, despite what Verbal and Klaatu might say, any 'Chess
Griffin sightings' at OLF were mistaken. :-) Hopefully, OLF will
move back to the end of September like it was last year because I
_really_ want to go back. I have made sure to put the date for the
inaugural Southeast
LinuxFest (June 13, 2009) on my calendar, however.
Speaking of the Southeast LinuxFest, I am really, really glad that
someone (big shout out to Dave Yates) has gotten things
rolling for a Linux conference here in the Southeast again. I
remember I went to one of the Atlanta Linux Showcases in the mid or
late 1990's (and have the t-shirt to prove it) but it's been too long
without a Linux show in these parts. I believe that my home lug, TriLUG, is listed as a participating
LUG and I hope that we can get a lot of TriLUG members at SELF. Given
that many TriLUG members here in Raleigh work at Red Hat, rPath, and
other F/OSS companies, or contribute to F/OSS projects like Fedora, I
imagine this is probably a given.
I turned 40 about a month ago. 'Nuff said about that.
I spent some time cleaning up my personal website in all its
circa-1997-html glory and moving it over to a home server running OpenBSD. I
then got blosxom working in the OpenBSD chrooted Apache, which may be the
subject of a future post. Using blosxom is great since I spend the vast
majority of my *nix time in a terminal with my friends Vim, OpenSSH, Irssi, and
GNU Screen (or, more precisely, my new favorite terminal multiplexer, tmux). Being able to write
blog posts in Vim and having my entire blog run off a single 28k perl script is
pretty sweet.
Finally, on a personal level, life has been great but very busy. Having
two young boys will make it that way. Between work, kids activities like
soccer, swimming, basketball, Y-Guides, and all the other assorted family
things, my hacking time has been limited. Still, I do plan on breaking open
the new OpenBSD 4.4 CD's that just arrived and upgrading my OpenBSD server this
weekend ... oh, and someone just submitted another patch for sbopkg that I need
to review and commit ... and there was another FreeBSD port that I was hacking
on ... and I was going to install another operating system on my Acer Aspire One ... plus, some
neglected C and Python projects are begging for attention ... damn, I hate todo
lists.
