Advance!BSD – thoughts on a not-for-profit project to support *BSD (1/2)

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2021/advance_bsd_pt1.gmi There are multiple reasons why I am a BSD user and enthusiast. For one thing I enjoy using systems where the design benefits from the holistic approach (whole OS vs. "kernel …

Multi-OS PXE-booting from FreeBSD 12: Linux, illumos and more (pt. 4)

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2021/multi-os_pxe-booting_from_fbsd_pt4.gmi Post 1 of this mini series is about what lead me to do this in the first place, features a little excursion for people new to PXE and details the setup …

Dystopian Open Source

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2021/dystopian_open_source.gmi Happy New Year dear reader! The other day I watched a video on YouTube that had only 6 views since last October. It is about a very important topic, though, and …

A glimpse into 2020

When you read this, the old year will be over (well, depending on the time zone you live in). If we're lucky, this might be the year to get our hands on the first affordable RISC-V hardware that can actually run a Unix-like operating system. It should definitely be the year to get interesting devices …

Illumos (v9os) on SPARC64 SunFire v100

Over the last month or so I've written a couple of articles on an old SunFire v100 machine that I own for a while now. First I took a look at the hardware of the machine and the LOM (Lights Out Management). Then I installed OpenBSD 6.0 from CD and updated all the way to …

Testing OmniOSce on real hardware

[edit 07-02]Added images to make the article a little prettier[/edit] Last year I decided to take a first look at OmniOSce. It's a community-driven continuation of the open source operating system that originated at OmniTI. It is also an Illumos distribution and as such a continuation of the former Open Solaris project by Sun that …

Rusted ravens: Ravenports march 2019 status update

It's been a couple of months since I last wrote about Ravenports, the universal *nix application building framework. Not exactly being a slowly moving project, a lot has happened since then. Platform support Raven currently supports DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris/Illumos, the latter being only in the form of binary packages (except for when …

Ravenports explained: Why not just join XYZ?

As the year comes to an end, I've seen quite some interest in my previous post. There has been a question on Reddit what the benefit(s) of Raven over Pkgsrc might be and why the developers don't simply join an existing effort instead of building something new. I've touched on this topic about half a …

One year of flying with the Raven: Ready for the Desktop?

It has been a little over one year now that I'm with the Ravenports project. Time to reflect my involvement, my expectations and hopes. Ravenports Ravenports is a universal packaging framework for *nix operating systems. For the user it provides easy access to binary packages of common software for multiple platforms. It has been the …

Exploring OmniOS in a VM (2/2)

This is the second part of my post about "exploring OmniOS in a VM". The first post showed my adventures with service and user management on a fresh installation. My initial goal was to make the system let me ssh into it: Now the SSH daemon is listening and I've created an unprivileged user. So …