It's been quite a long time since I did any updates on this blog so a couple of updates are in order

House

I've now been living in the new place for just over a year. Generally everything is good, we've started putting in a lawn and currently letting it get its roots in before we try to cut it

Twitter

Oh, boy, what an absolute train wreck. I've tolerated Elon's presence at Twitter because most of the stuff he did wasn't far off what Jack was doing prior. But cutting off all third party clients, forcing everyone onto the new TweetDeck (which likely will be paywalled too) has literally driven users away. Twitter has been losing users and revenue constantly, and it is totally unsurprising.

I've disabled my two TweetDeck profiles (a professional one, and a casual one) from Ferdium. But I doubt I will be going back any time soon.

Red Hat

Another train wreck of a situation. Red Hat's decision to first kill CentOS's stability, then for RHEL sources to only be accessible behind a subscription has pissed of a lot of users, even if it's not strictly speaking against license.

The only one left in its sights will be Fedora so that leads me onto the next update

Manjaro & Archlinux

I've been tinkering with Manjaro more and more lately, with its rolling release schedule meaning I never need to upgrade from a major version to another major version.

It's downside I'm finding is that some packages, especially those in the AUR are essentially "compile from source" packages which does the build on your machine during the install. This can take a varying amount of time depending on the code. With my RSS reader of choice: QuiteRSS, this build takes a mind numbing 2.5 hours to do, even on a high spec machine.

That's where I found out about setting up your own Arch repo. I've been tinkering with that, setting it up on GCP and fronted by a CDN. This works pretty well, but I still need to find how I can do scheduled builds to keep that up to date, but it looks like I'll be switching to Manjaro at some point in the near future. Sound works fine, using lyncolnmd's work.

Another downside with Manjaro, however is that its btrfs filesystem, my home directory backup, and CloneZilla don't seem to want to work well together

Wordpress & Domains

One final update, I will likely be transferring out the blenderfox.com domain out of Wordpress, while I had this registered as part of the blog, I'm finding it much harder to maintain this domain using Wordpress's very limited DNS management tools. I will likely transfer it out to Google Domains, even though there's talk of them shuttering that service. Secondary service would be AWS.

After much tinkering and cursing, I finally managed to get Linux Container running. I had originally wanted a Fedora container, but for some unknown reason, the container would not start. Instead, I tried a CentOS 6 container, and that started up successfully, so I am using that instead. It is actually good, because I can tinker with the CentOS container, experiment with different configurations, maybe practise setting it up as a proper (i.e. no GDM) server. This will help if I decide to go for a Red Hat-themed Linux certification.

Still bugging me why the Fedora 20 container won’t start, though.

This is a very useful boot disk - it allows you to download the latest network installer from the relevant site and boot it, without having to burn or create another stick. It supports the major distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Scientific Linux, CentOS and Slackware.

Be warned, though, Network Installers by nature can be heavily console-based.

NetbootCD.