Happy Pi Day 2024
I got myself a Raspberry Pi 5 last week, and I booted it up for the first time today. I imaged Ubuntu onto a USB stick and it is slow but usable. I love the 4 ARM64 cores that I have to play with!
Happy 32nd Birthday, Linux!
Every year, I wish the Linux kernel project a happy birthday, because what would I be using if it didn’t exist (probably macOS). Today is Linux’s 32nd birthday (a nice round number there), and it’s still my favorite operating system.
Local SMTP Setup If You Use Dreamhost
I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out how to send mail from my local machine using my Dreamhost SMTP server as a smarthost. Here’s a sample setup using msmtp: The important bit is tls_starttls off, without which will lead to a whole world of frustration.
Happy 31st Birthday, Linux!
So last year I wrote a big “happy birthday” post for the Linux kernel, which on 25th August is the anniversary of Linus Torvalds sending that fateful message to comp.os.minix announcing his “(free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones”. Linux wasn’t the first OS I […]
Submitting A Patch To The Linux Kernel
A few weeks ago I sent a spelling fix to the Linux kernel, mainly just to try out the patch submission workflow but also because I get mildly annoyed by spelling errors until I have the overwhelming urge to just send a patch. Here’s the cliffnotes of the process. Do your edits in the kernel […]
Miscellaneous Linux Kernel Compilation Tips
This is a random collection of things I want to note down about Linux kernel compilation, so that I don’t forget them. One is how to compile a kernel and output to a different directory than the kernel source path. If you Google this, most answers tell you to do something like this (in this […]
Processes and Threads
When writing an operating system, after you get past the tedium of the arbitrary rituals you need to initialize your hardware, you get to the fun part – designing the abstractions that your kernel will use. One of the things we need to think about is processes and threads. In operating systems textbooks, there are […]
Happy 30th Birthday, Linux!
30 years ago today, Linus Torvalds sent out the now-famous email announcing that he was building a free operating system. 30 years later, Linux has taken over the world, from tiny embedded systems to supercomputers and even runs in space, on Mars, and wherever else you can find a computer. I first used Linux in […]
Ingenuity Helicopter Flies!
Today, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, brought to Mars as a hitchhiker on the Perseverance rover, successfully took flight on the surface of Mars. This is the first time humanity has flown an aircraft on another planet! Since the atmosphere of Mars is less than 1% of that of Earth’s, the little helicopter’s rotors needed to be […]