Foss

It Died: An Update

Update: I’ve had an offer of a used workstation that I’m following up. I would still appreciate any donations to go towards costs for cables/converters/upgrades needed with the new system but the hard part should hopefully be out the way now. (:

Thanks for all the responses I’ve received about the death of my desktop PC. As I updated in my previous post, I find it unlikely that I will have to orphan any of my packages as I believe that I should be able to get a new workstation soon.

It Died

On Sunday, in my weekly report on my free software activities, I wrote about how sustainable my current level of activites are. I had identified the risk that the computer that I use for almost all of my free software work was slowly dying. Last night it entered an endless reboot loop and subsequent efforts to save it have failed.

I cannot afford to replace this machine and my next best machine has half the cores, half the RAM and less than half of the screen real estate. As this is going to be a serious hit to my productivity, I need to seriously consider if I am able to continue to maintain the number of packages I currently do in Debian.

Easy APT Repository

The PATHspider software I maintain as part of my work depends on some features in cURL and in PycURL that have only just been mereged or are still awaiting merge. I need to build a docker container that includes these as Debian packages, so I need to quickly build an APT repository.

A Debian repository can essentially be seen as a static website and the contents are GPG signed so it doesn’t necessarily need to be hosted somewhere trusted (unless availability is critical for your application). I host my blog with Netlify, a static website host, and I figured they would be perfect for this use case. They also support open source projects.

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz