Linux

🤔 What’s a syscall, anyway? Image credits: Mike Norris via Pexels Every time your program reads a file, writes to a socket, or allocates memory, at some point it has to ask the kernel to actually do it. That ask is a syscall, the narrow, well defined boundary where userspace code crosses into the kernel. write(), read(), open(), mmap(), these aren’t just library functions, they’re the entire vocabulary your program has for talking to the outside world. Everything else, fwrite, Python’s file.write(), std::fs::File, is just a wrapper around this same handful of kernel entry points. ...

📦 That new package smell We’ve all been there: you see a shiny new app on GitHub and you want to “unwrap” it immediately. But in the traditional Linux world, opening a package often feels like opening a box of glitter in your living room—before you know it, dependencies are scattered everywhere, and you’re still finding weird library versions in /usr/lib three months later. This is why I’ve started reaching for the Flatpak. It’s like an unboxing experience where the box stays a box. You get all the “goodies” inside, but the mess stays contained. Let’s see what happens when we tear off the shrink-wrap. ...

🧂 Salt without the sudo Follow-up from the previous post, today we are going to put our systemd-managed containers to work and use them for some useful tasks. The idea is to set up an environment to learn how the configuration management Salt works, and play/hack around with it, without even needing root or sudo rights. After all, in the infra-world, the Salt must flow! So we will setup two containers, one as a salt server and the other as a salt “minion” (representing the machine that will be configured via salt). ...

🦎 Hi geekos! If you’ve been running containers on your Leap or Tumbleweed machine, you probably started with podman run commands. Maybe you moved to Docker Compose files to manage stacks. Those are great tools, but they have a limitation, as they don’t integrate natively with systemd, your operating system’s init system. When your server reboots, do your containers start back up automatically? If a container crashes, does it restart? How do you view its logs alongside your system journal? ...