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Into the Void

I gave up on using OpenBSD on the HP Mini 210. It’s got an Intel Atom N450 which runs at 1.6GHz and… It’s just not enough. Firefox was borderline unusable.

I did, however, quite like OpenBSD as an OS. It was much simpler than Debian, which seems to have grown many bells and whistles over the years as well as all Linux’s usual endlessly re‐invented subsystems1.

So, I thought I’d try something a bit lighter and more old‐school UNIXy. After searching around a bit I decided to try my luck with Void Linux, which uses RunIt instead of systemd. It’s a bit different from what I’ve previously been used to with ancient versions of Solaris or even Debian pre‐systemd, but it’s pretty close. I’m quite happy with it so far. The biggest thing that caught me out is that it doesn’t come with many pretty standard services, like a mail server or even a cron daemon, so you have to install them yourself. I’ve opted for Dragonfly Mail Daemon, which apparently originates from Dragonfly BSD, and fcron which seems to cover the use cases I’d found quite handy on systemd.

I’ve also been fiddling with Ansible to configure everything so I can redo it quickly. I’d already been working that way for server configuration, and a bit for my desktop machines, but I think I’m properly getting the hang of it now.

And who knew XDM was actually configurable!?

So yeah, my exploration of OpenBSD wasn’t that succesfull, but it did help clarify what I’m wanting from my personal computers, and who knows, maybe I’ll try using it on servers soon.

  1. Seriously, when I started with Linux audio used OSS, which wasn’t up the task, so they invented ALSA, which fixed all the problems and provides an OSS compatibility layer. But ALSA wasn’t up to the task, so they invented PulseAudio, which solved all the problems, and ran on top of ALSA, so you still get compatbility with ALSA and OSS. But PulseAudio was awful, so they’ve now invented PipeWire, which runs on top of ALSA and provides PulseAudio compatibility, so you have OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio and PipeWire, all with their own interfaces, and… I honestly don’t know, I don’t really play audio on my computers any more… ↩︎