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  1. Fedora Toolbox with custom container images

    Recently I’ve been using Fedora Toolbox a lot for development to have a reproducible development enviroment across my different systems. To make it easier to have the same container on multiple machines I’ve created my own Dockerfile:

    Updated February 6, 2021
  2. Creating an Alpine Developer Environment for Fedora Silverblue

    Article by editor Leo [email protected]

    As readers know I’m a developer for Alpine Linux, it is a very nice simple distribution for running containers.

    Unforunately it is not very nice when using GNOME, it has less developers than other distros and its integration isn’t as good as it is in the more popular distros like Debian and Fedora.

    With that in mind I have decided to test Fedora Silverblue, a flavour of Fedora with GNOME that uses OSTree to provide reliable upgrades and rollbacks of the operating system, allowing the user to overlay their own packages on top and using container technologies (like podman and toolbox) to provide an alternative to installing packages onto the system itself.

    In this article I’ll describe the process of creating an Alpine Linux image to be used in podman and accessed via SSH or podman exec, while taking into account the peculirarities of working from inside toolbox.

    Updated December 27, 2020
  3. APKBUILD.vim: updates, new stuff, better

    Article by Leo [email protected]

    This is an update on APKBUILD.vim: filetype, plugins, syntax and linters for APKBUILDs on vim, as of now APKBUILD.vim is under very active constant development, and it will remain this way until all features have been implemented and there is nothing else to remove.

    In fact the development is so fast that the article was outdated the moment it arrived. So lets catch up on everything that happened until 247b647ba47cb9a091020e4e5c4df7894cc05b1d.

    If you wish to follow along then here are the commits.

    Updated November 3, 2020
  4. Setting up Pantalaimon for usage with Matrix clients and using panctl

    Article by editor Leo [email protected]

    Pantalaimon is a End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) aware proxy daemon that connects to a Matrix server and handles sending and receiving messages. It also handles verifying sessions, verifying or blacklisting devices, and exporting/importing session keys.

    Its main use-case is to provide clients that have not yet fully implemented some of the most important Matrix’s features, namely verifying devices and End-to-End encryption, a good man-in-the-middle that does it transparently for you.

    Today we will set up a local pantalaimon daemon and log in with Fractal, the GNOME client for Matrix. We will also learn how to use the panctl program from Pantalaimon to verify the session we started with Fractal.

    Updated November 1, 2020
  5. APKBUILD.vim: filetype, plugins, syntax and linters for APKBUILDs on vim

    Article by editor Leo [email protected]

    The Linux distro I contribute to, Alpine Linux, uses build recipes called APKBUILDs. They are shell scripts but with context-aware variables that can affect the final result of package. APKBUILDs are subject to policies that only apply to Alpine Linux and its packaging system abuild.

    Vim is a text editor used by many of our developers and users use for editing APKBUILDs. But while vim has a filetype for shellscripts, it is insufficient to provide syntax, plugins, indentation and other nice to have features that are specific to the context of an APKBUILD.

    In light of that I took upon myself to write a complete implementation of a vim filetype for APKBUILDs.

    Meet APKBUILD.vim.

    Updated October 30, 2020
  6. Flatpak-ing Nibbler, a Leela Chess Zero Interface and some Neural Network Engines

    Article by editor Leo [email protected]

    The Machine Learning terminology here is simplified and will have a loss quality, but not pertinent to the point.

    Nibbler is a Graphical User Interface to analyse chess games using mainly the Leela Chess Zero chess engine (software that plays chess and provides an evaluation of positions). It is written specifically for using Leela.

    Nibbler is written specifically to make use of Leela’s output. While traditional engines ouptut centipawns to indicate how much hundredths of a pawn either side is ahead. Leela outputs what it believes what is the Win, Draw and Loss chance for the current side, along with how certain it is of its evaluation and other information like how many moves left until the games reaches its conclusion.

    Unfortunately for us it is written in Electron which makes it very hard to package for musl systems like Alpine Linux which I use and am a developer of. Fortunately there is flatpak which is a godsend for packaging heavyweight apps, so lets go package it.

    Updated October 30, 2020