With all the noise lately about Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) and the lack of patched kernels from Slackware’s “Benevolent Dictator for Life”, I decided it was time to roll up the sleeves and get it done. Since Slackware doesn’t have a “sophisticated” build system and all that grease, it’s a trivial matter to step up to the plate and take responsibility for your own system. I’ll be using “vanilla-kernelversion” as my tag for the kernel and initrd. Also notice that I build my kernels as a normal user.

In an attempt to have a WordPress theme optimized for running on the Raspberry Pi 3, I went through the hurdles of writing my own theme. Among my goals was to create something entirely free of third party CSS and JavaScript frameworks. Actually, I wanted a theme free from JavaScript altogether and in my opinion there are already more than enough websites built on the Bootstrap framework (you’ll recognize them, they all look the same).

I got a call last week from a client that was having some issues with retrieving email from a Dovecot IMAP server. The client was connecting over TLS and was using an Apple mail client. Upon checking the mailserver log, I was greeted with a flood of rather vicious looking errors. I’m not gonna post the entire backtrace since its rather long, but you’ll get the idea.

My RPi3 just missed the six month uptime mark due to a power failure that also caused some minor data corruption. Interestingly, the RPi powered up before the network equipment was online and thus failed to synchronize the time. I didn’t notice immediately but things go sour quickly when a Internet connected device believes the date to be Jan 1 1970.

I was playing around with an open source video editor named OpenShot when I suddenly felt a familiar shiver going down my spine. I felt the unmistakable presence of evil, and it was coming from inside my own computer. ‘You will know me as the Google Analytics measurement protocol’ the beast answered upon detection.

On my Windows 10 computers I always work with a standard account and keep a separate administrator account. This provides some additional security as any operation needing administrative privileges will require an administrator’s approval.

As of Wednesday, August 24, 2016, Slackware ARM is out of retirement and ready to power your modern ARM devices. The Slackware ARM maintainer has made the decision to pick up development again and go ahead with a hard float port. It was announced three months ago that a hard float port was in the works, and today it’s powering my Raspberry Pi 2. Unfortunately the hard float release has been mostly ignored by the mainstream teach sites, but it’s definitely on top of my list. Get up to date with the latest development at arm.slackware.com.

After reading the latest horror stories depicting the Windows 10 anniversary update as a merciless destroyer of everything Linux, I was somewhat concerned before applying the latest and greatest from Redmond. Sure, it would make absolutely no sense if Microsoft was actually deleting data from their customers devices, but mistakes do happen so I made sure to back everything up before upgrading.

First up was my primary Windows 10 / Slackware 14.2 based notebook, an ASUS G771JM with 256GB SSD and 1 TB HDD running under UEFI/GPT with secure boot disabled.

After four months of hosting this WordPress blog on a RPi3 I have yet to experience a single issue. No filesystem errors, no kernel oops’s and no hard freezes. Definitely an enjoyable change of pace from the preceding twelve months of hosting this site on a Raspberry Pi 2.

I’ve not been doing any overclocking whatsoever on this device and I believe that to be the decisive factor when it comes to improved stability. My old RPi2 is pretty much useless at this point and I’m guessing it simply got burned out before its time. As for storage, I’m still using a SanDisk MicroSDHC Ultra UHS-I 32GB card.

Configuring and using a generic kernel on EFI-based platforms with ELILO is pretty much an identical exercise to using LILO with legacy systems. Slackware provides you with a mkinitrd generator script to assist in making an initrd image to boot your system.