Who would have thought, right? :-)

After installing my certificate from Let’s Encrypt last week I was immediately confronted with the fact that I had made the wrong choice in regard to key sizes. By using a 4096-bit private key I was relying too heavily on the RPi2’s CPU. This became abundantly clear as page load times were increased by 500 – 1000ms.

So you’re hosting your own WordPress blog on a Raspberry Pi 2 and want to join the HTTPS everywhere movement to ensure optimal privacy for your visitors. That’s great, but what kind of performance penalty can you expect as CPU intensive tasks are hardly a favorite with the RPi2. Is the extra computational cost of encrypting data and doing handshakes going to significantly slow down your site?

I had some issues today with the Akonadi server failing on my Slackware 14.1 box at the office, so I resorted to killing X for a quick revival. However, issuing startx only resulted in the following errors:

I woke up this morning to a mail informing me that WordPress had been upgraded to version 4.4.1. Shortly after I tried to access my blog to verify that everything had gone smoothly, but unfortunately my webserver showed no sign of life. Since I’ve previously had a few hard learned lessons with the RPi2, that made me a bit uneasy. A couple of hours later though, as I was reviewing my logs, the problem became pretty obvious:

Some big news was revealed through the Slackware Current (pre-release) changelog today as the switch from udev to eudev was finally announced.

So the last report from my Slackware based RPi2 hosting project ended on a cliffhanger (pun intended), as I was just recovering after suffering data corruption, the occasional kernel panic and random errors. Suspecting the instability might be caused by my overly optimistic approach to overclocking and overvolting, I decided to turn things down a few notches.

Excited by the prospect of hosting my blog on the new Raspberry Pi 2, I decided lately to wave goodbye to the local datacenter and unleash a Slackware Linux box into the wild (full story here).

Everything went (mostly) without a hitch until I wanted to get back in sync with the Slackware-current tree. After applying the available updates and issuing a reboot, the system seemed operational and nothing from the logs gave any indication of imminent failure.

Two weeks ago, I decided to move this blog from its old hosting and deploy it on a Raspberry Pi 2. The geek in me could no longer resist the urge to discover if a $35 worth computer could replace the need for commercial hosting. Besides, what a great opportunity to finally get my hands on Slackware’s official ARM port.

No additional software is required on a full Slackware 14.1 install.
Slackware 14.1 ships with KDE 4.10.5.

I usually prefer VirtualBox for my non-commercial virtualization needs, but since I already had VMware Player 6.0.2 installed on a Windows 8.1 64-bit host I decided go with it for my Slackware Linux 64-bit guest.

I did a review of Slackware Linux 14.0 a year ago and I was unsure as to whether I should make another one or not. There is rarely much change from a user point of view between different Slackware releases, and I expected to end up ripping off most of my previous review. Speaking of which, for a more well rounded assessment of Slackware Linux, please check out the Slackware 14.0 review.

During the easter holiday my Dell Studio 1735 died suddenly without hope of resurrection. This left me with my Windows 7 based gaming rig for all computer related endeavors.

A while back I bought the USB-N13 wireless adapter which slogan is: “simply insert, simply connect”. Well, after connecting the adapter I was able to detect available networks, but I was not able to establish a connection.

It has been an interesting year for slackers around the world as their favorite distro has been dragged through the mud and hung out to dry.
As usual, things blow out of proportions on the interwebs and at the break of dawn the Slackware rises once more.