SPEEDING UP THE BOOT PROCESS

In this how-to I will quickly describe how I speed up my boot from 27s to 19s using two simple changes that had no impact to my user experience at all.

CREATING A BOOTABLE USB STICK THAT CAN STILL BE USED AS NORMAL STORAGE

As someone who daily drives rolling release operating systems, having a bootable USB stick with a live install of Debian is essential. It has saved reverting broken packages and making my device bootable again at least a couple of times. However, creating a bootable USB stick usually uses the entire storage of the USB stick, which seems unnecessary given that USB sticks easily have 64GiB or more these days while live ISOs still don’t use more than 8GiB.

SETTING UP FAST DEBIAN PACKAGE BUILDS USING SBUILD, MMDEBSTRAP AND APT-CACHER-NG

In this post I will give a quick tutorial on how to set up fast Debian package builds using sbuild with mmdebstrap and apt-cacher-ng.

The usual tool for building Debian packages is dpkg-buildpackage, or a user-friendly wrapper like debuild, and while these are geat tools, if you want to upload something to the Debian archive they lack the required separation from the system they are run on to ensure that your packaging also works on a different system. The usual candidate here is sbuild. But setting up a schroot is tedious and performance tuning can be annoying. There is an alternative backend for sbuild that promises to make everything simpler: unshare. In this tutorial I will show you how to set up sbuild with this backend.

INSTALLING DEBIAN ON F2FS ROOTFS WITH DEBOOSTRAP AND SYSTEMD-BOOT

I recently got a new NVME drive. My plan was to create a fresh Debian install on an F2FS root partition with compression for maximum performance. As it turns out, this is not entirely trivil to accomplish. For one, the Debian installer does not support F2FS (here is my attempt to add it from 2021). And even if it did, grub does not support F2FS with the extra_attr flag that is required for compression support (at least as of grub 2.06).

FUN WITH THE PINETIME

When Pine64 announced the Pinetime, it was quickly clear to me, that I want to have one. I was already looking for an affordable and usable “smartwatch” to use with Gadgetbrige.

MINIDEBCONFONLINE #2: GAMING UTILITIES AND DEBIAN

After DebConf20 I didn’t plan to take part in any MiniDebConf soon, but when the topic for the MDCO got announced (“Gaming”) it was clear to me that I had to give talk about my current work in Debian, which mostly consists of packaging gaming utilities.

HOW TO CREATE A WEBSITE WITH HUGO

So for some reason, probably boredom without the part of having time, I want to rent a VPS (virtual private server). It’s actually quite cheap, and you can run your own little cloud on it.

DEBCONF20: SIMPLIFYING COPYRIGHT USING SPDX IDS

I’ve been contributing for Debian since late 2019, I submitted a talk to the DebConf20. One of the topics that annoyed me the most at that time was how tedious it was to write and read larger d/copright files.