I must not have enough Slack

So, as I am wont to do from time to time, I became sidetracked during my plans for world domination. It all started with the private cloud part of my journey. I have been planning for months on using NextCloud to host my own private cloud on my VPS, but it all blew up in my face - I could not get the install to work on FreeBSD. I want my private cloud to run on FreeBSD because I believe it is a superior server - and also, because of ZFS.

In a last minute scramble last weekend, I discovered Seafile. Seafile is a Dropbox replacement written in Python (another project near and dear to my heart) that provides both a web interface and a WebDAV interface. That WebDAV part allows for highly integrated remote sync with both iOS and Android devices, which would - once complete - allow me to seamlessly move files and pictures from my phone, tablet, Mac, and computers to the cloud. My cloud.

As I had done no research or planning ahead of time, my Seafile adventure continues - but I did get it working with Nginx and CertBot. I need to fine tune the Nginx config to get the web portal totally working.....

...which leads me to Slack. See, I also set up a Samsung N120 netbook to use as my out-of-band cloud portal specifically to use for my project. It did not have to be fancy, but it did need to be able to SSH into my cloud servers. As it is a 32-bit machine, and as I wanted variety, I loked for a Linux distro - only to find that many of them have all but abandoned 32-bit machines. There was Debian 32-bit, or a variety of half-baked, unmaintained attempts at a distro.

And then - I remembered Slackware.

I like Slackware a lot. It is a source-based distribution, and does not presume so much about what you may or may not want on your system. For this project, it was perfect. Or so I thought.... turns out, many things I needed had to be compiled from source. That is not a problem on a modern CPU, or even a desktop class 32-bit CPU. But on a Intel Atom N270 ? Nah. Python 3 took roughly two hours to build, Ruby 2.6.6 and Ruby 2.7.1 both took roughly two hours - each - as well. A few apps that had PyQt5 dependencies took a ton of time as well, and PyQt5 itself built in 4 hours and 31 minutes.

But what finally broke me - even after everything else worked - was Midori. All I wanted was a small lightweight browser that could run on this machine - which currently has 1 GB RAM. I can upgrade it to 2 GB, and no, I am not running Crysis or Minecraft anytime soon. But Midori had to build WebKit, and that - along with all the needed dependencies - took 21 hours and 45 minutes to build this past weekend.

The good news ? The netbook has had one hell of a stress test. The bad news ? I needed to switch over to FreeBSD to be productive.

More to the point, I needed FreeBSD to be productive with this netbook without Debian. And by extension, Systemd. 2 million+ lines of code all stacking on top of PID 1 is not my idea of a lean, efficient environment for IoT and out-of-band access to cloud resources. While both Slackware and FreeBSD can offer a lean, mean, austere environment - FreeBSD has binaries that are ready to go.

In the meantime, I moved the blog files over to my Mac - three cheers for plaintext ! - and continued on from there. Once I finish getting the screenshots moved over, I will have some fun before-and-after pics to show off.

As for Slackware ? I believe I need to go back over the Principia Discordia and get more slack, as clearly, I did not have enough.