Weekly status update, 09/17–09/27

Alpine Linux shenaningans and more

It’s a lazy Friday afternoon here; yet another off day this week thanks to my uni’s fest. My last “weekly” update was 10 days ago, and a lot has happened since then. Let’s get right into it!

My switch to Alpine

Previously, I ran Debian with Buster/Sid repos, and ever since this happened

$ dpkg --list | wc -l
3817

# or something in that ballpark

I’ve been wanting to reduce my system’s package count.

Thus, I began my search for a smaller, simpler and lighter distro with a fairly sane package manager. I did come across Dylan Araps’ KISS Linux project, but it seemed a little too hands-on for me (and still relatively new). I finally settled on Alpine Linux. According to their website:

Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

The installation was a breeze, and I was quite surprised to see WiFi working OOTB. In the past week of my using this distro, the only major hassle I faced was getting my Minecraft launcher to run. The JRE isn’t fully ported to musl yet.¹ The solution to that is fairly trivial and I plan to write about it soon. (hint: it involves chroots)

Packaging for Alpine

On a related note, I’ve been busy packaging some of the stuff I use for Alpine – you can see my personal aports repository if you’re interested. I’m currently working on packaging Nim too, so keep an eye out for that in the coming week.

Talk selection at PyCon India!

Yes! My buddy Raghav (@_vologue) and I are going to be speaking at PyCon India about our recent smart lock security research. The conference is happening in Chennai, much to our convenience. If you’re attending too, hit me up on Twitter and we can hang!

Other

That essentially sums up the technical stuff that I did. My Russian is going strong, my reading however, hasn’t. I have yet to finish those books! This week, for sure.

Musically, I’ve been experimenting. I tried a bit of hip-hop and chilltrap, and I think I like it? I still find myself coming back to metalcore/deathcore. Here’s a list of artists I discovered (and liked) recently:

• Before I Turn
• 生 Conform 死 (couldn’t find any official YouTube video, check Spotify)
• Treehouse Burning
• Lee McKinney
• Berried Alive (rediscovered)

That’s it for now, I’ll see you next week!