My AI mini workstation from HP has seen some non-AI workloads this weekend. I installed Capture One for photo editing and a couple of software synthesizers. And realized along the way that while built-in speakers are nice, high-end audio is a lot better! :-) For months, I have been listening to music on devices that are designed for speech: a pair of Jabra headphones and the speakers of my various laptops.

Once I got hardware-accelerated AI working under Linux on my AI mini workstation from HP, my next goal was to make it easier to use. From this blog, you can read about my initial experiments with Open WebUI on Fedora Linux. Open WebUI talking about central log collection :-) Everything in containers As Open WebUI is not yet available as a package in Fedora, my initial approach was to use containers.

I have an aging, but fully functional MacBook. I bought it for syslog-ng testing, but I also use for watching movies. Homebrew no more fully supports old, Intel-based Macs. This blog helps to compile the latest syslog-ng release on these old, but otherwise functional machines. Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/compiling-syslog-ng-on-an-old-mac syslog-ng logo

Ever since I bought my AI mini workstation from HP, my goal was to run hardware accelerated artificial intelligence workloads in a Linux environment. Read more to learn how things turned out on Ubuntu and Fedora! I have been using various AI tools for a while now. Generating pictures about some impossible situations, like a dinosaur climbing the Hungarian parliament building, finding information where a simple web search is useless, or explaining syslog-ng code to me.

Last week, I wrote about my initial FreeBSD experiences on my new toy, an AI workstation from HP. FreeBSD runs lightning fast on it, but the desktop was somewhat problematic. Well, I made lots of improvements this week! A bit of debugging While there are still some rough edges, there have been tons of improvements since last week. I do not have plans to use FreeBSD on the desktop in the long term, but still, I just could not believe that the FreeBSD GUI is this problematic on this device.

I often hear, even at security conferences that “no central log collection here” or “we have something due to compliance”. Central logging is more than just compliance. It makes logs easier to use, available and secure, thus making your life easier in operations, security, development, but also in marketing, sales, and so on. What are logs and what is central log collection? Most operating systems and applications keep track of what they are doing.

In the past few weeks, I installed five different operating systems on my latest toy: an AI workstation from HP. I love playing with OSes, but my main goal with the new machine is to learn various aspects of AI. I took my first steps in this adventure on Windows. Of course, you might ask: why on Windows? Well, it’s easy: because it’s easy… :-) There is nothing to install or configure there, as Windows has multiple built-in apps that support AI and can utilize the NPU (hardware-accelerated AI) support of the AMD Ryzen 395 chip.

The March syslog-ng newsletter is now on-line: Version 4.11.0 of syslog-ng is now available Using OpenSearch data streams in syslog-ng Changes in the syslog-ng Elasticsearch destination It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2026-03-4-11-0-release-opensearch-elasticsearch syslog-ng logo

Finally, I also installed FreeBSD on my new AI focused mini workstation from HP. I even managed to install GNOME on the machine with minimal effort. However, I also ran into many problems. So far it’s a mixed experience. Installation went smoothly, FreeBSD 15.0 was up and running in no time. However, FreeBSD is not found by any of the Linux boot managers I use (different flavors of GRUB), and it’s not in the EFI boot menu either.

The data sheet of my new AI-focused mini workstation from HP does not mention Fedora, but I could install it just fine. I expected this though, because when I asked around about Linux support and hardware AI acceleration for AMD Ryzen 39X chips, all responses came from Fedora users… :-) Installing Fedora on the HP Z2 Mini was a smooth experience, even though I hadn’t used the graphical installer for ages.