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.

Committed users compile syslog-ng for themselves from source. However, most of us wait until a software is available as an easy-to-install package for our operating system of choice. In this blog post, you will see an overview on the available packages for syslog-ng 4.11.0. Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-4-11-0-packaging-status syslog-ng logo

The data sheet of my new AI focused mini workstation from HP mentions Ubuntu 24.04 as the supported Linux distribution. I have tried that, but I could not get the installer to run. However, 25.10 installed without any problems, even from an openSUSE branded USB stick :-) Only the chameleon works with this machine:-) I must admit that I’m not an Ubuntu fan, but installed it anyway, as Ubuntu is the “official” Linux distro for this machine.

Version 4.11.0 of syslog-ng is now available. The main attraction is the brand new Kafka source, but there are many other smaller features and improvements, as well. Before you begin If you happen to use Debian, Ubuntu or the RHEL family of operating systems (RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, Oracle Linux, etc.) then ready-to-use packages are already available as part of the release process. For details, check the README in the syslog-ng source code repository on GitHub: https://github.

Last week I introduced you to my new toy at home: an AI focused mini workstation from HP. It arrived with Windows pre-installed, but of course I also wanted to have Linux on the box. Documentation mentions that I have to disable secure boot and make a few more changes before installing Linux. I did all the suggested BIOS changes before installing Linux. The data sheet mentions Ubuntu 24.04 as the supported Linux distribution.