For the past few days, the IT news has been abuzz with announcements from CES. As usual, I’m following them on Engadget. I must admit, that there were just a very few announcements which really caught my attention. And my favorite announcement is the most boring of them all :-) Foldable tablet by ASUS: I still use my Google Pixel C tablet almost every day. It’s almost six years old and waiting for replacement.

If you are a longtime FreeBSD user, you probably know everything I have to say, and, what’s more, you can probably add a few more points. But hopefully, there will be some Linux or even Windows users among readers who might learn something new! FreeBSD is not just a kernel but a complete operating system. It has everything to boot and use the system: networking utilities, text editors, development tools and more.

I wish I had BastilleBSD twenty years ago. I had a part-time sysadmin job - running web servers. PHP started to become popular by the turn of the century. Using jails on FreeBSD seemed to be a safe environment to run PHP-enabled web servers. However, there were no tools yet to work with jails. I had to write many scripts to build and update jails. A bit of history At first, I had a single server.

Let me share my Fedora story with you. Hopefully, it helps you to understand, why I am also promoting AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, even if I am an active Fedora and CentOS community member and contributor. Before the beginnings Someone suggested me to try Red Hat Linux in 1995 and replace Slackware Linux with it on my university server. I installed it, but I did not become a fan. And when I found the print out of the password file of my server on the wall of the Russian students’ computer lab (see: https://peter.

When I like a song and learn that it is actually a soundtrack of a movie, I usually look it up on IMDB. Often it belongs to a romantic movie, a super hero movie from Marvel or a TV show. In these cases I do not look any further. But sometimes I get curious while reading the plot or watching the trailer. I’ve found many good movies based on the soundtrack.

I love photography. I started taking photos four decades ago using a camera called Lubitel, a cheap Russian knock off of Rolleiflex. I switched from film to digital photography back in 2000, which was quite a bit earlier than most. I always treated mobile photography with strong skepticism (small sensor, too much processing, etc.) and have a dedicated camera with me everywhere. Well, the problem is with the words “always” and “everywhere”.

Can you hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 file? Most people cannot. But even if only one in ten can hear something, that means hundreds of millions of people. However, even if you can hear the difference, there is a good chance that the recording you love is not available in better than CD quality. Still, this problem is not as big as you first think. Let me show you why!

Celebrating 30 years of Linux - is 2021 finally the year of the Linux desktop? My favorite Linux insider joke is that “The year of the Linux desktop is always next year”. Each year there is a new technology which is expected to achieve breakthroughs. I was asked almost a decade ago to give a talk about this topic. I proved to my audience that the year of the Linux desktop is already here, just not the way most Linux users expect it.

Most people know me as a Linux and/or FreeBSD guy, and they are right. I use openSUSE and FreeBSD most of my time. However, I am not a fanatic who tries to solve everything using a single OS and I am curious as well. Most other operating systems I use are running in virtual machines, but I also have two computers: a Windows desktop and an old MacBook Pro. Both received a major software upgrade during the weekend.

Last week I participated the OpenPower Summit. I enjoyed it, even if I was on sick leave with a fever. There were many interesting talks, ranging from open source and education through Power10 to instruction development. All sessions were recorded. Hopefully recordings will also be shared, as I did not have the strength to visit all the sessions I wanted. And, as usual, some of the interesting talks were given in parallel.