When I published my blog about openSUSE a couple of weeks ago, most questions I received in private were about the Russian students I mentioned. In that blog I quickly described how my interest in information security started, about 25 years ago. This blog gives you a bit of historical background and a few more details. Historical background It was 1995. I was studying at a university, but I was already running one of the servers of the faculty.

A couple of weeks ago editors of https://opensource.com/ sent a question to contributors: What was your first programming language? Thinking about the question brought back some nice memories about the beginnings. You can read my answer below: What was your first programming language? My first ever programming language was BASIC in the early eighties. One of my relatives bought a C64 for their kids to get started with learning computers. They only used it for gaming, and I was also invited.

Most people only know that I work in IT. Some even call me a hacker – which I really appreciate :-) However, by university degree I am an environmental engineer (and English - Hungarian translator). Even if I never worked in my field, except for some student jobs, I still follow any news related to the environment closely. This is why I was very happy to learn, that my home city, Budapest, introduced bee pastures in the city.

I love listening to music. And while I am lazy (which is the popular term for considering if something is worth the effort before doing it), I still prefer listening to it in a realistic sound quality. Which sounds like a contradiction, isn’t it? Well, yes, but only if you are not ready for compromises. In this blog, I focus on technologies and software problems, and the compromises I made to keep listening to music simple but still enjoy it.

Recently connect.opensuse.org, the openSUSE member directory and social site was shut down. You can read more about the reasons on openSUSE News. I also had my profile on the site, listing many of the things I worked on during the past two and a half decades. Reading it was quite a trip down the memory lane. It also reminded me, how the name changed over the years. Did you know that SUSE was originally an acronym for Software- und System-Entwicklung?

Yes, it’s a syslog-ng blog from me, and it’s not on https://syslog-ng.com/ :-) The reason is simple: this is not a technical blog. This is my story about how I found the Turris Omnia Linux router and how this lead to working together with the Turris guys. The beginnings When I ordered my Turris Omnia, I did not know that it ran syslog-ng. All I knew that it was an ARM device and that it ran Linux.

I got my Google Pixel C tablet in early 2016, well over five years ago. I use it ever since almost every day. A big part of it is that I also have the Pixel C keyboard accessory. I prefer touch typing and funnily enough that does not work on a touch screen. It needs a real keyboard. And that keyboard died today. My Pixel C can still recognize the attached keyboard, but it does not work any more.

Why? Last week, when the latest version of Bastille, a jail (container) management system for FreeBSD was released, it also included experimental Linux support. Its author needed Ubuntu, so that was implemented. I prefer openSUSE, so with some ugly hacks I could get openSUSE up and running in Bastille. I was asked to document it in a blog. This topic does not fit the sudo or syslog-ng blogs, where I regularly contribute.

Why yet another blog? You might ask, “why yet another blog?”. A completely valid question. You can read my blogs and articles already at three different places: sudo blog syslog-ng blog opensource.com articles Still, not all topics fit these three places. The sudo and syslog-ng blogs include only blogs about the given software. And while opensource.com covers many topics, it still does not cover everything. They do fantastic editing work, but it takes time.