debian no systemd

debian testing jessie was steam rolling in to stable with talks of this oh-so-wonderful systemd. it all sounded so good.. then i wanted a preview at the internals of systemd, and took arch for a spin. and o boy, what a spin that was.. for my poor head! that was when i decided not to let that garbageware into my stables. it never was (and still isn't) stable, is it? this long love affair with debian, seems to be coming to an end with this episode!

systemd - the shameful episode in debian annals - forcing the debian tc (technical committee) to make a dodgy decision without giving them proper choices or time - three of the five tc resign soon after, and the debian founder allegedly commits suicide after having received death-threats! wonder who's pulling the debian strings??

lilo

grub2 has become bloatware afaiac, and i'd been meaning to move away for a while. i just didn't have the time, patience, and redundancy on my systems.

if you've been following me, you might have noticed that i like to trash bloatware. i'm always seeking smaller packages, and removing bigger ones. bloatwares are not just unnecessary resource hogs, but security concerns (malware?) too. bigger the code base, the easier it is to hide malware traits.

jwm

i seem to have come full circle, through quite a lot of de/wm back to the rather humble jwm. and i'm quite pleasantly surprised. jwm replaces my current openbox + tint2 setup quite well, perhaps even better.. more efficient, quicker, smaller, faster, simpler and very customisable. jwm gives me everything i use in openbox and tint2 combined. i think this is the end of my openbox saga.

kernel compile debian way

1. prepare your system

verify you have sufficient diskspace. about 1g or so.
you do not need root. normal user can compile.
you do not need to compile on your own system. another system, with faster cpu, more memory, spare demand, etc can compile your kernel.

using tmpfs

i find my ram usage doesn't go much over 512k. apart from some of my trusty older friends, most of my systems have ample ram left over. how do i make more efficient usage of extra ram?

ram is fast. disk is slow. move more operations from disk to ram, depending on how ram is spare.