Larvitz Blog
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Welcome to Larvitz Blog! I’m Christian, a Senior Consultant by day and FreeBSD enthusiast by night, with over 20 years in enterprise IT. Here I write about FreeBSD jails, PF firewalling, self-hosting, Linux system administration, and anything that’s cleanly engineered. Most articles are hands-on guides born from running my own infrastructure, from dual-stack networking and Ansible automation to hosting a Mastodon instance on FreeBSD.

Have a question or want to discuss something? Find me on the Fediverse at @Larvitz@burningboard.net. I’m always happy to chat!

Linux Articles

  • Thu 03 September 2026
  • Linux

Running Citrix Workspace on Fedora with Rootless Podman

Citrix Workspace is an application I need but do not want woven into my workstation. I put its official Debian package in a disposable rootless Podman container, then pass through just enough X11, PipeWire, GPU, and webcam plumbing to open downloaded ICA files from Fedora’s file manager.
  • Sun 16 August 2026
  • Linux

Crawlfest: Building a Terminal Roguelike in Rust

For a few months now I have been building a terminal roguelike in Rust in the spirit of ADOM and NetHack. This article is about the technical groundwork: why ratatui and legion instead of a game engine, how the four map generators work (rooms, cellular-automata caverns, hand-drawn prefabs, and a hybrid of the last two), how field of view and A* pathfinding hook into my own map type through two traits, how content lives in RON files instead of code, and how save games avoid serialising the ECS at all.
  • Wed 12 August 2026
  • Linux

Chezmoi and Git: Dotfiles Without Pretending Every Machine Is the Same

A Git repository is a good place for configuration files, but it does not know where they belong, which permissions they need, or why a work laptop and a home server should differ. Chezmoi adds that missing layer. This is how I use both tools to manage fish, Git, Neovim, GnuPG, OpenSSH and Atuin, including the recovery command for the inevitable day I edit a live file directly.
  • Mon 03 August 2026
  • Linux

Sane Development Environments for Ansible Automation Code

Ansible content deserves something better than a laptop full of loosely related pip packages. My preferred setup puts the editor on RHEL, the Red Hat-packaged Ansible toolchain in a versioned Dev Container, and Podman underneath both development and Execution Environment workflows. The result is reproducible without pretending that upstream community bits and supported downstream product content are the same thing.

Android Development on Fedora 44 Without Installing an Android Development Stack

I wanted to build a native Android companion for Kollect without filling Fedora 44 with a JDK, Gradle, Android SDKs, build tools, emulator images, and assorted mobile-development debris. My complete Android toolchain now lives in an Ubuntu 24.04 Distrobox instead. It builds the APK, talks to my phone over wireless ADB, runs the Android emulator, and even lets Kollect enrich links for free with Gemini Nano through Android AICore.

Kollect: The Native KDE Link Collector I Built for Myself

Kollect is a small native Plasma 6 application I wrote to get interesting links out of browser tabs and into a durable collection. It uses Kirigami and C++ on the desktop, plain TOML files by default, optional multi-user server storage, OpenRouter-powered metadata, KWallet for secrets, and a proper Fedora RPM. The source is not public, but the design is worth documenting.

bcachefs on RHEL 10.2: The Kernel That Said No

A few months ago I bullied RHEL onto a ZFS root and it worked. This time I tried to get bcachefs running on RHEL 10, lost a whole evening to compile errors, and the kernel won. Here is the autopsy, plus what bcachefs actually is and why an out-of-tree filesystem and a conservative enterprise kernel are a terrible couple.