Larvitz Blog
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Welcome to Larvitz Blog! I’m Christian, a Cloud 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

  • 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.

Fedora Hummingbird: Distroless, Container-Native Linux and a Slim mastogreet

Fedora Hummingbird brings the distroless container model to a full, image-based rolling operating system, and it ships a catalog of hardened language images alongside it. I rebuild the mastogreet bot’s Containerfile on top of registry.access.redhat.com/hi/python to see what changes, what shrinks, and where the commercial Red Hat Hardened Images downstream fits in.

Red Hat Offline Knowledge Portal: All the Docs, Air-Gapped, On Your Laptop

The entire Red Hat documentation site and the full Knowledgebase fit into a single OCI container that updates weekly, runs locally with a web UI and Solr search, and is included in every RHEL subscription that bundles Satellite. I have it on my laptop. I use it daily. Almost nobody I talk to knows it exists. This post is my small contribution to fixing that.

Distrobox: Different Distributions in a Box, Powered by Podman

A “real” RHEL container on a Fedora laptop, an Arch box for the AUR, an Ubuntu box for that one vendor tool that ships .deb files only, all of them with your home directory mounted, your shell history shared, and GUI apps that integrate into your desktop as if they were native. Distrobox uses Podman to make that boring instead of clever, and it pairs especially well with Atomic distributions where the host is meant to stay immutable.