Linux Articles

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 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.

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.

How I run a single quorate Proxmox VE cluster across two cheap Hetzner dedicated servers in two different datacentres, glued together with Hetzner vSwitches, a VXLAN overlay, an external QDevice for quorum, and one OPNsense firewall per node.

A walk through the MastoSum deployment pipeline: a version tag triggers Forgejo Actions, builds and signs a UBI-based image, then hands deployment to a rootless systemd/Podman host via a path unit and explicit cosign verification.

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.

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.

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.

A “control node” with a hand-curated venv works. Until it doesn’t. A colleague has different collection versions, CI installs a slightly newer Python library, and a playbook that ran yesterday now fails. Execution Environments turn the control node into a versioned container image. ansible-builder produces it, ansible-navigator runs against it, and the same artifact ships from your laptop into AAP/AWX without modification.

Hand-writing Quadlet files works for one host. For a fleet, the containers.podman collection’s native Quadlet generation lets you describe containers as Ansible state, including secrets, registry logins, and templated configuration. A small Mastodon welcome bot makes a concrete example.