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!

#fedora Articles

Hardware Keys Without GnuPG: The Rust OpenPGP Card Stack, Now in FreeBSD Ports

Three small Rust tools from the OpenPGP Card project replace the GnuPG stack for my everyday hardware key work: oct to manage OpenPGP cards and Nitrokeys, oct-git to sign Git commits, and openpgp-card-ssh-agent as a hardware-backed SSH agent. I ported all three to FreeBSD and they are now in the ports tree. This article explains what each tool does, how they share PIN handling, and how I set them up on Fedora and on my FreeBSD T480.
  • Sat 31 October 2026
  • Linux

Linux Foundationals: From Silicon to Userspace - The Boot and Init Chain

The first article in the Linux Foundationals series. It traces a Fedora system from the UEFI handoff through shim and Secure Boot, MOK enrollment with mokutil, GRUB2 and Boot Loader Specification entries, the dracut initramfs and switch_root, all the way to systemd as PID 1. Then it covers units, dependencies versus ordering, targets, and how to measure and fix a slow boot with systemd-analyze.
  • Fri 16 October 2026
  • Linux

WinBoat Broke, Windows Kept Running: dockurr/windows with Plain Podman

After a cleanup broke my WinBoat installation, I brought the same Windows 11 VM back with a single rootless podman run against the old storage directory. Here is what dockurr/windows actually is, what lives in its storage folder, why NETWORK=nat quietly became passt in rootless Podman, how I verified RDP without opening a window, and a Quadlet unit to keep it around.
  • 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.

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.

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.
  • Sat 11 April 2026
  • Linux

Replacing Lenovo’s WWAN Unlock Blob with a 100-Line Bash Script

My ThinkPad T14s shipped with an Intel XMM7560 LTE modem that would not register on the network until Lenovo’s proprietary FCC-unlock helper ran. I replaced it with a roughly 100-line bash script from a ModemManager merge request, and along the way learned that the “unlock” is just a small challenge-response handshake that is easy to explain in plain shell.