today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 16, 2026

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • arXiv ☛ [2601.12811] Docker Does Not Guarantee Reproducibility

    The reproducibility of software environments is a critical concern in modern software engineering, with ramifications ranging from the effectiveness of collaboration workflows to software supply chain security and scientific reproducibility. Containerization technologies like Docker address this problem by encapsulating software environments into shareable filesystem snapshots known as images. While Docker is frequently cited in the literature as a tool that enables reproducibility in theory, the extent of its guarantees and limitations in practice remains under-explored.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

    [...] We share details on what it is like to install and run d77void in our Feature Story. While Void has a smaller family tree than Debian, Fedora, and Arch, its unusual combination of technologies makes it an interesting base and a clean starting point for spins. [...]

  • Hackaday ☛ DR-DOS Is Back, But Not Quite As We Knew It

    He’s gone so far as to purchase the trademark, so this re-creation is the official DR-DOS. In any case [CheeseWeezel]’s DR-DOS is considered version 9.0, and is currently in Beta. The clean-sheet re-implementation of DR-DOS’s API was sadly necessary due to the rather tortured history of the IP after DR was bought by Novel, who sold DR-DOS to Caldera, who briefly open-sourced the code before retracting the license and selling on. Some of you may remember a controversy where a previous rights holder, DR DOS INC, was found purloining FreeDOS code in violation of the GPL. Perhaps because of that, [CheeseWeezel] isn’t using any old code, and isn’t open-sourcing what he’s done. Right now, the beta of DR-DOS 9 is free for non-commercial use, but as is standard for EULAs, that could change at any time without warning. [CheeseWeezel] is still working full compatibility, but at this point it at least runs DOOM.

  • BSD

    • Dave Gauer ☛ OpenBSD Blog #13: Moving ratfactor.com to OpenBSD.amsterdam

      I can say this now that it’s over: That VM was running Slackware 14.2. You read that right, I was serving my website from a distribution of Linux that was released in 2016, TEN YEARS ago. Of course, I had every intention of upgrading the OS, and, later, of moving to OpenBSD. But life kept happening and Slackware kept working.

      I don’t think I had a security event. I didn’t see anything concerning in the traffic or logs (monitorable externally). I’m sure I could have salvaged it somehow.

      But since I was planning to move anyway, I’ve simply embarked on an emergency crash dive into OpenBSD and a new VM host.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Jonathan Kamens ☛ It should not be this hard to run SQL queries on some data – Something better to do

      I’m doing some simple analysis of some data at work in a spreadsheet with about 8,000 rows, essentially to decide which rows I care about and which I can ignore. My first attempt at this involved many iterations of “build a filter filter in LibreOffice Calc to match certain rows I know I can ignore, delete those rows, resetting the filter, repeat.”

      After several hours of this I got myself down to about 4,000 rows remaining before realizing that some rows I’d decided to delete quite a ways earlier in the process, I really should have kept. Oh, well, time to start over.