today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 01, 2026

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • Hackaday ☛ Surviving The RAM Price Squeeze With Linux In-Kernel Memory Compression

    You’ve probably heard — we’re currently experiencing very high RAM prices due mostly to increased demand from AI data centers.

    If you’ve been priced out of new RAM you are going to want to get as much value out of the RAM you already have as possible, and that’s where today’s hack comes in: if you’re on a Debian system read about ZRam for how to install and configure zram-tools to enable and manage the Linux kernel facilities that enable compressed RAM by integrating with the swap-enabled virtual memory system. We’ve seen it done with the Raspberry Pi, and the concept is the same.

    Ubuntu users should check out systemd-zram-generator instead, and be aware that zram might already be installed and configured by default on your Ubuntu Desktop system.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • University of Toronto ☛ Early Linux package manager history and patching upstream source releases

    Both dpkg and RPM are very old (by Linux standards). As covered in Andrew Nesbitt's Package Manager Timeline, both date from the mid-1990s (dpkg in January 1994, RPM in September 1995). Linux itself was quite new at the time and the Unix world was still dominated by commercial Unixes (partly because the march of x86 PCs was only just starting). As a result, Linux was a minority target for a lot of general Unix free software (although obviously not for Linux specific software). I suspect that this was compounded by limitations in early Linux libc, where apparently it had some issues with standards (see eg this, also, also, also).

  • Arch Family

    • Logikal Solutions ☛ A Samba Share on Manjaro

      Manjaro is one of the better Arch based Linux distributions, but it has notorious frustrations with Samba. The latest rounds of frustration come from the fact they should have never supported Ubuntu Snaps. Snaps are insecure. Because of that insecurity Manjaro had to add apparmor. That gets us back to the classic issue with Manjaro. Developers behind the distro always view conflicts between packages as “someone else’s problem.”

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Kevin Fenzi: misc fedora bits for end of jan 2026

      Another busy week for me. There's been less new work coming in, so it's been a great chance to catch up on backlog and get things

      rdu2cc to rdu3 datacenter move cleanup

      In december, just before the holidays almost all of our hardware from the old rdu2 community cage was moved to our new rdu3 datacenter. We got everything that was end user visible moved and working before the break, but that still left a number of things to clean up and fully bring back up. So, this last week I tried to focus on that.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • CNX Software ☛ M5Stack AI-8850 LLM Accelerator M.2 Kit offers an alternative to Raspberry Pi Hey Hi (AI) HAT+ 2

      M5Stack has launched the “AI-88502 LLM Accelerator M.2 Kit 8GB Version” based on its LLM-8850 M.2 card with a 24 TOPS Axera AX8850 SoC, and offering an alternative to the Raspberry Pi Hey Hi (AI) HAT+ 2, supporting both LLM and Hey Hi (AI) vision workloads. The kit is comprised of the M.2 card and a Raspberry Pi-HAT 8850 board with USB PD power input for the card and Raspberry Pi 5, a 16-pin PCIe connector and 40-pin GPIO header for connection to the SBC, as well as accessories.

    • Hackaday ☛ Changing Print Layer Patterns To Increase Strength

      The problem, as [NeedItMakeIt] identified with a thermal camera, is that laying down walls around a print gives the extruded plastic time to cool of. This means new plastic is being deposited onto an already-cooled surface, which reduces bonding strength. Instead, he used an aligned rectilinear fill pattern to print the solid parts. In this pattern, the printer is usually extruding filament right next to the filament it just deposited, which is still hot and therefore adheres better. The extrusion pattern is also aligned vertically, which might improve inter-layer bonding at the transition point.