sda.io

Mike Sampson

Linux Systems Administrator

About

Archives

Feed

01 Apr 2014

Octopress and the Eudyptula Challenge

I have been really slack with updating my Blog. Three posts last year and this is my first post this year. I have been quite busy with a new job, getting used to a new city, etc. I don't feel too guilty.

Octopress!

A couple of weekends ago I converted my blog from Wordpress to Octopress. Octopress is a static blog generator which uses Jekyll. The conversion went fairly smoothly. I used exitwp to export my posts and switched to Disqus for comments. There are some formatting issues I need to fix, mainly with code blocks and links, however overall things look pretty good. I like being able to use markdown for my posts.

Octopress has a development server builtin which makes previewing content easy. Just run rake preview and this will spawn a Webrick server that watches your source files for changes and automatically regenerates the preview when required.

Apart from cleaning up the imported posts I would like to look at tweaking the theme a little. The default theme is quite nice and looks great on any size screen though it would be nice to make it a little distinctive.

Eudyptula Challenge

I came across the Eudyptula Challenge on Greg K. Hartman's Google+ page. Not sure who is organising it though I am finding it fun. Unfortunately my C is quite rusty1. I'm currently on Task 15 and have been busy compiling kernels, writing modules and kernel patches. Kernel patches have included adding files to /proc/<PID>/ and adding a new syscall.

For one of the tasks I found myself wanting to be able to quickly boot a kernel with a minimal initramfs for testing. I wrote a couple of simple wrapper scripts for generating the initramfs and booting the kernel using kvm with console output going directly into the terminal for easy cut and paste. These scripts were based on a blog post by Stefan Hajnoczi and can be found here.

1

Rusty as in, I am out of practice. Not that it looks like it was coded by Rusty.

Copyright © 2018 - Mike Sampson - Powered by cobalt.rs & Skeleton