Thursday, May 11, 2006

Old passions revisited: linux-ha and kernel hacking

Wow, long time no post. As usual. Anyway I decided to write something to mark this moment when I'm slowly going back to my most pleasurable mind games: Linux High-Availability projects and Linux kernel hacking for fun and profit. I'm slowly finding the old mailing lists, checking the archives, setting up mail filters to keep the sanity level on average, reading up on articles and whitepapers... all the pleasing activities of simple and uncompromised curiosity/creativity.

This is not to mean I'm not using OpenBSD anymore. I'm still in love with OpenBSD and still think there are lessons to learn there. Lessons of simplicity, correctness and cleanliness. My HDs will always carry an A6 partition from now on. :-) It's just that most of my friends are Linux people, and it's easier for me to find ways to participate and contribute on Linux than on OpenBSD, which is not that well known where I live. And it's also surely easier to find Linux development jobs.

Now that I have the time and resources to participate better in the "community", I've been remembering the forgotten "warm fuzzy feeling" of helping people on mailing lists, coding and simply sending patches away, just helping. Maybe that's the reason why I hadn't been feeling quite myself in the last several months. Kernelnewbies, here I come! (BTW, Happy Birthday Rik! Live long and prosper!)