Welcome to the ~chris. Now is probably a good time for me to admit that doing this with wordpress would have been the right way to do this at the beginning. I’m a software engineer who works with open source systems. This journal is a place for me to write about some of the things that I’ve been doing with open source. My goal is to get to a level of detail that allows you, the reader, to be able to take on the same projects.
I’m old school as far as open source is concerned. I don’t mind using the source code and would rather not play with binaries. This probably comes from the fact that I’m a developer first and a sysadmin second so I’m comfortable with C/C++, make, etc. That preference leads me to use FreeBSD on i386 and NetBSD on sparc/sparc64 as my operating systems of choice. In most cases the descriptions here should be okay even if you prefer Linux but you may have to get your hands dirty on the occasional source rpm.