In the first part of this pair, we built .deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu. Now it is the Red Hat family’s turn — RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, AlmaLinux, and, by extension, openSUSE: we will create .rpm packages from scratch, from the spec file to our own dnf repository, covering rpmbuild, rpmlint, mock, and GPG signing. How RPM works Unlike … Read more
AI agents that live in your terminal have become a commodity — but an agent that learns from its own experience is still rare. Hermes Agent, from Nous Research, is exactly that: an open source agent (MIT, written in Python) with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from the tasks it … Read more
Three Ubuntu nodes, one Galera, SST with mariabackup. It is not asynchronous replication: every node accepts writes and the majority decides who stays up. Two nodes are not enough — if one goes down, the other is left alone, without a majority. Below is the three-node cluster from the galera_new_cluster package, on Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, with backup a … Read more
OTRS started as Open Ticket Request System. Then it became Open Technology Real Services, and later just the four letters. What has not changed in twenty-five years is the core: Perl, queues, and email turning into tickets. In 2026, the commercial name belongs to EasyVista; the free code lives on in forks. Below is the timeline, without the folklore of … Read more
GLPI is the French acronym for Gestionnaire Libre de Parc Informatique — the free IT asset manager. It began in 2003 at the INDEPNET association, became a Teclib’ product in 2015, and on 1 October 2025 reached version 11. In June 2026, the stable community release is 11.0.8; version 10.0 still … Read more
Debian 12 ships PHP 8.2. Ubuntu 24.04 ships 8.3. Debian 13, 8.4. Ubuntu 26.04, 8.5. A real host needs all three at once: the old WordPress site, the new Laravel application, and the cron CLI. The distribution repository does not allow it. Ondřej Surý’s does. nginx comes from nginx.org — stable, pinned, without mixing … Read more
Synacor no longer provides free FOSS binaries. Anyone who wants Zimbra 10.1 on Ubuntu downloads a community tarball: maldua/zimbra-foss or bTactic builds. Below: a clean installation on Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 LTS, DNS, install.sh, and the first zmcontrol status. This is not an official Synacor build; it is the tarball the forum uses when the … Read more
Vibe coding in the CLI is fast until the agent forgets what you agreed on yesterday, rereads the entire repository with grep, and clicks the cookie banner instead of Save. Four open source tools — agent-browser, OpenSpec, codebase-memory-mcp, and ai-memory — fill precisely those gaps: the browser, the agreement before the code, … Read more
Rust began as a hobby in 2006: Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla engineer, was annoyed by his building’s elevator failing because of C software. The name came from the fungus — “over-engineered for survival.” Mozilla sponsored it in 2009. The public 0.1 release came on January 20, 2012. Version 1.0 followed on May 15, 2015. … Read more
Zimbra is the Ajax groupware platform that wanted to be Exchange for Linux. It began as LiquidSys in 2003, became Zimbra Inc. on July 26, 2005, and took its name from the Talking Heads song I Zimbra. In September 2007, Yahoo bought it for US$ 350 million. Then came VMware, Telligent, and Synacor. On the 31 … Read more
