I shared some thoughts earlier about building Moments. In simple terms, it’s like Bear Blog, but focused on photos. I expected a handful of people to get ...
New York, June 25, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists. In all countries and conflicts, CPJ removes names from...
Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian Posted on: 2026-06-24 Modified on: 2026-06-28Categories: LinuxTags: Debian , ARM , Systemd , OpenRCTL;DRI'm not a fan of systemd but I'm not against its use either. AKA if it works for you then it's ok.My case though is more of a mix between curiosity and discomfort. Curiosity of how init systems works and discomfort of how systemd integrates things or new features.I'm aware that it works well for most of its use cases (I've been using it since its early days) and also I agree that systemd breaks all KISS philosphy principles, but other projects do it as well, right?So why the discomfort?Well it began a while ago, when I was reading some news of how the project started to grab more and more responsibilities that belongs to other projects and how some prod deployments failed so bad because of a breaking change that could've been prevented if that responsibility wasn't part of systemd. Nothing too worrying for me though, in any case the first real kick of discomfort came when age verification law was cooking and my innocent thought was Ok, Windows and Mac will integrate it, but Linux and other OpenSource OSs and projects will "fight" against this ridiculous law!!.Then my next thought was Wait what?, the law is not even approved on some states/countries and systemd already integrated it, why?, what happened with the usual "fight" against non-sense laws?.I got pretty mad about it, I know, I'm not a contributor of that project and it's only an optional field but it didn't feel right at all. All the hate that the dev got wasn't right either.Then the second kick of discomfort came while I was reading tech news and I found this one systemd integrates sys-install systemd integrates it's own "system installer" called 'systemd-sysinstall' among other things.All right, one thing is to have tons of responsibilities for an init system. But another one is going from being PID 1 to being the sys installer too, and no matter how you want to sell that idea there's an ocean of difference on what you can call "Init system responsibilities" and "Systemd's weird responsibilities and wishes". So the curiosity entered the game and decided to try to install OpenRC on my Thinkpad X13s Snapdragon which I use for home hacking, testing stuff, etc. Laptop is running Debian BTW.InstallationInstalling OpenRC in Debian Testing is not hard but isn't a trivial operation either. I faced a few challenges and issues regarding to how apt-get and apt works with essential packagesChallengesI faced two major challenges while trying to install OpenRC at the same time as uninstalling Systemd.apt-get can't uninstall systemd at all and only errors out that is not possibleapt shows a better error of why it can't uninstall systemdAfter digging a bit about it and reading a few pages on the internet, I learned that i need to pass an argument to apt thus it can uninstall an essential package. So for uninstalling it'll be something like this:sudo apt purge --allow-remove-essential systemdDon't copy and paste it yet.Before deleting systemd, need to be sure that OpenRC will be installed, to so the command will besudo apt purge --allow-remove-essential systemd && sudo apt install openrc sysvinit-coreThat command will uninstall systemd and install some dependencies that might not be needed in the future.IssuesAfter installing OpenRC and uninstalling systemd, system didn't boot properly, so I had to go to recovery mode and hit Ctrl-D to allow me to fix the error.Issue itself was that while uninstalling systemd somehow OpenRC was removed too or not installed at all. So I went to recovery mode, then I connected to my wifi network and installed OpenRC again with apt install openrc sysvinit-core.So far so good. But neither Battery Status nor Audio worked. I knew that battery status was due to the kernel's regression I faced while installing Debian Testing on the laptop. So I converted my systemd service to a script and put it in /etc/init.d/, thus OpenRC can start it or enable it. It worked. I think audio needs a different service related to pipewire and wireplumber, or to launch them on login. I'll test them later on.Systemd Service:[Unit] Description=Start Qualcomm remoteprocs (SLPI/ADSP/CDSP) DefaultDependencies=no After=initrd-root-fs.target local-fs.target Before=sysinit.target [Service] Type=oneshot RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'echo start > /sys/class/remoteproc/remoteproc0/state; echo start > /sys/class/remoteproc/remoteproc1/state; echo start > /sys/class/remoteproc/remoteproc2/state' [Install] WantedBy=sysinit.targetOpenRC Script#!/bin/sh echo start > /sys/class/remoteproc/remoteproc0/state; echo start > /sys/class/remoteproc/remoteproc1/state; echo start > /sys/class/remoteproc/remoteproc2/state;I need to convert it into a proper OpenRC scriptFutureCurrently OpenRC does the work. I'm not sure if it'll be my default Init system for the comming ages, but I feel that my experiment was successful.I'll continue testing OpenRC on my "Home Hacking Laptop" for the next days, maybe weeks, and if I feel comfortable enough I'll migrate my work laptop (which runs Debian Testing too and has the same dotfiles in it) to OpenRC as well.Even though changing Init System on a working Linux installation has its quirks and challenges and might not be the best idea, I'm happy with my current results.If this works for you too, then I'll be happier to know that you're ditching systemd in favor of OpenRC as well, aside from jokes, in the end that's part of the unix freedom to use whatever you want and whatever works for you.Happy Hacking!!LinksSome links if you're interested in OpenRC tooDebian: Switching Init System Easily (OpenRC, Sysvinit, Runit)Beyond systemd: A Technical Deep Dive into OpenRC for Modern Linux SystemsIntroduction to OpenRC: Managing Services with EaseOpenRC on debian
Erik Benoist - Software engineer building platforms for 20+ years. Chicago-based. Focusing on product and DevOps.
Any one in New York City that wants to build robot let me know you have to be a super nerd and a hobbyist Thank you submitted by /u/BirdAccording7249 [link] [Kommentare]
I've been teaching myself how LLMs actually work, not at the API level, but down to the matrix multiplications. To force myself to really understand the forward pass, I first built a complete transformer by hand in a spreadsheet from embeddings through to the loss. Then I turned the forward pass into a web page so it's easier to share. It's a full transformer (single attention head, single block) shrunk to the smallest size where every single number still fits on screen: a 6-word vocabulary, 3-dimensional embeddings. It reads four words and predicts the next one, and it walks through the whole thing top to bottom: word vectors, Q/K/V, attention scores, the causal mask, softmax, the feed-forward network, logits, and the final probabilities. The part I found most useful for my own understanding: the weights and word vectors are editable, and everything downstream recomputes live. There's also a Randomize button that scrambles all the weights, and the prediction immediately turns to nonsense. That's the honest point of the whole thing: with random (untrained) weights the guess is meaningless, and training is the entire story this page deliberately leaves out. It's a single self-contained HTML file, no libraries, no build step. Backward propagation (how the weights actually get good) is the next one I want to build. Link: https://dgochin.github.io/transformer/ I'm not an ML researcher, I'm a software engineer learning this from the ground up, so if anything's wrong or could be explained better, I'd genuinely like to hear it. This was just my attempt of trying to understand the transformer in the most basic way. submitted by /u/DanielMoGo [link] [Kommentare]
Many would have seen this many times over the years, but this is for those who haven't. If this relates to you just drop a comment lol submitted by /u/gh0stprotoco1x [link] [Kommentare]
> Article except. Throughout much of 2026, Strategy has relied heavily on the issuance of perpetual preferred shares like STRC to raise billions of dollars to fund the majority of its bitcoin purchases. But that doesn't come without cost. Those securities carry roughly $1.2 billion in annual dividend obligations, while the company's cash reserves have dipped to around $1.4 billion, according to CryptoQuant. This has created a negative feedback loop that has put pressure on STRC, which itself hit a fresh low of around $71.40 on Friday before recovering to close at $74.72. That's nearly 26% below its intended $100 par value. submitted by /u/zesushv [link] [Kommentare]
I’m starting a new build-in-public project: oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself. Raspberry Pi, ROS 2, 2D LiDAR, Home Assistant, 3D printed, local-first — and open from the first commit.
Building a custom octocopter from scratch with an RL controller that sustains flight through motor failures. Follow the build log.