I wanted to explore some of the new features in Emacs 29 (in particular Eglot). The version of Emacs that ships with my version of Linux Mint is Emacs 27, so I decided to build Emacs 29 from scratch.
This turned out to be absolutely painless; but installing the new version seamlessly into the existing environment did cause some hang-ups.
A little while ago, I read (and quite enjoyed) “Learning eBPF” by Liz Rice. “Linux Observability with BPF” David Calavera and Lorenzo Fontana is another, slightly earlier, book on the BPF framework, also published by O’Reilly.
The extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF for short, is a plugin architecture for the Linux kernel. Using eBPF, it is possible to load (short) programs into the kernel at runtime, and have them be executed by the kernel. As the name suggests, the technology started out as a method to build custom filters for network packets, but it has since been extended and become much more general.
Building open-source software from source is not necessarily hard: after
all, typing make is fairly easy. But dealing with the tools and
dependencies can be tedious, in particular, if you don’t use them
all the time.
In this post, I want to describe how to use Docker containers as
convenient, clean-room build environments.
Containers are not usually associated with GUI applications, but there may be times when one might still want to run such a program inside a container, for example to isolate the application’s dependencies. Installing a GUI application in a container means that not only the application, but also all its specific dependencies are encapsulated inside the container (respectively, the container image), and can therefore reliably be removed from the system in a single step.
The primary challenge is to let a container communicate with the host’s display system, so that it can create GUI windows on the host. A GUI application will likely also need to share files with the host system, which in turn requires the appropriate user permissions.
In a previous post, I explored the possibilities of running a GUI application inside a Docker container. In the current post, I will continue where we left off before, adding some details to make the process more convenient.
Containers are not usually associated with GUI applications, but there may be times when one might still want to run such a program inside a container, for example to isolate the application’s dependencies. Installing a GUI application in a container means that not only the application, but also all its specific dependencies are encapsulated inside the container (respectively, the container image), and can therefore reliably be removed from the system in a single step.