When you build tons of kernels every day like my team does, you look for speed improvements anywhere you can. Caching repositories, artifacts, and compiled objects makes kernel builds faster and it reduces infrastructure costs. Need for speed We use GitLab CI in plenty of places, and that means we have a lot of gitlab-runner configurations for OpenShift (using the kubernetes executor) and AWS (using the docker-machine executor). The runner’s built-in caching makes it easy to upload and download cached items from object storage repositories like Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3.

Buildah and podman make a great pair for building, managing and running containers on a Linux system. You can even use them with GitLab CI with a few small adjustments, namely the switch from the overlayfs to vfs storage driver. I have some regularly scheduled GitLab CI jobs that attempt to build fresh containers each morning and I use these to get the latest packages and find out early when something is broken in the build process.

Fedora 30 is my primary operating system for desktops and servers, so I usually try to take it everywhere I go. I was recently doing some benchmarking for kernel compiles on different cloud plaforms and I noticed that Fedora isn’t included in Google Compute Engine’s default list of operating system images. (Note: Fedora does include links to quick start an Amazon EC2 instance with their pre-built AMI’s. They are superb!

I recently picked up a Dell Optiplex 7060 and I’m using it as my main workstation now. The Fedora installation was easy, but I noticed a variety of “pop” or clicking sounds when audio played, especially terminal bells. If everything was quiet and I triggered a terminal bell, I would hear a loud pop just before the terminal bell sound. However, if I played music and then triggered a terminal bell, the pop was gone.

The i3 window manager is a fast window manager that helps you keep all of your applications in the right place. It automatically tiles windows and can manage those tiles across multiple virtual desktops. However, there are certain applications that I really prefer in a floating window. Floating windows do not get tiled and they can easily be dragged around with your mouse. They’re the type of windows you expect to see on other non-tiling desktops such as GNOME or KDE.