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The Cat Fox Life
Personal blog · catfox.lifeprogrammingsystems
The Cat Fox Life is a personal blog at catfox.life about programming and systems. Since 2019, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN threads cite these posts on systemd's binary size and porting systemd to musl, and on big-endian Power and Illumos support. The comments use them as references and do not judge the writing directly.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Photography, cats, computing, and anecdotes from an Oklahoman fox.
Most-linked posts?
- Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-05
- /2018/11/03/clearing-confusion-regarding-modern-powerpc-endianness/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-07
- Leaving the Linux Desktop Behind2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-22
What Hacker News says?
systemd binary is around 1.5Mb, with the shared libsystemd it's around 2.5Mb. Both can be reduced by not including compressors (the infamous libz), audit libraries, SELinux, etc. The minimum binaries size that can be obtained by trivial removals is around 2Mb. OpenWRT should just stop being stubborn and integrate it. They dropped support for 4Mb devices loooooong ago, and recently bumped the minimum specs to 16Mb. >…
Comment linking /2024/09/05/porting-systemd-to-musl-libc-powered-linux/
on “Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux”Submitted Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux as a story · 192 points
HN discussionPower ISA includes an endianness switch in the spec. Power and Power64 are all BE and LE. Most Linux distros only support modern versions on LE though. Debian has a BE port but it's not considered a primary release target. The last PPC64 release of Ubuntu was 16.04 which is now out of support by about a month. Even on that, the two major web browsers didn't support building on the platform for a long time. Yes, it c…
Comment linking /2018/11/03/clearing-confusion-regarding-modern-powerpc-endianness/
on “Illumos to drop SPARC Support”Submitted Systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer as a story · 167 points
HN discussion> "Old Macs are big-endian, just as network processors from NXP. Some Power developers still want big-endian systems to keep the dream alive. But support for big-endian systems is mostly gone from Linux distributions, and when it comes to developing common utilities or even programming languages, most developers are no more even aware that a world exists outside of little-endian. As much as I love the PowerPC laptop…
Comment linking /2018/11/03/clearing-confusion-regarding-modern-powerpc-endianness/
on “Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world”Submitted The Musl Preprocessor Debate as a story · 116 points
HN discussion"And some are just running a musl system that can't even use systemd." no longer… https://catfox.life/2024/09/05/porting-systemd-to-musl-libc-...
Comment linking /2024/09/05/porting-systemd-to-musl-libc-powered-linux/
on “Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd”Submitted Exposing the Wayland lie (2018) as a story · 116 points
HN discussionSubmitted Daily-driving a Mac, one year later as a story · 80 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using MailWrap on macOS Monterey as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Leaving the Linux Desktop Behind as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Leaving the Linux Desktop Behind as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Live from Adélie: Streaming Spotify on Musl as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Debian: No longer a “Universal” operating system as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Experiences with building a Gentoo virtualisation host as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Debian: No Longer a “Universal” Operating System – The Cat Fox Life as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Keeping libre software accessible to all as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The complexities of enabling OpenCL support as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What’s the deal with Cisco devices in `file` output, anyway? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
