šļø Bug Smashing Friday is here!
Letās kick off the first Friday of June by stomping bugs and triaging issues in the Flatcar Container Linux tracker.
Join us in cleaning up, categorizing, and closing bugs to help make Flatcar even more robust!
š https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar/discussions/1772
š¹ https://meet.flatcar.org/BugSmashingDay
š§ #Flatcar #BugTriage #OpenSource #Linux #k8s
@flatcar This one's a biggie. We don't usually want people to check out Alphas (though all Alphas are thoroughly tested!) but this time it's different. New kernel, new sysexts, and many new features coming with this release.
Give it a spin!
:boost_requested:
Not a question, just love your support for @flatcar #Flatcar #Container #Linux on Brightbox.
Thank you!
Flat Cars Finished?
With the loads painted, the flat cars are substantially finished. I sprayed the underframes with a dusting of Vallejo āSmokeā so theyād look like theyāve done work if they should ever flip over. The trucks, body and the steel and iron parts received a muddy wash of raw umber and white so theyād look look like theyāve done some work even if the cars never flip over.
And with that, I believe Iām finished. Itās only taken eight years!
For the amount of work, the loads are passableThey make a nice train
Painting Wood Loads
I had three flat car loads to experiment upon, and with time running short before the Railway Modellersā Meet, I got right to work.
I had picked up a Vallejo paint pack for wood and leather when I went to Burnaby Hobbies for some primer. The āDark Sandā in the pack seemed a good starting point, and so, I airbrushed the three test loads with that. Obviously, the result was too uniform, so I followed that up by picking out individual boards with washes of āOrange Brown.ā That was okay, but lacked any appearance of grain. So, then I tried dry-brushing some of the same Orange Brown, which produce some interesting effects, but also ran the risk of darkening the whole side of the load. The winning approach to grain effects was obtained with a fan brush.
The load still looked like a monolithic piece of plastic, and so I tried a little Tamiya āDark Brown Panel Line Accent Colorā. That worked poorly on the matte finish, but showed promise. A second attempt following a coating with Pledge was much better.
In the end, these loads look pretty good. I donāt know if they are as realistic as a stack of scale lumber. And I donāt know that they were much less work. However, I learned some stuff along the way, and thatās something to celebrate.
Three test loads. Left to right: the best of the bunch, the failed panel liner, and no panel liner.
Lumber Loads
The 3D printer has been busy cranking out loads of lumber for the flat cars as I get ready for this yearās Railway Modellersā Meet. Iād already printed quite a few loads, some of which are āfactory secondsā and good only for experimenting, when I went back and looked at some photos of Canada Atlantic flat cars loaded with lumber.
The most striking feature of the real loads was that the ragged ends were all pointed the same way. It stands to reason as the flat cars were loaded by hand, and one stack could be piled while standing on the car deck, so only one stack had to be loaded from the end of the car. I also decided to make some of the loads a little lower to better reflect what I saw in the photos.
This realization lead to quite a few more loads, as the front load needs to have its stakes in a different location than the back load. When the resin stopped swirling, I had more than enough loads for my three cars, although I might make a couple more low B-end loads.
I forgot to take a photo of the raw prints, but remembered once they were primed. Three of the stacks have already received a layer of Vallejo Dark Sand in the hopes that I can make plastic look enough like wood to avoid having to redo the project.
#Flatcar #Linux ĆØ una #distro #immutabile nata per eseguire solo #container e ideale per la creazione di cluster #kubernetes.
I suoi punti di forza?
š estremamente #minimale e con una ridottissima superficie d'attacco
š configurazione #dichiarativa
š #immutabile e resistente agli errori grazie al sistema di partizioni A/B che permette #rollback automatici di qualsiasi aggiornamento andato storto.
FeatureScript Changes the Game
Speaking of flat cars, what about their loads? Most of the time, these cars would have carried lumber or logs. Without a sawmill on the line, it is unlikely they carried logs in my town, but there is a photo of a flat car of lumber in Pembroke.
Iād always imagined I would create lumber loads out of scale lumber. Rob Kirkham was building some at a recent modelling night, and exclaimed at the amount of scale lumber they consume. Then, at an operating session on Anthony Craigās layout, I noticed he had some nice resin loads, and those donāt consume any scale lumber at all!
Now, I have a way to make resin parts. Itās called a 3D printer. It needs a 3D model to work from. But, how could I get the variation of a hand-stacked load into the perfect world of a computer?
I started out with a drawing with a bunch of random parameters from my head. This was laborious, but not untenable. It would have been helped immeasurably if there were a mod() function in OnShape, and even more if there were a random() function. While looking for these, I stumbled upon the OnShape programming language, FeatureScript.
A few hours later, I had bungled my way through a desert of documentation and into making my first four custom features in OnShape. The last one is a pile of lumber. You simply fill in a form with the values like number of columns and layers of lumber, and a random seed, and you get a stack of lumber, complete with supports for 3D printing!
This new skill completely changes the game of 3D modelling for me. Imagine being able to place rivets along a line with a given pitch and diameter with the stroke of a pen. Imagine being able to introduce micro-variations in thickness. Consider being able to add grain. All of these were difficult or time-consuming before, but now just a few hours of programming away. The game has changed. Again.
The OnShape screen with two piles of lumber generated. The cylinders at the end are for 3D printing supports, and are placed on all the locally lowest boards. The boards are random lengths and widths within a tolerance, and offset from the start by a random amount. Note the feature list on the left contains two references to āPileā which is my custom feature.
Postgres friends: I have a container that needs a Postgres database. It will literally have one user with light usage. What are some options that I can have that are containerized? My hope is to run it from a podman quadlet and have it autoupdate through minor releases. Thank you. #postgresql #podman #Flatcar
@LinusTech 's latest video - POV: When you realize deploying your own VPN can be simple and secure with Flatcar #Flatcar #VPN #LinusTechTips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St-Itlk0W50&ab_channel=LinusTechTips
You know your favourite FOSS project has gone mainstream when Linus Tech Tips casually uses it for creating and operating safe and secure VPN nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St-Itlk0W50
Kudos to the #flatcar DNS to have waited the end of the #FOSDEM before giving up.
https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar/issues/1632
(It's always a DNS issue)
I'd have went for #Flatcar, but it seems it's using Docker and not Podman. I'm not giving up Quadlets, I am not.
So perhaps Fedora CoreOS? How's that one holding up?
#Akamai shares their contributions to the #CNCF and to #Flatcar #Container #Linux , and @ahrkrak provides a brief project status at the #KubeCon Day 3 keynote last week: https://youtu.be/f8ornY7h2KE?si=YcNXLXI-TPe4F-_8&t=144
The cloud-native community is awesome and we're super happy to be part of it.
For the first time ever, #Flatcar #Container #Linux will have a booth at FOSDEM! And even better, it's a shared booth with our upstream #Gentoo !
We've already started brainstorming on some fun stuff for the booth. If you're in Brussels on Feb 1+2 2025 please drop by for a chat!
Find a list of all FOSDEM 2025 booths here: https://fosdem.org/2025/news/2024-11-16-stands-announced/
