I had just read an article regarding the current state of Broadcom and the VMware saga. It seemed like a good topic for the May 2024 talk, as the regular cadre uses VMware products in their professional life, and some in their personal life. The recent changes in everything VMware related had left all of us in a somewhat uncertain about the future frame of mind. Needless to say, when I saw the announcement that VMware Workstation Pro (and Fusion Pro) would be free for personal use or for an annual subscription, I thought this might be of interest to the group.

This was a virtual meeting to have a quick talk about rootless containers and do what should be a relatively simple exercise in using podman in a rootless setting and running a kanboard container. Needless to say, it went sideways a bit, but it was a fun exercise in an environment where making mistakes are just that, mistakes. We made it most of the way through the exercise, but did not get to the point of having the user level systemd manage the container.

After some delays, we finally had a technical meeting. It was a little shorter then usual, but it was an easing back into a more technical program. What did we talk about? Containers (surprise). Specifically using podman and containers. There were even slides. It was a bit short, but it illustrated using podman and a asciidoctor container to process the presentation with asciidoctor-revealjs. I also mentioned that there is a container that is used to build the website.

This site needs some minor tweaking and possibly a new theme. I’m not too concerned with the general look, but I want it to be clean and not busy. You should not want to stab your eyes out when looking at it or reading it. I am also considering going back through all of the content and retagging it so that it can be viewed by topic rather than the linear stream it currently is.

As I review the site, I am seeing a few things that no longer work as they did in the past. I am not surprised though as the hugo engine has had a significant number of updates and the theme has been updated as well. Some configuration items are no longer valid, there are new ones to learn about, and the theme has had a number of revisions. One thing in particular is that if you visit the main page, you get a page on a jupyter talk from 2016 instead of a list of posts.