formicapunk

Following the previous steps, we are now interested in getting a graphical environment with a VSCodium, the opensource rebuild of the VSCode IDE.

Following on the rationale of the previous post, here is how I create a development VM based on ready to use disk images made by the debian cloud team.

Rationale: I was remembered via https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/chaindrop-npm-worm-analysis/ (linked from https://anarc.at/blog/2026-08-18-people-vs-ai-overlords/) of the risk of downloading untrusted packages in a dev environment.

So it will not play cyberpunk 2077, but if you prefer opensource drivers for your hardware, nouveau is certainly an option for some opensource gaming.

The Steam command line client, which I need to download the game data for the Doom3 BFG shooter, is only available as an Linux i386 binary.

So I am using Debian on a System76 Arm64 (aarch64) workstation since 9 months, and I can say: everything works.

Connected via serial console.

The limits of cryptography Since this blog post is about security and cryptography, it makes sense to start with this XKCD reminder about the value of encryption: .

In the future I will try to link to each blog post via my mastodon account at https://mastodon.sdf.org/@formicapunk That way readers can comment via Mastodon without creating a wordpress.com account.

Email interface of the Debian bug tracker The main interface of the Debian bug tracker, at http://bugs.debian.org, is e-mail, and modifications are made to existing bugs by sending an email to an address like 873518@bugs.Debian.org.