I wandered face-first into the Framebuffer UI pages the other day. It’s probably obvious, but I find the idea of running a framebuffer environment from within the kernel itself quite appealing.

Of course, it would mean dropping back to the 2.6.9 kernel, which is a big step back in terms of time. I doubt configuration would be an issue since much of the hardware I would use would be still older than that, but the first kernel I ever worked with was 2.6.15, I think. A six-version difference would be interesting, in a way.

No, what holds me back is really just the time I have available. Last month was an exception in that it was even more busy than normal, but given the few hours here and there in a week that I have available for experimentation, “normal” is a slim term anyway.

The time it would take to install, troubleshoot, reinstall, retroubleshoot, etc., would take weeks to make any progress.

There are lots of other things I would like to examine and try out. I found the outdated but still useful ISO for PublicIP the other day, and thought it might be fun to try running my house network with that. (I have more than enough network cards to make it work. 🙄 )

And I would love to come across a low-end laptop or low-power desktop and run FreeNAS on that, for the long term. As it is now I generally rely on the modular drive in my Inspiron to hold backup files, and run one or another machine as an NFS server to transfer stuff between computers. FreeNAS makes more sense.

And in that vein, I would love to have time to work more with the BSDs, if for no other reason than what little I’ve seen is very appealing. Light, fast and customizable, and plenty of new things to investigate.

I could list a half-dozen other things that would be fun to tinker with, if I could corral about a week or two with no outside obligations. I suppose that’s the way it always is though: So many projects, so little time.