void-packages VS mkcert

I was looking for a lightweight OS to run on old Asus Eee PC 1005 HA, which uses a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 processor. I installed Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/).

I may give DSL 2024 a try and see how it compares.

Linux Void

My computer is running Void Linux and it has only a wired network connection. I can hook up my phone for USB tethering if I need to connect to the WiFi of the ESP32. How do I update the software without downloading some shady programs from filesharing site links on my system? I have the Arduino IDE and the esptool.py script installed.

Classic "everyone is using the software wrong, but it's the fault of everyone, and not the software".

Some distros like Void seem to patch this out.[1]

From mandoc/mdocml's mandoc_char(7) [2]

In roff(7) documents, the minus sign is normally written as ‘\-’. In manual pages, some style guides recommend to also use ‘\-’ if an ASCII 0x2d “hyphen-minus” output glyph that can be copied and pasted is desired in output modes supporting it, for example in -T utf8 and -T html. But currently, no practically relevant manual page formatter requires that subtlety, so in manual pages, it is sufficient to write plain ‘-’ to represent hyphen, minus, and hyphen-minus.

Which is the common-sense thing to do.

Meanwhile, GNU projects become increasingly less relevant due to obnoxiousness like this.

In general the amount of wankery of "the correct hyphen" is staggering.

[1]: https://man.openbsd.org/mandoc_char

[2]: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/20c66829134...

So I was about to configure a new Archlinux build on my PC and came across Void Linux. I had already read about it a year ago but never researched it in depth. I know that is a Linux distribution made from scratch, with a different package manager and so on. Void Linux users or people who have tried it, what are your thoughts on it? Do you think the PM is easy to use? what about updates and bugs? what desktop or Tilling Window Manager do you use? could you tell me about it?

Good news about dbus-next: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/46760

The author mentions difficulties with HTTPS and trying stuff locally.

I've had some success with mkcert [1] to easily create certificates trusted by browsers, I can suggest to look into this. You are your own root CA, I think it can work without an internet connection.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/

Solution: mkcert – Your Zero-Configuration HTTPS Enabler Meet mkcert, a user-friendly, zero-configuration tool designed for creating locally-trusted development certificates. Find it on its GitHub page and follow the instructions tailored for your operating system. For Mac users employing Homebrew, simply execute the following commands in your terminal:

Well, Certifi does not ship with your company's certificates! So requesting internal services may come with additional painful extra steps! Also for a local development environment that uses mkcert for example!

My project, getlocalcert.net[1] may be the one you're thinking of.

Since I'm also building in this space, I'll give my perspective. Local certificate generation is complicated. If you spend the time, you can figure it out, but it's begging for a simpler solution. You can use tools like mkcert[2] for anything that's local to your machine. However, if you're already using ACME in production, maybe you'd prefer to use ACME locally? I think that's what Anchor offers, a unified approach.

There's a couple references in the Anchor blog about solving the distribution problem by building better tooling[3]. I'm eager to learn more, that's a tough nut to crack. My theory for getlocalcert is that the distribution problem is too difficult (for me) to solve, so I layer the tool on top of Let's Encrypt certificates instead. The end result for both tools is a trusted TLS certificate issued via ACME automation.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674224

2. https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

3. https://blog.anchor.dev/the-acme-gap-introducing-anchor-part...

Looks like step-ca/step-cli [1] and mkcert [2] have been mentioned. Another related tool is XCA [3] - a gui tool to manage CAs and server/client TLS certificates. It takes off some of the tedium in using openssl cli directly. It also stores the certs and keys in an encrypted database. It doesn't solve the problem of getting the root CA certificate into the system store or of hosting the revocation list. I use XCA to create and store the root CA. Intermediate CAs signed with it are passed to other issuers like vault and step-issuer.

[1] https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/

[2] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

[3] https://hohnstaedt.de/xca/

We use mkcert for this, it works wonderfully.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

mkcert: This is used to obtain a trusted TLS certificate with a custom domain name for your development machine. You can install mkcert on your development machine following the official instructions.

I've been pretty frustrated with how private CAs are supported. Your private root CA can be maliciously used to MITM every domain on the Internet, even though you intend to use it for only a couple domain names. Most people forget to set Name Constraints when they create these and many helper tools lack support [1][2]. Worse, browser support for Name Constraints has been slow [3] and support isn't well tracked [4]. Public CAs give you certificate transparency and you can subscribe to events to detect mis-issuance. Some hosted private CAs like AWS's offer logs [5], but DIY setups don't.

Even still, there are a lot of folks happily using private CAs, they aren't the target audience for this initial release.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/302

[2] https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues/3655

[3] https://alexsci.com/blog/name-non-constraint/

[4] https://github.com/Netflix/bettertls/issues/19

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/privateca/latest/userguide/secur...