First Kernel Module with Little Penguin

Thanks to the great people at the Eudyptula Challenge, everyone’s welcome to enjoy a systematic intro to Linux kernel development. I’ve grown to be a low-level man at heart and was excited to hear about it. I finished the first challenge tonight on Arch, and there were a couple of unforeseen hurdles.

Syslog-ng

Little Penguin needs proof of my accomplishment, and the simplest I could think of was tailing the system message log. Syslog isn’t around by default in Arch, it’s been replaced by systemd’s logger, journal. Syslog-ng collects messages from a socket fed by journal, which has taken over the original /dev/log device. The proper solution on Arch is surely to use journal straight away, but I’m working on “Hello World”, so I ran with the traditional, well-documented syslog output.

Mail

The email correspondence with Little Penguin needs to be plain text, and I got in this game by sending a message from emacs/mu4e. I’m new to Arch, but couldn’t find anything resembling “mu4e” in the repositories, so I decided to expand my horizons and try mutt. Mutt rules. I’ll likely never replace OS X Mail (or similar) because drag and drop attachments and inline images are very convenient, but I can live in a shell for days and will love using mutt there.

Anyway, when it all came together it was fairly anti-climatic–it just worked. Software “just working” is cool but rare, so it surprised me, but I suppose I’m good with that.