The Belgian government introduced an electronic ID card in 2009. While I was a bit wary at the time - I always am when the government discovers the advantages (and seemingly neglects the security risks) of the digital age - I was intrigued. The new eID was touted as being cross-platform (not just Windows and Mac OS X, but also Linux), so I decided to purchase a reader anyway - if only to find out what info could be read out from the card (thus accessible to anyone with a card reader).

Why Arch and not Ubuntu? Why Linux at all?

Although my original intentions were to install Linux, I first tried XBMC on the AppleTV OS - mainly to see how it performed. I was quickly annoyed by the fact you cannot autolaunch XBMC anymore (you can, but it will lose focus with recent firmwares, and to my knowledge the AppleTV OS has no way of calling XBMC back to the foreground). I'm picky and demanding, so that's not the only thing that irritated me. The limited shell on OS X put me off too. Although the shell itself is more or less fine, the limited selection of programs (and their limited possibilities) was disappointing. The long-term maintainability is not all that either; you need to hack the AppleTV firmware each time a new one comes out; basically you'll be performing the same steps (installing the Broadcom CrystalHD kext, installing TurboKext Enabler, modifying startup files etc.) over and over. Although the AppleTV Patchstick creator takes a lot of work out of your hands, you still have to go through the same setup procedures. I for one am not looking forward to that, and if Apple decides to stop support for the device, you're on your own too (I know, I am a positive thinker). Pit that against a rolling release distro with a proven track record, the familiarity of a real Linux environment, the flexibility of the Arch build system, and you know the outcome... Also, what would be the fun in just buying a device and using it like the manufacturer intended you to? If you can't hack it, there's no fun in it!

To the skilled Linux user, rsync and the OpenSSH suite aren't strangers. In fact, they're frequently used and praised by a lot of people for their convenience and versatility. Together they form an excellent remote backup solution.

Rsync supports operations over SSH out of the box. So far there's no problem. To automate those backups, however, you'll need to run a job scheduler (like Dillon's cron daemon). This doesn't pose any problems either - running it unattended does though...

Some of you might know LZMA as the default compression algorhythm of 7zip. *nix counterparts had support through LZMA utils. GNU Tar could be patched to support it, but there was no way for libarchive to support it - until recently. A new spec, a new name (xz) and a future change of license allowed for xz support in the codebase. Since pacman and makepkg rely on libarchive for compression handling, that makes it possible to build and install packages with xz.

For those unfamiliar with LZMA/xz, in the realm of compression formats it stands between gzip and bzip2 for compression and decompression speed, and it tops the list when you talk package size. Now let's have a look at how to get this going.

Arch has this wonderful hook called 'encrypt' that allows you to unlock your encrypted root partition with an external key if you want so. The problem is this implementation is rather rigid - the encrypt hook can only handle one partition and corresponding key for now (actually it can only handle a root partition by default). My 'hack' allows non-root partitions to get mounted automatically without having to resort to /etc/crypttab for unlocking information, but that is a weak point at the same time: you cannot have multiple encrypted partitions with this method - unless, of course, you continue to use /etc/crypttab.