Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
There are times when I just need to share some links outside the fleeting environment of Twitter, and this is where they might appear. The practice is very much in the spirit of the original weblog idea when it was about link sharing and not about writing down one’s thoughts as it subsequently became before sharing of photos, videos and other multimedia content became a mainstay of (legal) sharing for some people.
17:34 January 21, 2024
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13:32 January 5, 2024
21:47 December 23, 2023
How to stop websites from sending Bitdefender Safepay notifications
18:19 December 18, 2023
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16:33 December 18, 2023
22:26 November 19, 2023
19:02 November 10, 2023
19:14 November 9, 2023
23:04 October 20, 2023
20:26 July 31, 2023
So you want to build your own open source ChatGPT-style chatbotâŚ
16:42 July 31, 2023
16:37 July 31, 2023
16:33 July 31, 2023
19:52 July 4, 2023
09:32 May 12, 2023
16:30 March 17, 2023
13:42 March 15, 2023
19:35 March 14, 2023
13:15 March 10, 2023
Set Up SSH Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) on Debian 11 Server
13:51 March 9, 2023
10:25 March 6, 2023
WordPress 4.6 Admin Font Change Fix â How To Restore Open Sans Font?
10:24 March 6, 2023
20:14 February 24, 2023
20:11 February 24, 2023
14:35 February 24, 2023
01:31 February 20, 2023
01:31 February 20, 2023
Why is the Filter Gallery Greyed Out in Photoshop and How to Fix it
10:18 February 7, 2023
11:00 January 27, 2023
How to take a full-page screenshot with a hidden Chrome shortcut
14:53 January 23, 2023
15:52 January 19, 2023
10:15 January 12, 2023
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Proton Mail Bridge Microsoft Outlook for Windows 2019 setup guide
08:07 January 4, 2023
22:39 December 4, 2022
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09:59 November 21, 2022
14:29 November 18, 2022
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15:17 November 1, 2022
19:51 October 29, 2022
How to Upload or Download Files/Directories Using sFTP in Linux
19:50 October 29, 2022
19:49 October 29, 2022
17:00 October 27, 2022
[FIX] Memory integrity due to Incompatible drivers cannot be enabled in Windows 11
19:20 October 25, 2022
How can I redirect and rewrite my URLs with a .htaccess file?
13:49 October 25, 2022
How to change the maximum number of IMAP connections in Mozilla Thunderbird
20:49 October 23, 2022
18:06 October 23, 2022
13:46 October 23, 2022
11:49 October 22, 2022
11:49 October 22, 2022
Secure Tutanota desktop clients for Linux, Windows and Mac OS
11:48 October 22, 2022
11:47 October 22, 2022
11:47 October 22, 2022
How to Access the Hidden Symbols on Your Android Phoneâs Keyboard
08:43 October 22, 2022
10:31 October 13, 2022
Enable or Disable Automatic Sign-in at Startup in Windows 11
10:25 October 13, 2022
13:25 October 12, 2022
12:03 October 12, 2022
11:52 October 12, 2022
4 Ways to Embed User Privacy & Data Security in Your Business
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09:46 October 12, 2022
09:30 October 12, 2022
Introducing Improvements to the Opt-Out Form Feature in Matomo
14:14 October 11, 2022
17:51 October 3, 2022
12:06 September 29, 2022
15:01 September 28, 2022
10:58 September 15, 2022
How to automatically decline meeting invites from specific people in Outlook
10:46 August 25, 2022
16:06 August 20, 2022
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09:16 July 25, 2022
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What is a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)?
17:43 July 21, 2022
17:40 July 21, 2022
14:20 July 21, 2022
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09:00 July 1, 2022
14:05 June 29, 2022
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11:05 June 29, 2022
16:43 June 26, 2022
13:26 June 26, 2022
How to Reduce Eric Jones Spam (and all the other Contact Form Spam)
12:43 June 26, 2022
12:42 June 26, 2022
12:41 June 26, 2022
12:40 June 26, 2022
19:36 June 25, 2022
17:13 June 24, 2022
15:32 June 20, 2022
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Handling False Positives with the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set
11:10 June 14, 2022
How To Use a Multimeter to Measure Voltage, Current and More
13:11 May 26, 2022
13:10 May 26, 2022
15:36 May 9, 2022
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09:10 February 26, 2022
Show Amount Of Posts, Pages, Categories, Tags, Comments For WordPress Themes
09:09 February 26, 2022
How to Develop a WordPress Theme from Scratch â Beginners Guide
09:08 February 26, 2022
Count the number of posts in the custom post type in WordPress
09:41 February 23, 2022
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How To Configure Apache HTTP with MPM Event and PHP-FPM on Ubuntu 18.04
16:45 February 18, 2022
Protecting WordPress with Open Source Web Application Firewall ModSecurity
14:35 February 16, 2022
14:35 February 16, 2022
09:32 February 16, 2022
09:26 February 15, 2022
18:56 February 14, 2022
How To Configure Nginx to Use Custom Error Pages on Ubuntu 14.04
09:24 February 14, 2022
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How To Install Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP (LEMP Stack) on Ubuntu 18.04
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Talkyard with Nginx as a reverse proxy and Letsencrypt for HTTPS
09:53 February 8, 2022
09:52 February 8, 2022
To Fix The Docker and UFW Security Flaw Without Disabling Iptables
09:51 February 8, 2022
09:47 February 8, 2022
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Comments on a static website? That’s possible with utteranc.es!
09:39 February 8, 2022
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Tutorial: How to Add Self-hosted Comments to Your Static Site
15:33 February 5, 2022
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Build a Search Bar for Your Hugo Blog With a JSON Index and Some Vanilla JS
15:59 February 4, 2022
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How the Bootstrap 4 Grid Works
This also helps with understanding Bootstrap 5 as well. That was something that I discovered while porting a website from WordPress to Hugo.
21:14 January 29, 2022
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How to Open Link in New Tab with Hugo’s new Goldmark Markdown Renderer
21:04 January 29, 2022
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Overview of the best commenting systems for your static website
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08:36 January 23, 2022
How to upgrade Debian 10 to Debian 11 Bullseye using the CLI
08:32 January 23, 2022
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[Postfix] â warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop Permission denied
14:52 November 17, 2021
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08:16 November 17, 2021
09:05 November 13, 2021
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09:01 November 5, 2021
How to Enable clipboard and folder sharing in Qemu/KVM on Windows Guest
08:59 November 5, 2021
08:50 November 5, 2021
âError 1067: The process terminated unexpectedlyâ on Windows 10, 7 & 8
16:38 November 4, 2021
Error: No CurrentVersion entry in Software/JavaSoft registry
10:00 November 4, 2021
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13:43 November 2, 2021
How to Change the Default Browser in Windows 11, Even for Widgets and Search
How to Move the Taskbar to the Top in Windows 11
How to Replace the Start Menu in Windows 11
13:57 October 30, 2021
20:09 October 26, 2021
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How To Convert VirtualBox Disk Image (VDI) and img to Qcow2 format
17:08 October 24, 2021
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17:06 October 24, 2021
21:07 October 22, 2021
How to Enable HTTP/2 in Apache Web Server on Ubuntu and Debian
10:29 October 21, 2021
10:29 October 21, 2021
15:46 October 19, 2021
How to Run Windows 11 on a USB Drive (and Take it With You)
How to Bypass Windows 11’s TPM Requirement and Upgrade from Windows 10
13:12 October 12, 2021
15:31 October 8, 2021
15:30 October 8, 2021
15:29 October 8, 2021
Enable Virtualization-based Protection of Code Integrity in Microsoft Windows
15:28 October 8, 2021
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13:26 September 29, 2021
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Whitelist an IP using WAF -- ModSecurity Whitelisting IP addresses
10:59 September 25, 2021
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09:02 September 24, 2021
How to Resolve âTemporary failure in name resolutionâ Issue
13:07 September 23, 2021
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08:35 September 20, 2021
Integrating AbuseIPDB with Fail2Ban -- Automatically Report Bad IPs
21:10 September 19, 2021
21:09 September 19, 2021
13:24 September 17, 2021
12:19 September 4, 2021
09:46 September 4, 2021
16:58 August 31, 2021
How to backup and load Cron Jobs from a File in Linux and UNIX? Crontab Command Example
16:58 August 31, 2021
A Beginnerâs Guide on How to Use Nano Text Editor in Linux
14:19 August 27, 2021
14:19 August 27, 2021
08:46 August 18, 2021
18:26 August 17, 2021
18:26 August 17, 2021
18:25 August 17, 2021
Webmin: One big drawback to using this data centre management tool
10:32 August 13, 2021
18:09 August 12, 2021
18:05 August 12, 2021
How to prevent the “are you sure you want to leave this page?” prompt on Facebook?
18:05 August 12, 2021
Extending a Logical Volume on a Linux Virtual, Cloud or CloudNX server
11:41 August 11, 2021
11:41 August 11, 2021
11:40 August 11, 2021
18:00 July 27, 2021
17:59 July 27, 2021
17:59 July 27, 2021
19:07 July 24, 2021
11:03 July 23, 2021
Change user password in MySQL 5.7 with âplugin: auth_socketâ
11:03 July 23, 2021
How to enable AMD Virtualization on the Aorus X570 Motherboard
09:30 July 15, 2021
08:04 July 15, 2021
18:09 July 13, 2021
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13:58 July 11, 2021
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08:35 July 8, 2021
15:40 July 6, 2021
09:28 July 3, 2021
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10:13 July 1, 2021
How to install Windows 11 Insider preview on unsupported devices
14:55 June 28, 2021
13:30 June 24, 2021
23:47 June 5, 2021
16:38 June 3, 2021
13:27 June 3, 2021
10:02 June 1, 2021
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dbxcli: A command line tool for Dropbox users and team admins
09:00 May 27, 2021
08:58 May 27, 2021
08:57 May 27, 2021
How to stop loading Microsoft Edge processes at startup on Windows 10
13:50 May 16, 2021
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Connecting to Microsoft Exchange Calendar from Mozilla Thunderbird
13:03 January 27, 2021
11:10 January 10, 2021
11:09 January 10, 2021
11:08 January 10, 2021
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11:07 January 10, 2021
09:26 January 7, 2021
09:41 December 17, 2020
Using mod_security2 with WordPress
WordPress â Mod_security problems with posts and comments fixed
17:59 December 14, 2020
17:46 December 12, 2020
20:54 December 6, 2020
20:53 December 6, 2020
14:51 November 23, 2020
 How to force your computer to download the Windows 10 May 2020 Update
14:44 November 11, 2020
16:00 November 10, 2020
09:18 November 9, 2020
09:27 October 19, 2020
14:16 October 18, 2020
09:31 October 18, 2020
13:36 October 10, 2020
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14:59 October 7, 2020
10:55 October 6, 2020
15:15 October 1, 2020
14:03 September 29, 2020
14:02 September 29, 2020
12:36 September 18, 2020
12:35 September 18, 2020
12:34 September 18, 2020
12:33 September 18, 2020
Everything you need to know about DNS -- Plus a list of free public DNS servers
12:27 September 18, 2020
Securing DNS across all of my devices with Pi-Hole + DNS-over-HTTPS + 1.1.1.1
10:47 September 18, 2020
16:11 September 17, 2020
17:04 September 11, 2020
Improve Firefox Performance on Linux by Turning WebRender On
16:46 September 9, 2020
How to Embed an External RSS Feed in WordPress Posts via Shortcode
13:43 July 31, 2020
19:03 July 18, 2020
13:43 July 13, 2020
17:51 July 4, 2020
09:33 June 16, 2020
Linux Mint 20 Blocks Snap App Installs, So Hereâs the Workaround
09:30 June 16, 2020
08:11 June 10, 2020
09:31 June 4, 2020
13:48 March 8, 2020
17:11 March 2, 2020
14:27 February 29, 2020
17:05 February 26, 2020
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14:51 February 23, 2020
10:35 February 20, 2020
Change User’s MySQL Password | Reset MySQL Root Password Guide
12:38 February 19, 2020
09:35 February 17, 2020
09:34 February 17, 2020
09:32 February 17, 2020
13:14 February 16, 2020
13:10 February 16, 2020
20:34 February 15, 2020
14:29 February 14, 2020
14:29 February 14, 2020
09:46 February 14, 2020
09:45 February 14, 2020
How to move docker data directory to another location on Ubuntu
09:45 February 14, 2020
The Complete Guide to âuseraddâ Command in Linux â 15 Practical Examples
09:43 February 14, 2020
09:42 February 14, 2020
20:30 February 12, 2020
How to Optimize and Compress JPEG or PNG Images in Linux Command Line
17:41 January 29, 2020
20:21 January 28, 2020
18:37 January 17, 2020
12:45 January 17, 2020
12:44 January 17, 2020
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21:01 January 16, 2020
20:59 January 16, 2020
At the time of writing, this website uses an older version of TLS so you may see browser messages on visiting it. Hopefully, that will get sorted since it looks out for a security tool website.
20:57 January 16, 2020
12:19 January 15, 2020
12:17 January 15, 2020
The most important steps to take to make an Apache server more secure
12:17 January 15, 2020
How to Implement Security HTTP Headers to Prevent Vulnerabilities?
12:16 January 15, 2020
21:38 December 31, 2019
21:37 December 31, 2019
14:41 December 24, 2019
14:24 December 24, 2019
How To Protect an Apache Server with Fail2Ban on Ubuntu 14.04
This may refer to an older Ubuntu version but the advice contained in the article remains relevant to current ones. In fact, I have used it to harden some VPS systems that I have. Now, I only need to see what impact this action might have.
13:12 December 23, 2019
16:47 December 6, 2019
16:01 November 26, 2019
21:28 November 7, 2019
15:40 November 7, 2019
12:51 August 31, 2019
22:09 July 6, 2019
14:16 June 11, 2019
14:14 June 11, 2019
14:46 June 10, 2019
10:55 June 8, 2019
How to disable Sign-in screen acrylic (blur) background on Windows 10 May 2019 Update
11:47 May 22, 2019
11:39 January 30, 2019
Psensor â A Graphical Hardware Temperature Monitoring Tool for Linux
13:34 January 29, 2019
20:03 December 8, 2018
How to commit changes to a docker image
Five Ways to Slim Your Docker Images
09:59 December 8, 2018
09:58 December 8, 2018
14:04 December 6, 2018
15:53 December 5, 2018
Show the slide number and total number of slides on every PowerPoint slide
21:28 December 4, 2018
19:53 December 4, 2018
18:03 November 26, 2018
 Configure Postfix to Send Mail Using Gmail and Google Apps on Debian or Ubuntu
18:02 November 26, 2018
Configure Postfix to Send Mail Using an External SMTP Server
18:01 November 26, 2018
18:01 November 26, 2018
18:00 November 26, 2018
11:09 November 26, 2018
11:07 November 26, 2018
How to Setup a Complete Mail Server (Postfix) using âSquirrelMailâ (Webmail) on Ubuntu/Debian
14:51 November 25, 2018
11:43 November 25, 2018
How to Configure WordPress to Use SMTP For Sending Emails Tutorial
11:42 November 25, 2018
11:41 November 25, 2018
11:41 November 25, 2018
11:39 November 25, 2018
 How to Send Email in WordPress using the Gmail SMTP Server
11:38 November 25, 2018
11:38 November 25, 2018
11:37 November 25, 2018
10:51 November 25, 2018
10:45 November 25, 2018
20:31 November 24, 2018
20:30 November 24, 2018
17:44 November 24, 2018
17:37 November 24, 2018
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS Using .htaccess File: Step by Step
21:45 November 22, 2018
21:43 November 22, 2018
12:10 November 17, 2018
12:08 November 17, 2018
apt-get install linux-image-extra getting âW: mdadm: /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf defines no arrays.â
12:04 November 17, 2018
15:40 November 4, 2018
Here are the 13 most useful Mac shortcuts that will help you do everything faster
11:02 October 21, 2018
09:05 October 13, 2018
11:48 September 22, 2018
16:12 September 20, 2018
Use an Easy PowerShell Command to Search Files for Information
12:20 September 19, 2018
10:06 September 9, 2018
21:18 August 5, 2018
13:42 July 22, 2018
17:27 July 21, 2018
14:27 July 15, 2018
16:27 July 13, 2018
10:13 June 25, 2018
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20:48 May 29, 2018
20:47 May 29, 2018
11:02 May 28, 2018
10:26 May 28, 2018
09:54 May 28, 2018
16:08 May 25, 2018
The Ultimate Guide to WordPress and GDPR Compliance â Everything You Need to Know
16:02 May 25, 2018
Performance optimizations you can apply today to load the Matomo JavaScript tracker faster
16:01 May 25, 2018
Different ways of embedding the Matomo tracking code for faster website performance
11:24 May 16, 2018
23:18 May 13, 2018
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11:02 May 12, 2018
10:59 May 12, 2018
10:52 May 12, 2018
10:32 May 12, 2018
10:30 May 12, 2018
10:27 May 12, 2018
21:42 May 5, 2018
12:23 April 18, 2018
How to troubleshoot the error code “SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER” on secure websites
09:34 April 15, 2018
10:08 April 14, 2018
22:25 April 13, 2018
18:20 April 10, 2018
Write your best resume in Word with help from LinkedIn in Resume Assistant
09:59 March 29, 2018
16:37 March 28, 2018
15:58 March 28, 2018
14:12 March 28, 2018
14:00 March 28, 2018
10:35 March 27, 2018
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14:05 March 17, 2018
14:01 March 17, 2018
13:59 March 17, 2018
11:11 March 17, 2018
13:53 March 7, 2018
10:17 November 25, 2017
10:17 November 16, 2017
Diving Into the New Gutenberg WordPress Editor (Pros and Cons)
19:11 November 15, 2017
19:09 November 15, 2017
16:44 October 31, 2017
23:34 October 25, 2017
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
23:32 October 25, 2017
23:31 October 25, 2017
19:20 October 24, 2017
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19:18 October 24, 2017
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23:25 October 22, 2017
10:19 October 14, 2017
17:03 October 7, 2017
17:01 October 7, 2017
Get rid of those extra TIFFs & PSDs in your Lightroom Library fast!
11:57 September 15, 2017
09:47 September 11, 2017
09:45 September 11, 2017
17:11 August 13, 2017
14:21 July 22, 2017
12:13 July 8, 2017
20:03 July 1, 2017
18:58 June 21, 2017
17:03 April 24, 2017
12:01 April 2, 2017
Windows 7: Windows 7 Not Updating
Windows Update error “0x80070002” or “0x80070003”
Fix Windows Update errors by using the DISM or System Update Readiness tool
18:17 March 22, 2017
23:25 March 12, 2017
22:08 March 7, 2017
Review: Evoluent Vertical Mouse 4 (and how to make it work in Ubuntu)
11:14 February 25, 2017
18:38 February 16, 2017
18:34 February 16, 2017
10:35 February 5, 2017
00:45 December 3, 2016
16:02 July 18, 2016
18:21 June 9, 2016
15:22 May 13, 2016
15:13 January 15, 2016
Get rid of the annoying formatting pop-up when you paste in Word
11:15 December 5, 2015
16:23 December 4, 2015
14:08 December 3, 2015
14:07 December 3, 2015
22:16 November 12, 2015
11:08 November 12, 2015
Fedora 23/22/21 nVidia Drivers Install Guide
HOWTO: Install NVIDIA driver on Fedora â replacing Nouveau
09:56 October 30, 2015
20:15 October 29, 2015
20:10 October 29, 2015
20:06 October 29, 2015
21:01 October 2, 2015
22:02 September 28, 2015
11:28 August 7, 2015
16:14 July 27, 2015
11:18 July 24, 2015
18:40 July 10, 2015
15:16 July 9, 2015
18:41 July 6, 2015
07:24 July 2, 2015
The Command Prompt is Outdated: 2 Command Prompt Replacements for Windows
6 Great Windows 10 Features You Can Get Today on Windows 7 or 8
07:35 June 23, 2015
20:12 June 18, 2015
12:08 May 8, 2015
20:00 May 4, 2015
20:00 May 4, 2015
11:07 May 4, 2015
10:51 May 1, 2015
10:44 April 16, 2015
10:39 April 13, 2015
09:45 April 12, 2015
09:45 April 12, 2015
15:04 April 11, 2015
12:42 April 6, 2015
14:01 April 3, 2015
How to fix âSystem program problem detectedâ error on Ubuntu
19:27 March 28, 2015
11:34 March 27, 2015
11:21 March 27, 2015
11:04 March 27, 2015
16:51 March 26, 2015
16:53 March 18, 2015
04:00 March 7, 2015
02:39 March 5, 2015
Google Translate CLI Lets You Translate Text From The Command Line
01:51 March 5, 2015
23:19 February 21, 2015
14:25 February 19, 2015
11:56 February 16, 2015
22:29 February 9, 2015
15:45 February 5, 2015
Switch Windows by Hovering the Mouse Over a Window in Windows 7 or Vista
10:32 February 4, 2015
15:30 January 30, 2015
10:17 January 21, 2015
12:56 December 31, 2014
10:05 December 11, 2014
17:05 December 9, 2014
16:22 December 6, 2014
18:45 December 5, 2014
The crop tool is stuck in a fixed shape. How can I make it work properly?
14:55 November 26, 2014
22:12 November 18, 2014
How To Install MATE Desktop on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Cinnamon 2.4 Debuts With New Features, Hereâs How To Install It In Ubuntu
FSF-Endorsed Linux Distro âTrisquel 7.0ⲠReleased
19:53 November 11, 2014
21:54 November 4, 2014
21:52 November 4, 2014
22:30 October 30, 2014
21:34 June 11, 2014
18:57 January 24, 2014
Archive area of old releases of Java for those who need them.
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There are times when I feel the need to share some snippets with a longer lifespan than a tweet. This is a place for those and some yet may even turn into longer articles themselves. That already has happened for one of them, so there is something of a digital scrapbook in operation here.
13:08 January 8, 2024
Now that ownCloud has been acquired by Kiteworks, there is some uncertainty about what happens next. So far, there is an offer for ownCloud and Nextcloud users to move to Kiteworks’ proprietary platform. Nextcloud itself has been busy making use of the uncertainty to promote their own product line.
19:15 November 19, 2023
The open-source section of the website got a lot of tweaking in the last few weeks. The recipient of the attention was the operating system subsection. That got a full reorganisation with all the listings seeing new entries too. The desktop software also got a bit of attention, and other areas could get altered yet.
11:35 January 20, 2023
Recently, I have been having trouble with Nvidia drivers following a kernel update in Linux Mint (21.1 is the version that I am using). The kernel version has been rolled back from 5.19.x to 5.15.x, and I installed an old AMD graphics card as well. Things still are not perfect, though, so I will be looking out for a way to make things smoother. For now, all is good enough for the moment.
10:30 February 12, 2022
Google Analytics appears to be losing favour in the EU, if Matomo is to be believed. First, Austria outlawed its usage and no France follows suit. This naturally suits Matomo, a self-hosted open-source alternative for collecting website metrics, so it should not be any surprise that they are forthcoming with these details.
16:20 October 9, 2021
Here is the sequence of commands to use when upgrading from OpenMediaVault 4.x to 5.x. All need to be executed with elevated access privileges:
wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/upgrade4to5 | sudo bash
reboot
Once your system has restarted and you have logged in again, then you execute these:
apt-get purge openmediavault-omvextrasorg resolvconf
wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/packages/raw/master/install | bash
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
omv-salt deploy run nginx
omv-salt deploy run phpfpm
apt-get install usrmerge
omv-confdbadm migrate conf 5.0.0
15:19 October 9, 2021
Here are some North American online emporia fro buying computers, their components or peripherals:
09:06 September 24, 2021
Here are boilerplate commands for banning and unbanning IP addresses using Fail2ban:
fail2ban-client set <JAIL> banip <IP>
fail2ban-client set <JAIL> unbanip <IP>
13:09 July 27, 2020
If you ever need to install Linux kernel headers on an openSUSE instance in order to install VirtualBox Guest Additions, the following command should be executed in order to do the needful:
sudo zypper in kernel-source
10:37 February 5, 2017
Here is a possible way of resetting the CSS definition for a HTML element, class or ID:
#reset-this-parent {
all: initial;
* {
all: unset;
}
}
Browser support for the above may vary though.
10:39 November 23, 2016
After seeing messages like “The authenticity of host ‘hostname’ can’t be established” during ssh connections, I decided to investigate more and came up with the following solution:
sudo chown -v $USER ~/.ssh/known_hosts
My known_hosts file had gained root ownership so i could not write to it so changing the ownership to that of my own user account sorted the problem. An alternative could be to change the group assignment using chgrp and setting permissions using chmod but what I did sufficed for my needs.
06:30 November 23, 2016
When I ran into trouble with accessing my own websites using my broadband, I found that the solution was to change DNS Lookup Service to what Google offers. This was done on the router side and the IP addresses used were 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.
22:33 June 4, 2016
Here’s a way to convert DNG files to JPEG ones:
find -type f | grep DNG | parallel mogrify -format jpg {}
10:51 September 16, 2015
Here is a way to recursively delete folders and their contents in PowerShell:
Remove-Item .\foldertodelete -Force -Recurse
The Force switch silences any messages that otherwise would appear and the Recurse switch is what gets directories removed.
23:38 August 18, 2015
Thomson Reuters is changing over Open Calais at the end of August.
11:05 July 29, 2015
Motorola now selling phones direct to the public through its own store. Customisation options are available for more expensive models like Moto X and Nexus 6 too.
10:18 April 12, 2015
Devuan (pronounced like dev-one) is a fork of Debian that does not use systemd as Debian, like so many other distros, is doing. Part of the name must come from a collective calling itself Veteran UNIX Admin (VUA). There is no actual release just but one is intended for around the same time as Debian 8.0 gets released and donations are being solicted via the website.
18:51 February 20, 2015
Here is a handy way to get PowerShell to show files larger than a certain size:
get-childitem | where-object {$_.length -gt 10000}
|ft fullname, length -auto
19:40 December 1, 2014
When a VirtualBox upgrade broke the networking on a Windows 8.1, it was time to look at System Restore to see what it would do. It reverted version 4.3.20 to 4.3.15 and the network disconnection stopped. For now, I will remain with that older version after the misstep with the latest one. Sometimes it is best to stick with what is known to work.
20:38 October 30, 2014
With my deciding to try doing about my waistline during the summer (a bike got put on a trainer and around 30 minutes is spent on it most evenings while I also catch up some reading; now, I feel fitter and incursions into the countryside have an added air of confidence about them), an interest in fitness monitors has developed and the Pulse Ox from Withings has taken my eye due its being price of around ÂŁ100. That makes it less than alternatives and it isn’t the only health gadget that the company does either with there being a blood pressure monitor in its range too. The Pulse Ox monitors such things as heart rate, activity such as walking and running, sleeping and weight too. It should work with your smartphone as well, which is a bonus. It is one of several like it with Samsung and Apple going in for phone apps and Microsoft releasing their Band device as well. This appears to be a growing area where I never expected to see mainstream technology companies having a role for themselves.
12:44 October 30, 2014
Ergotech now have useful desktop stands for tablet computers. There is one for a full size iPad and another for any other type of tablet. A standalone one on wheels also is available though I cannot see myself ever needing such an item.
20:24 October 20, 2014
Here are some more specialist information sources with search facilities:
18:53 October 7, 2014
Here is the test for the “Shellshock” vulnerability in the bash shell:
env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable’ bash -c “echo this is a test”
It should not return the following:
vulnerable
this is a test
This would be acceptable:
bash: warning: x: ignoring function definition attempt
bash: error importing function definition for `x’
this is a test
Also, just having this might be fine too:
this is a test
In case you need it, Redhat has more information on the bug that caused scare stories everywhere. Now, it is over to system administrators everywhere to do their bit now that bash has been patched.
21:36 August 24, 2014
Sometimes you need to create more than one directory level in a hierarchy at once and mkdir has the -p option for this purpose. That gets it to create any missing levels in a folder path and avoids warnings that would be issued otherwise.
16:18 August 21, 2014
Debian 8 is under development and has its first beta ready for download. XFCE is now the default desktop environment though it remains possible to install GNOME and GNOME Shell too. In fact, I successfully have given that a go in a VirtualBox installation and will keeping an eye on development so long as no system meltdowns occur. The version of the X Window system already is incompatible with VirtualBox 4.3.14 so we need to await a new version of the virtualisation software before we get access to advanced functions like full window desktop expansion. What we have at the moment works well enough to keep eye on development so we can wait for that full support.
18:31 August 6, 2014
Perfect Resize from onOne Software caught my eye for scaling up images after seeing it mentioned in a Outdoor Photography review of Avanquest PhotoZoom Professional. With a library of 6″ x 4″ prints, I am limited in how large I can make scanned images without they looking blurred and pixelated so that’s why my interest was aroused. There may be a free moment spent seeing what it might do in that situation yet.
16:24 August 2, 2014
Nvidia has a useful page on the difference between DVI-D and DVI-I. It came in handy when transitioning from VGA to DVI on my home PC’s. That made what appears on my Iiyama screen much sharper and allowed me to rid myself of a suspect VGA cable too.
21:42 June 11, 2014
Here are some interesting articles about EFI and UEFI that I uncovered during a recent episode of setting up dual booting of Windows 8.1 and Linux Mint 17 on a PC with EFI:
UEFI Dual-Boot -- Ubuntu 12.04.3 + Windows 8.1 (One GPT HDD)
11:53 May 3, 2014
In the U.K., BT allows you to divert your phone calls for a fee and I have made good use of it over the past year. The service is called Call Diversion and Eircom, Ireland’s counterpart to BT, offers Call Forwarding in Ăire. Both are handy because redirecting a call to a mobile phone means that you know you are not missing any calls and that there is nothing lurking on an answering machine when you do get to your home or office. Landline telephony may seem less exciting these days than other forms of communication yet it still has its place and I would not get any nasty surprises along the path of life either. If only I had started doing this kind of thing earlier than I did…
20:12 April 4, 2014
Here’s a useful article about the ever useful locate command. Whether it is FreeBSD or Ubuntu that you are running, this article has a use and that especially when the locate database needs updating with the updatedb command.
20:54 March 12, 2014
A recent website redesign was well helped by modern.IE‘s collection of virtual machine appliances containing different versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. Depending on the host operating system that you are using, you have different options. For Linux, it is VirtualBox only while Windows gains VMware and Virtual PC too. It is a matter of just picking out what suits your situation from dropdown lists.
The first one that I picked was Vista with IE 7 and it was an interface that I had not seen for a while. For all the criticism, the operating system did work well though I wonder if it arrived before the computer hardware that it really needed in order to run smoothly. The dark theme cannot have helped its cause either, especially when compared with the much brighter Windows 7 or Windows 8.x. A Windows XP appliance with IE 6 was grabbed before it gets yanked and support for the elderly OS does finish in April. IE 6 probably is on its last legs so I probably can ignore it now but IE 7 might live longer yet. Window 7 appliances with IE 9 and IE 10 also were downloaded and confirmed that all was well in recent versions of IE when it came to the website. The Vista virtual machine allowed me to ensure that all looks acceptable on IE 7 too. The VM’s themselves contain evaluation versions of enterprise variants of Windows and have a limited lifespan though it is little trouble to reimport an appliance again to rest the clock if so required. In most cases, you extend the evaluation periods too through re-arming and there only are so many times that you can do that anyway. With Windows 8.x, it isn’t even a possibility anyway.
22:05 March 9, 2014
Today, I found an interesting article on CSS media queries and put it to some use for a website redesign that has been keeping me busy over the weekend. Twitter’s Bootstrap came in handy for this too. Now, it’s on to ridding the new design of any rough edges that remain in there. That can be an ongoing task and the site is here if you fancy a look to see what my efforts have produced.
16:20 February 26, 2014
Adding a new Zalman ZM450-GS power supply did little to sort the buzzing in my speakers but it has made the PC where it was installed so much quieter; a much larger fan spinning slower helps while still moving the required amount of air. It is 450W too and I am wondering if my main PC would benefit from a similar upgrade. That may be quieter than the other one was but the case was not a deluxe model so the change should do no harm. As for the speakers, moving them was the only way to get rid of the buzzing. Looking back on this now, it seems that one of them was far too close to a PC.
20:33 February 15, 2014
Currently, the spare PC appears to be causing buzzing on my main PC speakers and with my landline telephone when it is placed right under these. Removing it helps to cut it down but I fancy having a better fix and am wondering if a new power supply might help. Also, I am wondering if there are other sources too. In the meantime, I would like to share an article on the subject that I recently found: Kill Studio Hum and Buzz at the Source.
22:14 February 12, 2014
Applying latest set of updates to LMDE worked to get to Update 8 worked smoothly unlike some predecessors. This brought the latest version of Cinnamon so GNOME now is redundant. It will be interesting to see where things go next.
16:24 February 8, 2014
During the week, I discovered that Twitter is not a benign place to go ruminating. A sharp riposte in an unnecessary tone of voice was enough to bring on a sense of extra caution. Wherever you get humanity, you are likely to encounter and one had a go at me so some thoughts are going to be kept away from there from this point forward. Sometimes, you own website is a far better place to go ponder happenings in the world around you. After all, an ugly comment can be deleted and a rogue IP address blocked if things need to go that far. Of course. more civility would be best. Polite correction is the best course whenever it is warranted since we all are human and no one is beyond making mistakes.
16:15 February 8, 2014
On my outdoors website, I have been using a PHP script from Detect Mobile Browsers but this does not distinguish between Android running on a tablet and that running on a phone. Therefore, I have turned to another source of such scripting and that is working better so far. In fact, this offers more than just PHP but also Python, JavaScript and other scripting languages along with configuration files for web servers too. Apache, Nginx and IIS all have something for them. The logic essentially is based on Perl regular expression matching of user agent strings, not an infallible means but good enough for me along with a smattering of responsive design.
14:30 February 1, 2014
For anyone lost when faced with the changes Microsoft brought in with the launch of Windows 8 and largely retained in Windows 8.1, TechRadar has a useful article: 62 Windows 8 tips, tricks and secrets. What will prove especially interesting is where Microsoft goes next when many of their customers prefer the Windows 7 interface and are sticking with the elderly Windows XP. You only can get so far by telling your customers that they are wrong all of the time and the is competition in the form of Apple’s OS X and Google’s Chrome now.
14:23 February 1, 2014
TechRadar has a round-up of Best free photo editing software: 10 top image editors you should try. Usual options like GIMP, Paint.Net and IrfanView get a mention along with other less well known ones. Interestingly, Google’s Picasa is excluded from the list but that might be because it largely is an image file management tool even if it has some image editing capabilities too.
21:28 January 27, 2014
Late last week, I found out about the image file sorting tool PhotoSift via an article on the software. It looks interesting though I have yet to try it.
17:52 January 27, 2014
Here are some interesting reviews from TechRadar:
Best compact system camera 2014: the top models reviewed
Best tripod and camera support: 13 tested
The tripod heads review really caught my eye more than the others. After all, 2013 was the year that I got a CSC and a Manfrotto tripod has sat reproachingly in the corner far more often than it should.
19:41 January 16, 2014
Today, I spotted two interesting articles to which I want to retain links on here:
Managing the future of complex business and IT landscapes
Send large files to clients with these 8 free tools
Both of these ring bells for me for different reasons. The first is a reminder of a slow and painful system project with which I was involved and of an ineffective IT support service that pained us at the time. The second is ever present in my current job with its need to send data and output files to clients as well as receiving specifications from them.
19:36 January 4, 2014
In recent weeks, I have been having trouble with the onboard network controller on a spare PC that I have at home. It connects to the network fine for a few minutes and then struggles. Making use of an old PCI ethernet card that I had from another machine solved the problem. Does anyone know of issues with ASRock motherboards and onboard network ports at all? It isn’t something that I have seen before and this motherboard never had good networking capability as long as I have had it.
19:33 January 4, 2014
After Christmas, I took delivery of an HTC One mini mobile phone that I got free as part of a contract renewal with O2. It also is known as the M4 and I have been getting used to it since I got it. A lot is familiar and there are some little differences too. Some of these leave me asking why what worked well before got changed to something that is less smooth. Of course, that can be the course of things and it applies to buying a new car as much as getting a phone upgrade. All in all, the phone works well and battery life appears much improved over the HTC Desire S so far, never a bad thing to notice.
19:25 January 4, 2014
This morning, the hosting provider for this website had an outage that lasted over three hours. The provider was Fasthosts and the cause was a power failure. They usually are good so this thankfully does not happen too often. However, we have been getting a lot of stormy weather crossing Britain and Ireland this winter so I suspect that there should be little in the way of surprise when something like this happens. Weather is not due to settle during this month so there may be more power failures, hopefully elsewhere, before things settle down again.
17:20 January 3, 2014
On one WordPress website that I have, the refresh rate for RSS widgets wasn’t the quickest and the remedy was to add this line into the themes functions.php file:
add_filter( ‘wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime’, create_function(‘$a’, ‘return 600;’) );
It creates a custom function that is attached to the widget and the refresh time is set to 600 seconds or 10 minutes. So far, this seems to be doing what I needed.
17:56 December 19, 2013
What I didn’t realise is that TRIM currently is not enabled in Ubuntu by default. That is set to change in Ubuntu 14.04 and here is some advice on the matter until then.
20:41 December 14, 2013
This weekend, I had visions of needing a new hard drive when all files on one in my main home PC (runs Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 64-bit) went read only. The cure was to re-seat the SATA cables and all was well again. Sometimes, inexpensive remedies are best and I need not to forget this one.
20:54 October 29, 2013
Here are two interesting articles that I spotted: the first is on new features in GNOME 3.10Â and the second about getting DRM-protected Flash media playing on Ubuntu 13.10. For now, I am sticking with Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 in spite of a pop-up dialogue encouraging an upgrade to 13.10; the potential for even a little disruption is something that I am delaying for now.
20:34 October 16, 2013
While editing a file in Nano on an virtual Arch Linux web server that I have, I noticed that a file had DOS newline characters instead of UNIX ones so conversion using the dos2unix command was in order. There is more on this to be found on nixCraft and there are other options such as sed described in there too.
21:51 September 7, 2013
Following a look at Webmin, I have to say that it seems a worthy tool for remote management of servers. My trial so far has been on my Ubuntu virtual web server and it works on port 10000 without interfering with the operation of the actual web server. Being able to run system updates and deletion of MySQL databases without resorting to the command will seem a bonus for some. There’s more to it than these though and I have seen the possibility of managing virtual servers located within a real being mooted. It was an issue of Linux User & Developer than inspired me so my Linux magazine reading is seeing its uses.
20:30 September 4, 2013
Here are some interesting articles for anyone thinking about software development and its realities:
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
Being an introvert as I am, this article really is something to which I can relate. Whenever I cannot get the space for undisturbed work, it takes from how I enjoy my job.
How designers and engineers can play nice (and still run with scissors)
We all have to work cross-functionally so you cannot have it all your own way…
Six reasons why the NHS National Programme for IT failed
Having been involved in system design, development and implementation myself, I have something to share that fits into the same topic area. Too many cooks can spoil a broth.
Queensland Government Bans IBM from IT Contracts
My past experiences of IBM have not been good and it wasn’t just where I worked either so this is not exactly a surprise. Service organisations need to ensure that they are sufficient responsive and flexible with empowered and enthusiastic staff who do the needful.
23:09 August 11, 2013
Vagrant and Puppet look like very interesting tools for working with virtual machines. They work with VirtualBox or VMware’s Fusion and Workstation so there’s a choice of virtualisation tool.
20:52 April 18, 2013
Crash reports have been appearing after logging into an Ubuntu session for /usr/share/hplip/config_usb_printer.py and it repeating has been reinstalling HPLIP software for my HP LaserJet 1018 printer too. Leaving the printer off until I need it would be one solution and saves some electricity too but it is best to try to sort an issue when you keep getting it. The first step was to download the latest HP software and install it. That wasn’t a complete solution so I altered the latest send_message function call in /usr/share/hplip/config_usb_printer.py from the following:
send_message( device_uri, printer_name, EVENT_DIAGNOSE_PRINTQUEUE, username, 0,”)
to:
send_message( device_uri, printer_name, EVENT_DIAGNOSE_PRINTQUEUE, ”, 0,”)
So far that alteration appears to have addressed the problem but I’ll be keeping an eye on things anyway. If you’re wondering, the inspiration came from a bug discussion on Launchpad and it was the queue clearing section of the Python script that I went and edited.
20:40 April 16, 2013
Recently, I have been having bother with WordPress Jetpack comment form submission. This was caused by the Bad Behaviour plugin and allowing cross site form submission sorted the problem. The setting to change is in Settings > Bad Behaviour on the Dashboard.
17:31 March 16, 2013
Here’s a quick way to make Faenza and Faience icons available to Ubuntu and maybe Linux Mint too:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tiheum/equinox
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install faenza-icon-theme faience-*
20:53 February 19, 2013
During a look at a Fedora 18 Live DVD, I found a user name was needed to get to the desktop and root did the trick for me. What I didn’t notice was an install to hard drive option for the GNOME variant that I tried. Maybe it was hidden on the desktop and not displayed. If so, it looks like an oversight.
16:02 February 14, 2013
Here’s the way to find the version of PROC CDISC that came with the version of SAS that you are using:
proc cdisc version;
run;
14:00 February 14, 2013
Here’s robustness principal for software design that otherwise is known as Postel’s Law after TCP pioneer Jon Postel:
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
08:10 February 14, 2013
Here’s a command for removal of orphaned packages in Arch Linux and its derivatives (CinnArch and ArchBang come to mind but there may be others):
sudo pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qqtd)
15:11 January 26, 2013
Cinnarch looks very interesting. It’s based on Arch Linux so it’s a rolling distro but has Cinnamon as its desktop environment. Currently, it’s still in beta but I am tempted to give it a go in a virtual machine.
20:55 December 15, 2012
Having decided that my ever sluggish system needed a fresh operating system installation, I set to trying to get on Linux Mint 14. However, not remembering that the disk and not the partition needs specifying for GRUB installation cost me some time. Later, adding on GNOME Shell resulted in a system conflict between MDM and GDM so I now am running Ubuntu GNOME Remix instead. All feels fresher so far though a spot bother was had with the lock screen that caused me to turn off the feature. VMware Player installed without any of the trickery needed to get in its forbear and runs without a hitch so far too. Other bits and pieces need instating yet but the basis of a refreshed computing platform is in place now.
20:56 November 19, 2012
A look at Linux Mint 14 64-bit release candidate in a VirtualBox virtual machine confronted me with irritating mouse pointer behaviour. The pointer constantly darts to the left when you need it not to do that and it seriously affects usability. The final version will be awaited to see if there is an improvement because it’s not very usable as things stand. GNOME Shell can be installed in working order after a spot of fiddling. Installing the software from the Software Store doesn’t add gnome-session as well so the command line alternative remains best:
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell && sudo apt-get install gnome-session
These two really need packaging together as dependencies. Cinnamon is looking as nice as ever and in need of a plug-in that makes virtual desktops behave as they do in GNOME, even if that’s a minority interest now.
12:07 September 30, 2012
Here are commands for adding Cinnamon to Ubuntu:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
14:39 September 29, 2012
Had a look at GNOME 3.6 in Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 Beta 1 release. Not all extensions are supported yet but GNOME 3.6 only launched officially yesterday anyway. Will take a little while for those extension developers to catch up with it. No hurry in moving from GNOME 3.4 until they do so.
20:24 September 22, 2012
Picked up Netgear ethernet switcher at PC World today. Working without a hitch so far. Some network reorganisation may follow suit.
20:14 September 22, 2012
Initially, I needed to use the command “modprobe vboxdrv” to get VirtualBox going on Sabayon 10. However, there seems to be a better remedy: adding the line ‘modules=”vboxdrv vboxnetflt vboxnetadp”‘ (removing the outer single quotes, by the way) to /etc/conf.d/modules and restarting the system. That seems to have done the trick though I wonder it wasn’t added for me automatically.
13:08 September 22, 2012
Until recently, I hadn’t realised that most if not all SSD’s come in 2.5″ form factor. An extra bracket is needed for installing into 3.5″ drive bays. While tempting, this remains a nice to have upgrade for me.
20:02 September 21, 2012
Found out why my proftpd daemon wasn’t working on Linux Mint. Needed to set it as standalone and not inetd operation. It’s the ServerType setting in /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf.
21:53 September 18, 2012
Given the site a new appearance. The cause was getting microblogging going on this page. Clashes with zeeDisplay theme and Twitter Tools made for replacements that now power what you see here. Jetpack plugin added too. All looking good to my eyes so far. More tinkering may happen yet.
21:36 September 15, 2012
Here are a few places where you will find Linux version information stored: /etc/issue, /etc/issue.net, /etc/lsb-release.
17:30 September 15, 2012
Desktop swapping can be done in Ubuntu and here’s the command for Xubuntu:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
17:22 September 15, 2012
Here’s a set of commands that I once used to get GNOME Shell going for a Sabayon 9 installation in a VirtualBox virtual machine:
su
equo install --ask linux-sources
cd /run/media/john/VBOXADDITIONS_4.1.16_78094
./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
mv /usr/libexec/gnome-session-check-accelerated-helper /usr/libexec/gnome-session-check-accelerated-helper.bak
ln -s /bin/true /usr/libexec/gnome-session-check-accelerated-helper
Hope they have a use though VirtualBox has gone through a few versions since I discovered that these had the desired effect though the login screen behaved a little oddly. Otherwise, everything worked as it should.
14:16 September 15, 2012
Pondering purchase of NAS. QNAP TS-412 looking promising but need to think about my home networking set up first. Might need an ethernet switch but plan to look into it more first, especially with uplink capability needed.
14:11 September 15, 2012
Appearance of Sabayon 10 caused a bit of disturbance to my Sabayon installation that needed installation from a DVD to resolve. Tried GRUB repairs before the non-loading of an Nvidia kernel module caused bother. Went for old fashioned approach for sake of saving a little troubleshooting time.
13:52 September 15, 2012
This has been added using the Live Blogging plugin and it’s good for pages too, unlike Automattic’s own Liveblog plugin. Maybe they’ll add that sort of functionality in time.
It’s amazing what ideas Linux gives that you wouldn’t encounter that clearly in the world of Windows. One of these is output and command line history so a script can be created. In the Windows world, this would be called a batch file. Linux usefully has the history command and it does the needful for taking a snapshot like so:
history > ~/commands.sh
All of the commands stored in a terminal’s command history get stored in the commands.sh in the user’s home area. The command for doing the same thing from the Windows command line is not as obvious because it uses the doskey command that is intended for command line macro writing and execution. Usefully, it has a history option that tells it to output all the commands issued in a command line session. Unless, you create a file with them in there, there seems to be no way to store all those commands across sessions, unlike UNIX and Linux. Therefore, a command like the following is a partial solution that is more permanent than using the F7 key on your keyboard:
doskey /history > c:\commands.bat
Windows Powershell has something similar too and it even has aliases of history and even h. All Powershell scripts have file extensions of ps1 and the example below follows that scheme:
get-history > c:\commands.ps1
However, I believe that even Powershell doesn’t carry over command history between sessions though Microsoft are working on adding this useful functionality. They could co-opt Cygwin of course but that doesn’t seem to be their way of going about things.
Linux and UNIX have the touch command for changing the creation dates and times for files. However, it also will create empty text files for you as well. In fact, there are times when I feel the need to do this sort of thing on Windows too and the following command accomplishes the deed when run in a Command Prompt window:
type nul > command.bat
Essentially, null output is sent to a file that is created anew, command.bat in this case. Then, you can edit it in Notepad (or whatever is your choice of text editor) and add in what you need. This will not work in Powershell so you need another command for that:
New-Item command.bat -type file
This uses the New-Item command, which also can be used to create folders as well if you so desire. Then, the command becomes the following:
New-Item c:\commands -type directory
Note that file on the previous example has become directory and there is the -force option should you need to overwrite what already exists for some reason…
That other use of the UNIX/Linux touch command can be performed from the Command Prompt too and here is an example command:
copy /b file.txt +,,
The /b switch switches on binary behaviour for the copy command though that appears to be the default action anyway. The + operator triggers concatenation and ,, gets around not having a defined destination because you cannot copy a file over itself. If that were possible, then there would no need for special syntax for changing the date and time for a file.
For doing the same thing with Powershell, try the following:
(GetChildItem test.txt).LastWriteTime=Get-Date
The GetChildItem command has aliases of gci, dir and ls and the last two of these give away its essential purpose. Here, it is used to pick out the test.txt file so that its timestamp can be replaced with the current date and time returned by the Get-Date command. The syntax looks a little more complex even if it achieves the same end. Somehow, that touch command is easier to explain. Are Linux and UNIX that complicated after all?
Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions and has spawned many of derivatives, with Ubuntu being the most notable of the lot. It, too, has a range of ports that include one using a BSD kernel (GNU/kFreeBSD) too. Mainly though, it is the x86 and AMD64 architecture Linux variants that get the most attention.
After all, I do have something of a soft spot for Debian, mainly because it was loaded on a backup machine that was pressed into service when my main home system went belly up on me in 2009. It may attract its aficionados (and there is an administrator’s manual so that gives you an idea of who gets attracted to the OS) but that does nothing to detract from its usability based on my experience of using it. Well, Ubuntu did start from a good base when it did.
That was not to be the end of my dalliance with Debian and I still have virtual machines loaded with it today. The fact that new versions of the operating system may not come around very frequently can be an attraction that is lost on those who always want the latest software. When it comes to GNOME Shell, maintaining the same version longer than six months and wondering if favoured extensions will get updated to a new version has something going for it. Long-term support helps too, a growing trend in the world of Linux.
The changes introduced with GNOME 3 have been contentious and the Debian team has toyed with using other default desktop environments yet always returned to it regardless. Still, the range of desktop environments that you can use with Debian has expanded with both Cinnamon and KDE being options that come to mind and there are others.
As you might tell, I do have a soft spot for Debian and its focus on stability is at the heart of that. Maybe that is why so it has so many variants, like Ubuntu and Linux Mint, to name just two. Whenever a new version does appear, it may not have the latest versions of software, but there are times when experimentation needs to be tamed and it is good to know that upheaval hardly is a regular occurrence either.
So many other distros are based on Debian that there needs to be a list of them on here. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are the most notable of the lot, but there are many others, as you will see below. Others may fall in more specific functional listings that you can find via the sidebar.
An up-and-coming Ubuntu derivative that uses the Enlightenment desktop environment.
This is another derivative of Ubuntu that is gaining favour thanks to the elegance of its desktop. That it’s essentially GNOME 3 is saying something about how GNOME Shell can be customised too.
When Debian changed from sysvinit to systemd for managing system start-up and services, there were those who disagreed strongly with the decision. Though the Debian team did vote for this under the bonnet change, the detractors set up Devuan as an alternative downstream project that allows them to continue as they were.
It has Ubuntu at its heart, but a lot of work has happened to make it feel as if that isn’t the case.
What you have here is a Swedish respin of Deepin Linux. From the website, it appears that freedom is a concern but there needs to be more made of the reason for doing what they are doing.
This is not a full desktop option since it contains many system utilities for maintenance and recovery. What you get on startup is a root command line with everything available to you.
If you can forego the support that Linspire offers its customers, then this can come to you free of charge. The basis here is Ubuntu with different choices like the inclusion of Flatpak as well as a different software selection that includes the Brave browser and OnlyOffice.
This is a remix of Debian that uses the Zsh shell that runs exclusively as a live distro, either on a DC or on a USB flash drive.
If I recall correctly, this was the first-ever distribution to offer a Live CD version of itself and the innovation has taken off to the level that almost all of its competitors now offer the same. Its creator also writes a helpdesk column for Linux Magazine.
Until the 12.04, release this was sponsored by Canonical, but that has changed with Blue Systems taking over for the 12.10 release. It remains the KDE flavour of Ubuntu despite this and that seems to remain the case for the foreseeable future.
As the name suggests; thus, Ubuntu variant is suitable for older computer hardware. Also, it is based on LTS releases of Ubuntu, so there is no need to upgrade every six months either.
The main distro may be based on Ubuntu, but there is a Debian-based version, LMDE, too. The latter only comes with the Cinnamon desktop environment while the former comes with Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. My everyday choice has been the Cinnamon edition based on Ubuntu even if the Debian version has been checked out for a time as well; LMDE felt a little clunkier to me so I am staying mainstream for my purposes. All in all, Linux Mint feels far more community-oriented with less drama, which is why it gets my vote for everyday computing.
One of the promises here is the running of Windows applications using Wine along with the running of Android apps. Also, the chosen desktop environment is KDE Plasma.
The first place I ever tried Lubuntu was on a now elderly Asus Eee PC netbook. LXDE is the desktop environment choice here too and it’s very lightweight and so fits the bill for netbooks and PC’s that are getting on in years. The included software is chosen for being lightweight, so Chromium appeared instead of Firefox, but the accessibility of Ubuntu repositories meant that LibreOffice and the aforementioned Firefox never took long to appear on where I installed Lubuntu. Originally, it was an independent project but it impressed Mark Shuttleworth enough to gain official support such that new versions now appear on the same day as the main Ubuntu release itself.
The website for this project disappeared for a while but it seems to be back again, so the entry reappears in this list. It is yet another lightweight distro for use on an ageing computer, as if Linux does not provide enough of these already. However, each has their own aesthetics so that may have something to do with the number of available options.
In the first decade of the century, Warren Woodford created a distro called Mepis, but that project was discontinued in 2009. In response, members of the antiX and Mepis teams came together to create MX as a successor to Mepis. Today, the project remains active, and the latest version comes with XFCE, KDE and Fluxbox desktop environment choices. The antiX involvement adds a little extra computing efficiency too.
When Kubuntu existed, the need for this was lost on me, but the continued existence of this project will serve those who were left without an option after the official Ubuntu derivative. The effort is sponsored by Blue Systems.
Here is one of the strap lines for Nitrux: Powered by Debian, KDE Plasma and Frameworks, and AppImages. The last on the list refers to an ongoing trend for packaging applications within containers for desktop usage. All you need to do is drop the AppImage file somewhere, make it executable and run that.
There was a time when this Turkish distro made something of a splash, but those days are gone and I even thought the project was moribund only to get corrected. As it happens, both GNOME and XFCE desktop environments are offered for your choosing.
Both Debian and Devuan form the basis for spins of this distro. XFCE is the chosen desktop environment so that should be more than usable for most.
If you buy a computer from System76, then Pop!_OS is the operating system that you get with it since the project is orchestrated by the same company. You can download installation media for other computers too and the target audience includes those working in science, technology, engineering and mathematical sectors as those who are content producers. There is a bespoke desktop environment called Cosmic in place of more commonplace options.
Prague appears to be the development HQ for this distro these days. For desktop environments, it has KDE but also a unique choice in the less well-known Trinity, and it has dual desktop capability. Another interesting feature is the way it runs alongside Windows. It also runs on ARM as well as x86.
This is a packaging of software from Debian’s unstable branch, always called Sid and so the inspiration for the name of this distro. There are quarterly releases and five desktop environments are on offer, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, KDE SC and Razor-QT. For whatever reason, there is a version with no desktop environment at all, but that might be for the sort of DIY enthusiast who enjoys the likes of Arch.
Using the testing branch of Debian, this rolling release distro comes in E17, LXDE, MATE and Razor-qt flavours. There’s also a command-line edition for those wanting to build their desktop environment instead of having it pre-packaged for them.
What you have here is a respin of Debian that uses its software repositories directly while adding a dash of added user-friendliness. It probably is for those who want to stay closer to the Debian base than Ubuntu does, yet a recent magazine review commented that Ubuntu does user-friendliness better anyway. Even so, Debian does not offer live DVD/USB images like you get here.
It was Ubuntu that steered me into the world of full-time Linux usage after a series of Windows XP meltdowns. In contrast to earlier dalliances with Linux, all of my hardware was supported without any bother and everything seemed to work straight away. Whatever issues I faced in those early months, there seemed to be an answer in an Ubuntu forum or blog for my problem even if some needed a spot of thought when it came to their implementation.
Budgie may be an upstart desktop environment, but that has not stopped an official Ubuntu spin from using it. Things look swish so it will be interesting to watch this.
In a sense, this is going back to how Ubuntu was before the arrival of GNOME Shell or Unity, both of which caused controversy, and it is a community effort and not one sponsored by Canonical. With Linux Mint having the MATE desktop too, you might be tempted to ask what this offers but the decision by the Linux Mint team to go exclusively for a long-term support model answers that. In contrast, the next release of Ubuntu MATE will be 14.10 so you get an intermediate release this way and in situ distro version updates should be a possibility too, another practice that the Linux Mint team reckons is undesirable. It will be interesting to see how many go for this.
This is a spin of Ubuntu for content creators. Here, the focus is on audio, graphics, video and photography. The main desktop is KDE but you also can add the Ubuntu Studio experience to other favours of Ubuntu, increasing the choices of desktop environment.
This is a French project with variants based on Debian and on Ubuntu. The website has sections about gaming and ChatGPT, among other things. For English speakers, text comes up in French before converting to English; patience is needed to avoid confusion.
This is a variant of Ubuntu using the Xfce desktop environment. As such, that makes it a bit lighter on computer power than the main distro would be. Having tried it a few times on various machines, it remains very usable and has a more conventional user interface too.
From the website, this would appear to be a mail server operating system that has a user-friendly feel to it. However, Linux Magazine has left me with the impression that its talents go beyond this and that activities like serving websites are supported. These are things that I have yet to explore with the VirtualBox instance that I have set up to see what it can do.
This distro is mocking up its desktop environments to ape those of Windows and macOS, and is its major selling point. That’s not all, since they are selling laptops with the OS installed on them too. Additionally, enterprise management services are another product line here.
One of the good things about using virtual private servers for hosting websites in preference to shared hosting or using a web application service like WordPress.com or Tumblr is that you get added control and flexibility. There was a time when HTML, CSS and client-side scripting were all that was available from the shared hosting providers that I was using. Then, static websites were my lot until it became possible to use Perl server side scripting. PHP predominates now, but Python or Ruby cannot be discounted either.
Being able to install whatever you want is a bonus as well, though it means that you also are responsible for the security of the containers that you use. There will be infrastructure security, but that of your own machine will be your own concern. Added power always means added responsibility, as many might say.
The reason that these thought emerge here is that getting PHP to render Markdown as HTML needs the installation of Composer. Without that, you cannot use the CommonMark package to do the required back-work. All the command that you see here will work on Ubuntu 22.04. First, you need to download Composer and executing the following command will accomplish this:
curl https://getcomposer.org/installer -o /tmp/composer-setup.php
Before the installation, it does no harm to ensure that all is well with the script before proceeding. That means that capturing the signature for the script using the following command is wise:
HASH=`curl https://composer.github.io/installer.sig`
Once you have the script signature, then you can check its integrity using this command:
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', '/tmp/composer-setup.php') === '$HASH') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
The result that you want is “Installer verified”. If not, you have some investigating to do. Otherwise, just execute the installation command:
sudo php /tmp/composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
With Composer installed, the next step is to run the following command in the area where your web server expects files to be stored. That is important when calling the package in a PHP script.
composer require league/commonmark
Then, you can use it in a PHP script like so:
define("ROOT_LOC",$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
include ROOT_LOC . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use League\CommonMark\CommonMarkConverter;
$converter = new CommonMarkConverter();
echo $converter->convertToHtml(file_get_contents(ROOT_LOC . '<location of markdown file>));
The first line finds the absolute location of your web server file directory before using it when defining the locations of the autoload script and the required markdown file. The third line then calls in the CommonMark package, while the fourth sets up a new object for the desired transformation. The last line converts the input to HTML and outputs the result.
If you need to render the output of more than one Markdown file, then repeating the last line from the preceding block with a different file location is all you need to do. The CommonMark object persists and can be used like a variable without needing the reinitialisation to be repeated every time.
The idea of building a website using PHP to render Markdown has come to mind, but I will leave it at custom web pages for now. If an opportunity comes, then I can examine the idea again. Before, I had to edit HTML, but Markdown is friendlier to edit, so that is a small advance for now.
While I lived in Edinburgh, I largely stuck with local PC part resellers such as Ideal Computing or Silicon Group for my PC building needs. Since all my purchases had to be paid for in cash due to my not having credit or debit cards in those days before the credit splurge that caused subsequent economic problems, that was just as well and was sufficient for my needs. Luckily, they were simpler at the time.
My move south to Macclesfield meant that the counterparts to those stores that I frequented in Edinburgh were not the same. Nevertheless, I found one in Stockport and another in Heaton Chapel that gave me the service that I needed for as long as they lasted. The first was away from Stockport’s shopping precinct and supplied me with a full tower case and an AMD CPU before it closed. The second was part of the now defunct MicroDirect and was conveniently near a train station, so a PC case, motherboard, USB drive housing and WD 500 GB hard drive all came from there before financial trouble struck during the Great Recession. Restructuring allowed the Manchester store to stay open before it, too, shut its doors during 2014, taking the website operation with it. If I find a replacement for either of these, I might be tempted to give it a try.
Another thing that moving from Edinburgh brought my way was working for a living so I now could get debit and credit cards when I could not before then. That meant that online shopping became more of a possibility. As ever, delivery arrangements are not the most convenient with the need for traipsing around the country to courier depots and I don’t fancy annoying neighbours with my deliveries either. However, my current job allows for working from home and this does help, but the sight of Saturday and evening delivery still retains its attraction even if this is a more expensive option.
Over 20 years of making purchases does have you encountering a few computer equipment resellers and many of those companies listed below have seen some business from me from time to time. My being easy to please may mean that I rarely have cause for complaint with any of the ones with which I have had dealings apart from delivery inconveniences. The list should be a living one and economic conditions have taken their toll and may do so again. That will mean changes over time so we’ll need to see how suppliers fare.
This surely has to be a strange entry to have at the top of this list yet they seem to have a greater range of laptop computers than Currys! My HP Pavilion dm4 came from one of their stores and it has been a successful purchase too. Otherwise, various items such as mobile broadband modems and even an external Seagate 2 TB hard drive have been acquired from them. When it comes to computing hardware, it seems that all that’s missing are PC components such as internal hard drives. It’s amazing how mainstream computing has become these days.
This West Midlands only recently came to my attention due to their Cube PC’s. There is a wider range of computer goods that include desktop machines from other manufacturers and the range of laptops is extensive, yet their range also includes TV and audio devices as well. The company has been around since 1996, so there is a track record too.
It seems that PC Pro readers like this Yorkshire company a lot and I once had a colleague at work who swore by them too. There was a time when I ordered an AMD Athlon CPU from them and needed to return it when it didn’t work as I had hoped. Then, the service was what more should emulate an efficient order fulfilment has continued into recent times too. More recent items have included a 2 GB Western Digital hard disk and a Zalman ZM450-GS 450W power supply. Each did what was expected of them so I have no complaints.
PC World was a pervasive name for so long until the holding company consolidated everything under the Currys name in much of the UK away from airports. The list of what I have purchased from their stores in Edinburgh, Stockport, Manchester and now Macclesfield over the decades rather shocks me. Thinking about now, items bought there have included a Toshiba laptop bought in a January sale, an Epson printer and a now retired Canon scanner. Evening opening has ensured that an actual store can become a source of emergency purchases for those who need to be at a workplace during the working day and that’s how it has been for me on a number of occasions like when a power supply has failed.
It was September 1997 when I made my first purchase from this long-established reseller. That was 16 MB of RAM for a Dell XPS 133 and it was not the last item that has come from them either. The attraction then was the ability to pay by cheque for any goods obtained by mail order and I think that DABS must have offered a similar arrangement since I ordered PC parts from them too. In those days, I was without a credit or debit card, so internet shopping was not so convenient and that trend has intensified since then.
More recently, one of my reasons for turning to them has been to get tested and pre-assembled bundles for system upgrades. One was a Gigabyte Z87-HD3 motherboard that came with an Intel Core i5 4670K CPU and 8 GB of DDR3 1600 MHz RAM installed on it and the whole unit tested. It worked without any problems at all and that is more than can be said for some of the system upgrades that I have tried: 2001 was blighted by a destructive ASUS motherboard that wrecked AMD Athlon CPU’s and an IBM Deskstar hard drive; 2009 was disrupted by a dead Gigabyte mainboard before I turned to a bare-bones system from Novatech. That whole unit appeared to have been sourced from Foxconn and had one of their A6VMX motherboards along with an AMD Athlon X2 7820 dual-core processor and 2 GB of DDR2 400 MHz RAM. More memory was added to get 4 GB in there and hard drives and a DVD writer were installed to gain a working main PC after a few months of making do with other machines. My backup machine not has a Gigabyte H81 mainboard with an Intel Core i5 4570 CPU and 8 GB of RAM, which came as a pre-tested bundle and also worked without a problem.
There was a time when I needed to test out Novatech’s returns policy too with an order for what proved to be incompatible memory and they did the needful worked without any problem too. Other more mundane purchases have included 2 GB and 8 GB USB drives and there was nothing amiss with those. All in all, I’d continue to give Novatech some custom.
As the name suggests, these are people who are concerned with providing quieter PC hardware and that includes components as well as whole PC’s too.
During August, I acquired an Olympus Pen E-PL5 and it is an item to which I still am becoming accustomed and it looks as if that is set to continue. The main reason that it appealed to me was the idea of having a camera with much of the functionality of an SLR but with many of the dimensions of a compact camera. In that way, it was a step up from my Canon PowerShot G11 without carrying around something that was too bulky.
Before I settled on the E-PL5, I had been looking at Canon’s EOS M and got to hear about its sluggish autofocus. That it had no mode dial on its top plate was another consideration though it does pack in an APS-C sized sensor (with Canon’s tendency to overexpose finding a little favour with me too on inspection of images from an well aged Canon EOS 10D) at a not so unappealing price of around ÂŁ399. A sighting of a group of it and similar cameras in Practical Photography was enough to land that particular issue into my possession and they liked the similarly priced Olympus Pen E-PM2 more than the Canon. Though it was a Panasonic that won top honours in that test, I was intrigued enough by the Olympus option that I had a further look. Unlike the E-PM2 and the EOS M, the E-PL5 does have a mode dial on its top plate and an extra grip so that got my vote even it meant paying a little extra for it. There was a time when Olympus Pen models attracted my attention before now due to sale prices but this investment goes beyond that opportunism.
The E-PL5 comes in three colours: black, silver and white. Though I have a tendency to go for black when buying cameras, it was the silver option that took my fancy this time around for the sake of a spot of variety. The body itself is a very compact affair so it is the lens that takes up the most of the bulk. The standard 14-42 mm zoom ensures that this is not a camera for a shirt pocket and I got a black Lowepro Apex 100 AW case for it; the case fits snugly around the camera, so much so that I was left wondering if I should have gone for a bigger one but it’s been working out fine anyway. The other accessory that I added was a 37 mm Hoya HMC UV filter so that the lens doesn’t get too knocked about while I have the camera with me on an outing of one sort or another, especially when its plastic construction protrudes a lot further than I was expecting and doesn’t retract fully into its housing like some Sigma lenses that I use.
When I first gave the camera a test run, I had to work out how best to hold it. After all, the powered zoom and autofocus on my Canon PowerShot G11 made that camera more intuitive to hold and it has been similar for any SLR that I have used. Having to work a zoom lens while holding a dinky body was fiddly at first until I worked out how to use my right thumb to keep the body steady (the thumb grip on the back of the camera is curved to hold a thumb in a vertical position) while the left hand adjusted the lens freely. Having an electronic viewfinder instead of using the screen would have made life a little easier but they are not cheap and I already had spent enough money.
The next task after working out how to hold the camera was to acclimatise myself to the exposure characteristics of the camera. In my experience so far, it appears to err on the side of overexposure. Because I had set it to store images as raw (ORF) files, this could be sorted later but I prefer to have a greater sense of control while at the photo capture stage. Until now, I have not found a spot or partial metering button like what I would have on an SLR or my G11. That has meant either using exposure compensation to go along with my preferred choice of aperture priority mode or go with fully manual exposure. Other modes are available and they should be familiar to any SLR user (shutter priority, program, automatic, etc.). Currently, I am using bracketing while finding my feet after setting the ISO setting to 400, increasing the brightness of the screen and adding histograms to the playback views. With my hold on the camera growing more secure, using the dial to change exposure settings such as aperture (f/16 remains a favourite of mine in spite what others may think given the size of a micro four thirds sensor) and compensation while keeping the scene exactly the same to test out what the response to any changes might be.
While I still am finding my feet, I am seeing some pleasing results so far that encourage me to keep going; some remind me of my Pentax K10D. The E-PL5 certainly is slower to use than the G11 but that often can be a good thing when it comes to photography. That it forces a little relaxation in this often hectic world is another advantage. The G11 is having a quieter time at the moment and any episodes of sunshine offer useful opportunities for further experimentation and acclimatisation too. So far, my entry in the world of compact system cameras has revealed them to be of a very different form to those of compact fixed lens cameras or SLR’s. Neither truly get replaced and another type of camera has emerged.
The world of open UNIX variants may not be as vibrant as the Linux one, but UNIX predates Linux by decades so it might be put down to its much greater maturity. BSD seems to predominate here, but the reason may be because of Sun keeping a tight hold on Solaris for so long. Now that Oracle has gone and been more restrictive again, it is the breakaway projects to which we have to look for OpenSolaris successors now. However, the partially free availability of Solaris 10 & 11 may draw some away from the open-source community of the alternative.
In the world of BSD UNIX, it often is difficult to see what is different between the various projects and some are based on technical excellence using the sort of reasoning that would be inaccessible to many computer users. Though many see the operating system as being one for servers alone, there are PC-focussed versions with PC-BSD being the most notable. The existence of those projects is in start contrast to a mantra that keeps BSD for servers and Linux for desktop systems.
This was a fork of FreeBSD and it seems to have been done for very technical reasons, such as handling of cluster computing and larger disc drives. If the reasons make sense to you, then it could be an option, but it doesn’t sound like one for the masses, though BSD UNIX hardly is at the best of times.
When someone turns to creating a desktop variant of BSD, FreeBSD seems to be a starting point for so much of the time. Even Debian, itself the foundation of so many Linux distributions, bases its own BSD variant on FreeBSD and Gentoo apparently has been looking at doing something similar. FreeBSD does give away a bias towards servers in that the default installation does not include a desktop environment. However, if you do the work, you can get one like GNOME 2 or XFCE on there and the process does remind me of the thinking behind Arch Linux. Until recently, I had FreeBSD 10 installed in a VirtualBox virtual machine until a software update broke it and that does sit well with the BSD culture of stability. Of course, it could be another sign of a focus on server computing too. Nevertheless, it ran well until then and fared no worse than the aforementioned Arch Linux, though it probably should have done better.
Apparently, this is FreeBSD with a choice of MATE (a fork of GNOME 2 for those not fancying the idea of using GNOME 3 and its GNOME Shell), XFCE, LXDE or OpenBox desktop environments. A recent look demonstrated that the desktop environments are turned out very nicely too. All in all, it looks like an interesting counterpart to what you would find with a Linux distro.
Given the troubled state of the online world because of cybercrime and cyberwarfare, it hardly comes as a surprise that computer security has a higher profile than it ever has. It then is hardly surprising that someone decided to create a more secure spin of FreeBSD. For added context, here is what the project had to say about its goals:
HardenedBSD aims to implement innovative exploit mitigation and security solutions for the FreeBSD community. Security is like an onion--it’s made up of layers. To be successful, attackers must peel back each layer. HardenedBSD takes a holistic approach to security by hardening the system and implementing exploit mitigation technologies. We will work with FreeBSD and any other FreeBSD-based project to include our innovations. Our primary goal is to provide a clean-room reimplementation of the publicly documented parts of the grsecurity patchset for Linux.
According to the website, this is a derivative of NetBSD developed with desktop users in mind. At first, it had a feel that would have been more widely available with UNIX and Linux systems in the middle of the 1990’s. Since then, XFCE was chosen as a desktop environment and that has modernised the feel.
Since I last had a look, the focus of this project has become portability. What they mean by portability is have versions of NetBSD that run on all sorts of hardware and I even thought I saw a mention of Sony PlayStation (PS2) if my eyes did not deceive me and ARM-based systems also appeared, hardly a surprise with the rise of tablet computing. Other more conventional computing platforms are served too, but the others make NetBSD stand out from the others more than I once thought it did.
To some, portability is about running software under different hardware architectures. That is not what is meant here since we are talking about the ability to run an installation off a USB drive plugged in to any computer, more likely with Intel and AMD processors. The underlying basis is FreeBSD with OpenBox being the chosen desktop environment, assuring a friendly user interface as well.
With a strap line like “Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!”, you’d have to suspect that security and stability are the key attributes of this operating system. The security aspect certainly crops up a lot so I think that a spot of exploration is in order, especially when various system types (x86 and SPARC are just two of them) are supported anyway. The ongoing furore about intelligence service monitoring and increasing numbers of attacks on different systems over the web do make the whole subject more relevant now than it ever was and it never was irrelevant.
When m0n0wall was discontinued in 2015, OPNsense was forked from pfSense, a move that has left tension between the two projects. The newcomer gave the following reasons for its actions: code quality, regular releases, security issues related to the web UI being run as root, source code for the pfSense build tools is no longer publicly available, concern regarding transparency, new ownership of the pfSense brand, using the brand name to fence off the competition and several licence changes for no apparent reason. These have been contested by the pfSense while OPNsense now uses HardenedBSD as its basis and has stuck with a frequent release model.
This was started in 2004 as a fork of the now defunct m0n0wall with the first public release coming in 2006. It is based on FreeBSD and can be installed on physical or virtual appliances for added network security. It seems to add a BSD installation for a firewall and other security functions, but there clearly is a place for this in the enterprise market by all accounts.
Network-assisted Storage (NAS) has blossomed in recent years for home users and anyone with a DIY mindset might be tempted to go and build things themselves using PC parts and it is for those that this FreeBSD-based distro would be an asset. When I went looking at the possibility, the inability to boot the installation disk that I was using put paid to the attempt. Then, I was left wondering if my use of AMD’s CPU’s was part of the problem, though I since have realised that building a low-power system might be a better option than reusing a full PC. There has been an incursion into the world of NAS drives in the form of a 3 GB Western Digital My Book Live, so any return to DIY ways could be a better informed.
Like TrueNAS, this another BSD for use when making an old PC into a NAS file server. In fact, this came into being when part of the FreeNAS community took exception to the direction in which iXsystems were starting to take it after 2011. It also is based on FreeBSD and has a different web interface. That makes it an alternative if TrueNAS does not do the deed for you.
One of the casualties of Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems was the community-based OpenSolaris project. The more proprietary Solaris 11 Express became Oracle’s answer to the need that OpenSolaris fulfilled back then. Since, Solaris 10 & 11 became available without charge with support contracts becoming the revenue earner.
The demise of OpenSolaris saw a major new project emerge. Its basis is Illumos, itself a fork of the now defunct OpenSolaris, and a recent look revealed that it is maturing rather nicely. MATE is the chosen desktop environment so it should not be that unfamiliar to those coming from the Linux world. Initially, there is not so much software installed, but Firefox does get included and there is a graphical package manager, so there is little point in complaining.
The enterprise focus of this offering is plain on the website since virtualisation and the storage platform get a strong showing. Discussion of desktop environments and such like are conspicuous by their absence. Seemingly, this is infrastructural software above all else and there are support contracts available too.
The website for this Illumos distro has a retro, so it is easy to believe that the operating system could be similar. Since MATE, XFCE and Enlightenment are the available desktop environments, anyone coming from Linux should be thrown off very much once they figure out how to get things started.
With a moniker like “Converged Container and Virtual Machine Hypervisor”, this clearly is not a desktop computing offering. There is more than a hint of cloud computing about it and that hardly is a surprise given the age in which we work.