today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 05, 2025

• Ted Unangst ☛ can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

  Once upon a time, there was a university president who couldn’t send an email more than 500 miles, and the wise sysadmin said that’s not possible, so the president said come to my office, and lo and behold, the emails stopped before going 500 miles. Has technology improved? Can we send an email farther than 500 miles in 2025?

  There’s a lot to the story that’s obviously made up, but if we fix the details so that it can happen, we can reproduce it.

• Nathaniel Snelgrove ☛ Fix grid and flexbox layout problems with display:…

  display:contents; is meant for use within flexbox or grid systems where child HTML elements like this break the flow of content. It’s support is decent (barring some tag-specific incompatibility). Its one downfall is that it breaks screen reader support; my understanding is that formatting is not read via screen readers when display:contents; is in use. (I am not positive this is accurate, but the situation used to be worse, and overall it seems fine today.)

• Michael Kjörling ☛ Get your own domain name!

  Whichever provider you choose, if you donʼt already have one, then also at the same time get a domain name to use for your email, and start using that instead of the service providerʼs domain name.

  Also, do not register the domain name through the mail service provider. Thatʼs convenient if they offer the option, but unless you are careful needlessly risks tying the two together too tightly. Instead, work with a registrar, which is the company which takes your money and processes the domain registration itself (you will very likely need a registrar that also offers DNS or name service as part of the deal) to register the domain name first, then tell the mail service provider when you sign up what the domain name is and follow their instructions for associating email for that domain name with your account with them.

• Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Function Keys

  For at least 12 years laptops have been defaulting to not having the traditional PC 101 key keyboard function key functionality and instead have had other functions like controlling the volume and have had a key labelled Fn to toggle the functions. It’s been a BIOS option to control whether traditional function keys or controls for volume etc are the default and for at least 12 years I’ve configured all my laptops to have the traditional function keys as the default.

  Recently I’ve been working in corporate IT and having exposure to many laptops with the default BIOS settings for those keys to change volume etc and no reasonable option for addressing it. This has made me reconsider the options for configuring these things.

• Sahilister ☛ Sahil Dhiman: Secondary Authoritative Name Server Options for Self-Hosted Domains

  In the past few months, I have moved authoritative name servers (NS) of two of my domains (sahilister.net and sahil.rocks) in house using PowerDNS. Subdomains of sahilister.net see roughly 320,000 hits/day across my IN and DE mirror nodes, so adding secondary name servers with good availability (in addition to my own) servers was one of my first priorities.

  I explored the following options for my secondary NS, which also didn’t cost me anything: [...]

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Set Default Gateway on Linux Mint 22

    Network connectivity forms the backbone of modern computing, and understanding how to properly configure your default gateway is crucial for maintaining reliable internet access on Linux Mint 22. The default gateway serves as the crucial bridge between your local network and the wider internet, directing network traffic when no specific route exists for a destination.

  • ID Root ☛ How to Install PPTP VPN on Fedora 42

    Setting up a PPTP VPN connection on Fedora 42 provides users with secure network access for remote work, privacy protection, and bypassing geographical restrictions. This comprehensive guide walks through both graphical and command-line methods to configure Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol connections on your Fedora system.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Angular on Fedora 42

    Angular stands as one of the most powerful and scalable JavaScript frameworks for building modern web applications. Developed and maintained by Google, this robust platform has become an essential tool for developers worldwide.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Enable TCP BBR on Manjaro

    Network performance optimization has become crucial for modern GNU/Linux users seeking faster downloads, reduced latency, and improved overall connectivity. TCP BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time) represents Google’s revolutionary approach to network congestion control, offering significant improvements over traditional algorithms like CUBIC and Reno.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Composer on Rocky GNU/Linux 10

    PHP Composer stands as the industry-standard dependency manager for PHP applications, revolutionizing how developers handle project dependencies and package management. This comprehensive guide walks you through installing Composer on Rocky GNU/Linux 10, ensuring your development environment is properly configured for modern PHP development workflows.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Thunderbird on Fedora 42

    Mozilla Thunderbird stands as one of the most reliable and feature-rich email clients available for GNU/Linux users. This powerful, open-source application developed by Mozilla offers comprehensive email management capabilities, including support for multiple email accounts, advanced message filtering, encryption features, and extensive customization options through add-ons.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Grub Customizer on Fedora 42

    Customizing your bootloader experience on Fedora 42 requires understanding the complexities of modern GRUB configuration. Grub Customizer offers a graphical interface for managing boot entries, themes, and appearance settings, but installation on Fedora 42 presents unique challenges that demand careful consideration.

• Hans de Goede: Recovering a FP2 which gives "flash write failure" errors

  This blog post describes my successful os re-install on a fairphone 2 which was giving "flash write failure" errors when flashing it with fastboot, with the flash_FP2_factory.sh script. I'm writing down my recovery steps for this in case they are useful for anyone else.I believe that this is caused by the bootloader code which implements fastboot not having the ability to retry recoverable eMMC errors. It is still possible to write the eMMC from GNU/Linux which can retry these errors.