today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 01, 2025

• Barry Kauler ☛ Mechanism to detect kernel hang at bootup

  This is an unresolved problem in Easy Excalibur; random hang at bootup. It gets to displaying "Loading kernel modules...", which is inside /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, and that's it, stuck there.

  The kernel has a mechanism to detect hung processes, described

  https://blog.cloudflare.com/es-la/searching-for-the-cause-of-hung-tasks-in-the-linux-kernel/

• Noah Liebman ☛ Using subgrid to avoid nested interactive elements

  Nested interactive elements — like clickable things inside other clickable things — are a no-no on the web. Keyboard focus becomes a mess, screen readers have trouble announcing what’s what, and if you’re using semantic HTML, your HTML is probably invalid.

• Dan Q ☛ Developing an alt text button for images on my website

  He’s come up with an implementation, described in his post, that works pretty well. I find myself wondering if a <details>/<summary> UI metaphor might be more appropriate than a visually-hidden checkbox. Where CSS is disabled or fails, James’ approach displays a checkbox, the word “ALT”, and the entire alt text, which is visually confusing and will result in double-reading by screen readers.

• Amit Patel ☛ Let’s write a search engine, part 1 of 2

  But I realized that trying to figure this out is a distraction. Maybe it’ll matter. Maybe it won’t. But I don’t know yet, and I shouldn’t prematurely try to solve this problem. Instead, the most important thing is to investigate the biggest unknown. The biggest unknown in this case: is searching over lines even useful?

  So I instead tried this (using the xhtml input file, which is the page without the header, nav bar, footer, copyright, etc.): [...]

• Ruud van Asseldonk ☛ Automating configuration updates with rcl patch

  RCL is a new configuration language I’m building. It extends json into a simple functional language that enables abstraction and reuse. It’s a principled alternative to templating configuration files, and enables modularity for tools that don’t natively support it. Our earlier example, now in RCL: [...]

• MaskRay ☛ Benchmarking compression programs

  Compression algorithms can be broadly categorized into three groups based on their typical performance and compression ratio: [...]

• Andreas ☛ How a VPN kill-switch caused sudo to hang

  Recently I ran into a frustrating but interesting issue on my Linux machine (Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS): whenever my VPN’s kill switch engaged (when the tunnel went down for any reason), using sudo became noticeably slow. Eventually, I figured out what was happening and found several ways to fix it. The root of the problem was surprising, at least for me, and I thought it was worth sharing.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Ntopng on Fedora 42

    Network monitoring has become an essential aspect of modern system administration, especially as organizations increasingly rely on digital infrastructure for their operations. Whether you’re managing a small business network or overseeing enterprise-level systems, having real-time visibility into network traffic patterns, bandwidth usage, and potential security threats is crucial for maintaining optimal performance and security.>

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install NTP Server and Client on Debian 13

    Network Time Protocol (NTP) serves as the backbone of time synchronization across computer networks, ensuring accurate timekeeping for distributed systems, security protocols, and system logging. In today’s interconnected digital environment, maintaining precise time synchronization becomes critical for enterprise applications, database transactions, and security certificate validation.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install QEMU on Manjaro

    Virtualization has revolutionized how we work with operating systems, allowing multiple OS environments to coexist on a single machine. QEMU (Quick Emulator) stands as one of the most powerful and versatile virtualization solutions available for GNU/Linux systems.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install QEMU on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

    QEMU (Quick Emulator) serves as one of the most powerful and versatile virtualization platforms available for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS systems. This comprehensive guide provides detailed instructions for installing and configuring QEMU with KVM acceleration, transforming your Ubuntu machine into a robust virtualization environment capable of running multiple operating systems simultaneously.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install MongoDB Compass on Debian 13

    MongoDB Compass stands as the premier graphical user interface for MongoDB database management, offering database administrators and developers an intuitive platform for data visualization, query building, and performance analysis. As Debian 13 (Trixie) emerges as the latest stable release, installing MongoDB Compass on this robust GNU/Linux distribution provides users with cutting-edge database management capabilities.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install MongoDB on Debian 13

    MongoDB stands as one of the most popular NoSQL databases in modern web development, powering applications for companies like Facebook, Google, and Adobe. This document-oriented database offers flexible schema design, horizontal scalability, and JSON-like document storage that makes it ideal for handling complex data structures.

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Install & Set Ptyxis as Default Terminal in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

  Like the new Ptyxis terminal emulator introduced in Ubuntu 25.10, here’s how to install and set it as default in current Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04 LTS.