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today's howtos
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Make Use Of ☛ 5 commands to quickly fix broken packages in Linux
Most Linux users encounter broken packages eventually. An interrupted update, a failed install, or a dependency that wandered off into the woods are all issues that contribute to broken packages. While it's sometimes possible to use a Linux graphical interface such as Synaptic to fix many problems, I go to terminal commands first.
Let’s start where most people live: Debian derivatives such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and Pop!_OS. This is the environment I’m most comfortable using and what I'll focus on. I’ve dabbled in other Linux infrastructures, so I’ll add a quick run-through for the largest ones at the end.
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XDA ☛ These 7 terminal tools help me find anything fast
As of today, you can do almost everything on Linux through a graphical interface. You can install applications from an app center, change system settings, and search for files using a file manager, all without touching the terminal. For most users, this is more than enough.
However, throughout my Linux journey, I learned that some tasks become much faster when done through the terminal. It can significantly speed up your workflow and save a lot of time. One such task is searching for files or text using terminal-based tools, which are often quicker, more precise, and more powerful than their GUI alternatives.
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HowTo Geek ☛ I automated Linux backups with a simple bash script and cron (and it’s better than a GUI)
A tool like Déjà Dup is an easy and excellent graphical way to automate Linux backups. However, creating a backup script is the superior, DIY way to automate backups. It offers way more control over what gets backed up, where the data gets backed up, and the frequency of backup jobs. It’s also a fun introduction to basic scripting. Here’s how I created a simple backup script and used cron to automate backup jobs.
As long as you edit and update the script with your absolute paths, your backup location can be a local folder, a new disk partition, or an external drive.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Windows networking commands in Linux: 5 equivalents you should know (plus WSL tricks)
Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:
If you've used networking commands on Windows, such as ping and tracert, you might wonder if you can use them on Linux, whether on its own or part of WSL. Fortunately, you can.
ping
I remember sitting in a computer networking class in college when the instructor demonstrated the use of the ping command in the Windows Command Prompt. It was the beginning of a lifelong relationship, even if it's crossed operating systems and came back full circle with WSL.
The simplest way to use ping in the Linux and WSL command line is to use ping followed by an IP address or domain name.
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Hackaday ☛ SSH Over USB On A Raspberry Pi
Setting up access to a headless Raspberry Pi is one of those tasks that should take a few minutes, but for some reason always seems to take much longer. The most common method is to configure Wi-Fi access and an SSH service on the Pi before starting it, which can go wrong in many different ways. This author, for example, recently spent a few hours failing to set up a headless Pi on a network secured with Protected EAP, and was eventually driven to using SSH over Bluetooth. This could thankfully soon be a thing of the past, as [Paul Oberosler] developed a package for SSH over USB, which is included in the latest versions of Raspberry Pi OS.
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Michael Kjörling ☛ Detecting whether a Linux system is connected to a specific network — Michael Kjörling
Every once in a while itʼs useful to programmatically do things differently depending on what network a system is connected to.
For WiFi, this is less of a problem, especially if you can assume that the network is not actively hostile specifically against you; "just" check the BSSID of the connected-to network.
However, on wired networks, things are a little less straight-forward since there is no clear and unambiguous "network identifier" in that case. Basically, how to tell one 192.168.1.0/24 network apart from another 192.168.1.0/24 network?
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Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Integrating FreeBSD 15 with FreeIPA: Native Kerberos and LDAP Authentication
Most FreeIPA documentation assumes you’re running Linux and will use ipa-client-install to join hosts to the realm. FreeBSD doesn’t have this luxury. There’s no official IPA client, and the enrollment scripts expect systemd and other Linux-specific components. But that’s not necessarily a disadvantage.
FreeBSD’s native Kerberos implementation and the lightweight nslcd daemon provide everything needed to integrate with FreeIPA cleanly. The result is arguably more elegant than the Linux approach: pure GSSAPI authentication via SSH, LDAP-backed identity lookups, and zero local user management. No SSSD, no realm daemon, no complexity.
This guide details integrating a FreeBSD 15.0 host into a Red Hat Identity Management (IdM) or FreeIPA realm using only native FreeBSD components.
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[Old] Mark Seeman ☛ Visitor as a sum type
Sum types (also known as discriminated unions), on the other hand, are types that express mutually exclusive alternatives. Object-oriented programmers might mistake such a statement for sub-classing, but the difference is that object-oriented sub-classing creates a potentially infinite hierarchy of subtypes, while a sum type is statically constrained to a finite number of mutually exclusive cases. This is often useful.
In this article, you'll see that a sum type is isomorphic to a corresponding Visitor.
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Arseny ☛ MikroTik: First Look and Getting Started
I had been thinking about trying MikroTik for a long time, but I was always a bit too lazy to delve into RouterOS.
Finally, riding the wave of the Home NAS project setup (see the beginning in FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – setting up ZFS mirror), I decided it was time to upgrade my network stack and replace a simple TP-Link Archer router with something more interesting.
That is how I ended up with two MikroTik routers: RB4011iGS+RM as the main router and MikroTik hAP ax3 for WiFi.