today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 24, 2026

• Linuxize ☛ apt vs apt-get: What Is the Difference?

  Understand the difference between apt and apt-get in Debian and Ubuntu. When to use each tool, how the commands map to each other, and which one belongs in your scripts.

• LinuxConfig ☛ How to Install Desktop on Ubuntu Server 26.04

• Systemd Crossword: Test Your Knowledge of GNU/Linux "ctl Commands"

  A fun GNU/Linux crossword puzzle featuring systemd ctl commands like systemctl and journalctl. Perfect for testing and improving your GNU/Linux skills.

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Ubuntu 26.04 Now Shows Sudo Password Asterisk Feedback [How to Restore]

  Ubuntu 26.04 LTS finally breaks the longstanding security tradition by now displaying the asterisk feedback when typing sudo password in terminal or command console. As you know, most GNU/Linux distributions by default do not show any feedback when user is inputting password in terminal or any other command console for sudo authentication.

• LinuxConfig ☛ How to Create and Manage Swap Files on Ubuntu 26.04

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install FOSSBilling on Fedora 43

    Running a hosting business or managing billing for digital services without a solid client management system is a pain. You either pay for expensive SaaS tools or wrestle with outdated open-source projects that have gone stale. FOSSBilling changes that equation entirely.

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

    Managing passwords across a team without a proper system is a security incident waiting to happen. Shared spreadsheets, reused credentials, and email threads with plaintext passwords are exactly how breaches start.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Rclone on Debian 13

    Managing files across cloud storage from a GNU/Linux server is painful without the right tool. You end up juggling browser uploads, proprietary clients, or brittle shell scripts that break at the worst possible time.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install OpenZL on Debian 13

    OpenZL represents a significant advancement in data compression technology. Developed by Meta, this open-source format-aware compression framework delivers exceptional compression ratios while maintaining high processing speeds, making it ideal for large-scale data operations and Hey Hi (AI) workloads. Installing OpenZL on Debian 13 “Trixie” provides a stable, production-ready environment for leveraging this powerful compression tool.

• linuxcapable

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Discord on Linux Mint 22 and 21

    Discord still fills the same role for gaming groups, study servers, and developer communities that need voice chat, screen sharing, and persistent text channels in one place.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install balenaEtcher on Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04

    Writing install media with dd works until one mistyped device path wipes the wrong drive. That risk is exactly why many people install balenaEtcher on Ubuntu: its guided three-step workflow and post-write validation make USB and SD card jobs much harder to botch.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Brave Browser on Linux Mint 22 and 21

    Brave strips out ads and trackers before you start piling on extensions, which makes it a sensible fit when you want a Chromium-based browser with a quieter privacy stance.

• Advanced Blivet-gui on Fedora 44 Server vs Calamares

• Hackaday ☛ Linux Fu: UPNP A Port Mapping Odyssey

  If you’ve ever run a game server or used BitTorrent, you probably know that life is easier if your router supports UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). This is a fairly old tech — created by a standards group in 1999 — that allows a program to open an incoming port into your home network. Of course, most routers let you do this manually, but outside of the Hackaday universe, most people don’t know how to log into their routers, much less how to configure an open UDP port.

  I recently found myself using a temporary setup where I could not access the router directly, but I needed some open ports. That got me thinking: if a program can open a port using UPnP, why can’t I? Turns out, of course, you can. Maybe.

• Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Dual-FIB Policy Routing on FreeBSD: Two Upstreams, One Server, Zero Confusion

  The previous articles in this series covered the BGP router side: obtaining an AS, peering with upstream providers, and building a tunnel overlay. This article covers the other end - the downstream server that consumes that tunnel and needs to serve traffic from two completely different IP ranges through two completely different paths, simultaneously, without either one interfering with the other.

  The server in question is radon, a Netcup VPS running FreeBSD with Bastille jails. It has two [Internet] uplinks: a physical connection to Netcup’s network and a GIF tunnel to my BGP router (hobgp). Jails on this server use three distinct routing paradigms - private NAT, natively routed BGP IPv6, and pure public routed BGP IPv4 - all on the same bridge interface.

  The mechanism that makes this work is dual-FIB policy routing: two independent routing tables in the kernel, with PF deciding which table handles which traffic based on source address. It’s elegant once you understand it, and surprisingly simple to configure once you’ve seen it done.

• [Old] LWN ☛ So you think you understand IP fragmentation?

  IP fragmentation is when an IP (Internet Protocol) packet is split into smaller pieces before it is sent to another computer. TCP and UDP, along with a lot of other network protocols, are implemented on top of IP. Many networking experts think they know when IP fragmentation will happen, and I thought I did too—until I had to implement an algorithm for a VPN. That's when I learned that, like me, a lot of other networking experts are quite bad at predicting when a packet would be split into pieces. To explain why, we start with what IP fragmentation is.