today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 20, 2026

• Linuxize ☛ rsync Incremental Backups with --link-dest

  Create space-efficient rsync incremental backups with --link-dest. Each dated snapshot remains directly browsable while unchanged files share disk space.

• TecMint ☛ 11 Top Linux Distributions for Beginners in 2026

  Things have changed quite a bit.

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Install Fish Shell & Set Default in Ubuntu 26.04

  This tutorial shows how to install the latest version of fish shell, and set it as default in Ubuntu. Though the title says for Ubuntu 26.04, it also works on Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04.

• linuxcapable

  • Linux Capable ☛ sudo Command in Linux: Examples and Common Fixes

    Handle sudo without turning every command into a root shell: verify access, run commands as another user, use sudoedit and sudo tee, protect scripts from password prompts, and diagnose policy, PATH, and permission errors.

  • Linux Capable ☛ dig Command in Linux: DNS Lookup Examples

    When DNS behavior does not match expectations, dig shows the resolver response, record type, TTL, and status so you can compare caches, authoritative servers, DNSSEC, TCP fallback, and lookup failures.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install MySQL Workbench on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

    Setting up a graphical database interface on your fresh Ubuntu 26.04 LTS machine can feel overwhelming [...]

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

    Nginx powers over 34% of all websites worldwide, making it the most popular web server for production environments.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install HandBrake on Fedora 44

    Fedora 44 does not ship HandBrake in its default repositories. You cannot run sudo dnf install handbrake and expect it to work.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Nginx on Fedora 44

    Running a web server on GNU/Linux does not have to be complicated.

• Sal ☛ TIL: CSS View Transitions API

  When I moved my blog, I based the new one off of the eleventy-base-blog starter kit. At some point I noticed there was a fade effect when I’d click around my site. It was subtle enought that I ignored it for a bit, thinking perhaps it was built into Safari and had just been there all along.

  But eventually I realized it must be “something” and did some searching. Turns out it was these three lines of code in the starter kit’s CSS, which invoke the View Transition API: [...]

• Mariusz Zaborski ☛ How to Fetch a Moving Target with Poudriere

  The FreeBSD ports framework has a simple idea about the world: a distfile never changes. It has a fixed size and a fixed checksum, written once into distinfo and verified every time after that. It is super useful to verify that the upstream has not changed the package, or that someone changed it without authorization. Basically this is the trust contract between our FreeBSD ports system and the upstream ports. My problem is that one of my distfiles has to change - almost every build.

  I build the packages for one of my projects in Poudriere, using an overlay port on top of the standard ports tree. The port fetches its source from my internal GitLab as an auto-generated archive of a branch: [...]

• David Bushell ☛ Life is too short for lowercase ASCII

  CSS is deceptively hard as a whole despite many of the constitute parts being simple. CSS syntax is simple (mostly). CSS properties and values are simple (to lookup). What is hard is deciding how to organise styles. What we like to call: CSS methodology.

• Dan Langille ☛ Getting Nginx logs into Victoria-Logs – v2

  VictoriaLogs is feature rich, which means at this point, I know very little about it.

  I do know that the original syslog-ng configuration I supplied in Getting Nginx logs into Victoria-Logs is now less complicated. With the help of duck.ai, I managed to reduce it. Now it’s sending the json without running it through a parser.

• University of Toronto ☛ Limiting web server bandwidth the brute force way

  Recently, so many requests started arriving that they overwhelmed our main departmental web server and we decided to deal with the problem by moving this data to another physical machine with its own, dedicated web server (and then using HTTP redirections to push 'people', which is to say software, to fetch the data from that new web server).

• Pimoroni ☛ My Stellar Unicorn needed a stand! So I designed and 3D printed one in an afternoon.

  I've wanted to learn FreeCAD for some time, as my good friend Jo "JSON" Hinchliffe has been a long time inspiration. Jo, I finally did it!