today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 15, 2026

• RoseHosting ☛ AlmaLinux 10 vs Ubuntu 26.04 vs Debian 13: Which GNU/Linux Distro for Your VPS in 2026?

  In this blog post, we will compare AlmaLinux 10 vs Ubuntu 26.04 vs Debian 13.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install LEMP on Fedora 44

  Build a one-domain LEMP server on Fedora GNU/Linux with the distro's Nginx, MariaDB, and PHP-FPM packages. The workflow keeps SELinux enforcing, opens the correct Firewalld zone, proves the database-backed request path, and adds optional Certbot HTTPS with ownership-aware cleanup.

• Hackaday ☛ UDP Broadcasting And The Joys Of IPv4 Subnetting

  The most pertinent point raised was definitely that of broadcast addresses and IPv4 subnets, with the latter topic especially being something that the sysadmins at the office would talk about all the time, but which us software developers were always happy to ignore as something that didn’t concern us. Turns out the joke was on me and everyone else – like our esteemed readers – who thought that they could escape the fascinating world of subnets, as today we’ll take an in-depth look at what subnets are and how they are relevant to the world of UDP network discovery.

  I somewhat alluded in the first article to the topic of ‘which broadcast address to use’ as being somewhat of a rough topic to figure out, which is clearly why I just stuck to a blatantly ‘works for me’ /24 subnet that usually will work on networks, until it does not.

• Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Truly Portable Birdnet-Pi

  With all that done, I had a truly portable Birdnet-Pi. I can access it from any of my Tailscale devices, which is great because I can check on it from my phone and use that to shut it down if needs be. I can plug it into my laptop with a USB cable and edit the WiFi configuration directly. And I can identify birds on the go.

• Henry Desroches ☛ I made a Plex server

  There’s a lot to like about Plex from a philosophical standpoint — it’s local-first software centered around sharing your favorite art with your friends. Plex hosts movies, TV, and music — media you purchase because you love it, and share with your friends because we share media we love with our friends since time immemorial.

  I’ve been shaking loose streaming services for the past three or four years, kicking the strident bells of subscription renewal emails back into the grass — I think ownership is important. If I love a book I can keep it on my shelf, but if I love a movie I have to pay $19.99/mo forever and hope that the higher-ups at Poob Streaming Inc. don’t decide to take it down. Plex is a natural answer to the tension between on-shelf ownership and on-line convenience: I purchase movies and I upload them to a server I own, and then I can conveniently share them with folks I love, and those folks can share with me in the same stroke.

  Here’s how I started hosting my own Plex server.

• Dan Q ☛ Recreating a 1990 Book Cover (in HTML + CSS)

  At the weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the cover of the manual for GoScript Plus, a 1990 software tool for converting PostScript output into a format that’s compatible with a wider array of IBM-compatible printers.

  I’ve never used this piece of software. I can’t even remember how I found my way to archive.org’s copy of its documentation. Just one of those mysteries.

• University of Toronto ☛ How early SunOS did diskless workstations before NFS

  Sun's workstations could boot without a local disk from very early on (because that made them cheaper, not because it made them better), but famously NFS only appeared in SunOS 2.0 (which required Sun to also create the idea of a virtual filesystem switch (VFS), which has appeared in basically every Unix since). The pre-NFS versions of SunOS operated without a local disk by using Sun's 'nd', the 'net(work) disk', which is basically what it sounds like.

• Johanna-Mathilda Langenhan ☛ How my images are dithered

  Dithering, beside making a picture look (to put it professionally) cool as fuck, also reduces file size and thus needed storage (if using only the reduced images) and the weight of your website for the client. That's why sites like Low Tech Magazine use it, for example.

• [Old] Invisible Internet Protocol ☛ Decentralized instant messenger (XMPP aka Jabber) - i2pd documentation

  This tutorial shows you how to run your own XMPP server inside I2P network. That server can be used for decentralized instant messaging and for building any other applications with XMPP protocol.

• [Old] Element Creations Ltd ☛ Setting Up the XMPP Bridge - element docs.

  The XMPP bridge relies on the XMPP "component" feature. It is an equivalent of matrix application services. You need to configure an XMPP Component on an XMPP Server that the bridge will use to bridge matrix and XMPP user.

• idroot

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

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PostgreSQL on Fedora 44

    Every few months, someone on a GNU/Linux forum asks why their fresh Fedora install won’t let them connect to PostgreSQL after a “successful” installation.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Odoo on Fedora 44

    Installing Odoo on Fedora 44 is very doable, but it goes much smoother when you treat it like a production service instead of a hobby project.

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

    Yarn on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is best installed with Corepack today [...]

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

    Every sysadmin has that one server that “just needs PostgreSQL installed quickly” — and every sysadmin knows how that story usually ends.