today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 23, 2025

• It's FOSS ☛ How I Configure Polybar to Customize My GNU/Linux Desktop

  Let me share how I am customizing my desktop GNU/Linux with the awesome Polybar. This could work as a beginner's guide to understanding Polybar configuration.

• Evgeni Golov: Booting Vagrant boxes with UEFI on Fedora: Permission denied

  If you're still using Vagrant (I am) and try to boot a box that uses UEFI (like boxen/debian-13), a simple vagrant init boxen/debian-13 and vagrant up will entertain you with a nice traceback: [...]

• Zach Flower ☛ Boundaries, Amirite?

  What I don't shut the machines down for is to prevent students from connecting to them remotely after school hours. Because the machines are shut down anyway, preventing ingress after hours wasn't something that was really on my radar.

  Well... last week I learned to never underestimate the ingenuity of a teenager with a computer, a still-developing prefrontal cortex, and too much time on their hands.

• University of Toronto ☛ Unix mail programs have had two approaches to handling your mail

  Historically, Unix mail programs (what we call 'mail clients' or 'mail user agents' today) have had two different approaches to handling your email, what I'll call the shared approach and the exclusive approach, with the shared approach being the dominant one. To explain the shared approach, I have to back up to talk about what Unix mail transfer agents (MTAs) traditionally did. When a Unix MTA delivered email to you, at first it delivered email into a single file in a specific location (such as '/usr/spool/mail/') in a specific format, initially mbox; even then, this could be called your 'inbox'. Later, when the maildir mailbox format became popular, some MTAs gained the ability to deliver to maildir format inboxes.

• Aaron Rainbolt: Setting up a weird dual-boot DOS workstation

  I’ve been wanting to create some Bible study software for DOS for a while now. Why target DOS? Because it’s a cool platform, it’s still in use in some areas of the world, and I haven’t been able to find readily available Bible software for DOS, whether open-source or not. Over the weekend, I was thinking about this project again, and decided that, for the sake of development ease and avoiding emulator quirks, I should set up a DOS installation on physical hardware and create the software on that machine.

  I have tons of old computers in varying states of decay or usefulness; three of them still work pretty well. I decided to pick the weakest of the three for this project since it probably had more than enough grunt for the project at hand, but wouldn’t be useful for much else. The chosen system was a Compaq Presario 6000 desktop, featuring some iteration of an AMD Athlon XP processor, 256 MB RAM, a 20 GB hard drive (which I was about to expand for reasons I’ll get into later), a floppy drive, and dual optical drives (only one of which works). This particular system is a bit strange since its USB controller and network card are both NVIDIA hardware, even though NVIDIA is typically associated with graphics cards. Beyond that though, the system was pretty typical for the kind of hardware you’d see in the early 2000s - all of the drives use IDE to communicate with the motherboard, and most of the expansion slots are PCI (except for a couple of mystery slots, one of them might be AGP, and another one seems to be intentionally blocked off and I can’t tell what it is). The back panel features PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, a parallel port and a serial port, a VGA port for the monitor, and a few USB (probably USB 2) ports. There was also a 3Com network card installed in one of the slots, which I had put there when experimenting with OpenBSD on this system. The front panel had a couple more USB ports.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Varnish on Linux Mint 22

    Varnish Cache stands as one of the most powerful HTTP accelerators and reverse proxy solutions available today, delivering exceptional website performance improvements that can enhance loading speeds by several hundred times.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Apache Solr on Linux Mint 22

    Installing a powerful search platform on your Linux Mint 22 system doesn’t have to be complicated. Apache Solr stands as one of the most robust open-source search engines available today, offering enterprise-grade functionality for applications requiring sophisticated search capabilities.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install KubeSphere on Manjaro

    Installing KubeSphere on Manjaro GNU/Linux provides developers and system administrators with a powerful enterprise-grade container platform built on Kubernetes. This comprehensive guide walks you through the entire installation process, from initial system preparation to post-deployment configuration and optimization.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PHP on Debian 13

    PHP 8.4 represents a significant milestone in web development, introducing groundbreaking features and performance improvements that revolutionize server-side scripting.

  • ID Root ☛ Sha1sum Command in GNU/Linux with Examples

    The sha1sum command stands as one of the most essential utilities in the GNU/Linux command-line arsenal for ensuring data integrity and file verification. This powerful tool computes and verifies SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) checksums, generating unique 160-bit hash values that serve as digital fingerprints for files and data streams.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install JDownloader on Linux Mint 22

    JDownloader is a powerful, open-source download management tool that excels at handling multiple file downloads from one-click hosting sites and file-sharing platforms. This comprehensive guide covers multiple installation methods for JDownloader on Linux Mint 22, ensuring you can choose the approach that best fits your needs and technical experience level.

• TecMint ☛ Difference Between su and sudo and Configuring sudo in Linux

  When a regular user needs to make changes that affect the entire system, they must use either the su or sudo command to gain temporary administrative privileges.