today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 06, 2026

• TecMint ☛ Rocky Linux 10 Minimal Server Installation Guide

  Most sysadmins treat OS installation like a checkbox; they click through fast, accept defaults, and move on, but the problem is that those defaults are often not what you actually want, so you end up fixing things later that the installer decided for you.

• Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Ansible-Native Quadlets: Deploying a Mastodon Greeter Bot with containers.podman

  I’ve covered Podman Quadlets and the broader Podman in Production story already. The pattern is straightforward: drop a .container file into /etc/containers/systemd/, run systemctl daemon-reload, and you have a container managed as a first-class systemd service. No daemon, no Compose runtime, no orchestrator. That works beautifully on a single host; once you have more than one, you want the deployment in version control and applied by a tool that can detect drift.

  The containers.podman Ansible Collection has quietly become a very nice answer to that. As of recent releases it can generate Quadlet files directly from a podman_container task: you declare the desired container, the module writes the unit file, and the role wraps the rest of the deployment around it. Ansible’s idempotency takes care of the rest.

• John D Cook ☛ Changing one character in a PDF

  My first thought was that it had something to do with hyphen being an ASCII character and an en-dash not. Changing a hyphen to an en-dash would make a UTF-8 encoded text file a couple bytes longer. (See why here.) Maybe adding one non-ASCII character could cause the file to include a glyph it didn’t before.

  I did a couple experiments. I made a minimal LaTeX file with only the text [...]

• Alexandru Scvorțov ☛ On zram swap and zswap

  I recently converted all my machines from zram swap to zswap. In this post I go over the differences between the two and why zswap is almost certainly better for any general use-case.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Podman Desktop on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

    If you manage GNU/Linux servers, you already know the Docker daemon is a security liability sitting in plain sight.

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

    If you run containers on a GNU/Linux server [...]

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Incus on Fedora 44

    Installing container and virtual machine management software on Fedora 44 requires careful preparation and attention to system configuration.

  • ID Root ☛ IPv4 Subnetting on GNU/Linux Explained with Examples

    If you have ever set up a GNU/Linux server and later discovered that two of your services could not talk to each other [...]

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Podman Desktop on Fedora 44

    Managing containers from the terminal is powerful, but there are times when a visual interface just makes the job faster.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Podman on Fedora 44

    If you want to install Podman on Fedora 44, you picked the right time to do it.