today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 27, 2026

• Linuxize ☛ How to Check if a Command Exists in Bash

  Check whether a command exists in Bash with command -v, capture its path, validate several dependencies, and compare type, hash, and which.

• Sparky-aptus-upgrade on Sparky GNU/Linux 2026 06 instance in UEFI mode

• dwaves.de ☛ gnu linux debian: kvm qemu non root user can not see any vms ( virsh list –all empty list )

• ID Root ☛ How To Install MySQL Workbench on Fedora 44

  If you want to Install MySQL Workbench on Fedora 44, the main challenge is not MySQL itself.

• dwaves.de ☛ gnu linux + bash + kvm virt-manager: how to start and connect to display of vm

• Linux Handbook ☛ LHB GNU/Linux Digest #26.08: Knowledge Base Boosting, Local AI, Terminal Course, Podman 6.0 and More

  Create your perosnal knoweldge base, if you have not already.

• TecMint ☛ Install GNOME on Rocky Linux 10 Using ISO (Offline)

  This setup is ideal for servers because it’s lightweight and uses fewer system resources. However, if you’re using your system as a workstation, a virtual machine, or simply prefer working with a graphical interface, you’ll probably want to install GNOME.

• OSTechNix ☛ How to Securely Delete Files on Linux (So They Stay Gone)

  On Linux, pressing Delete or running rm does not erase your data. It just removes the pointer to it. The actual bytes stay on your disk, sometimes for days, sometimes forever, until something else overwrites them.

  That matters if you are trying to remove a sensitive photo, a private document, a password file, or anything you never want anyone to recover.

• [Repeat] Jeff Geerling ☛ Quickly apply LUTs (color grading) with ffmpeg

  This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference.

  I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years1, mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pull more color and luminance information out of the footage later.

  But unlike photography, where RAW has been a thing for decades, and many workflows 'just work' without me having to 'grade' every individual photo, in video precious few consumer apps handle Log footage gracefully. You generally end up with a muddy grey mess.

• Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Monitoring a FreeBSD Mastodon Instance with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki | Larvitz Blog

  A while ago I migrated burningboard.net to a multi-jail FreeBSD setup: nginx, Puma, Sidekiq, and the database each in their own jail, with the host doing all the PF and routing. That post ended on the architecture. What it did not cover is the question that matters the morning after you put real users on a thing: is it actually healthy right now, and if it is not, will I find out before they do?

  This is the observability half of that story. I run a completely separate machine whose only job is to watch the Mastodon host, plus a handful of other boxes in my network. It runs Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Grafana to draw both, and Alertmanager to wake me up. None of it lives on the Mastodon host itself, because a monitoring system that shares a fate with the thing it watches is not a monitoring system, it is a single point of failure with extra steps.

  I covered the in-the-moment FreeBSD troubleshooting toolkit (top, gstat, netstat, rctl) in an earlier article. This one is the opposite end: history, dashboards, and alerting. When something is on fire right now, you reach for top -SHPj. When you want to know what was on fire at 3am while you were asleep, you reach for this.

• Ankur Sethi ☛ Your analytics are lying to you

  Web analytics are fragile. They fail in so many ways that making product decisions based wholly on your Google Analytics or Plausible data is folly of the highest degree.

  Here's a subset of all the reasons your analytics package undercounts or miscounts visitors: [...]