Linux

When you upgrade a package on Linux Debian/Ubuntu, you need to restart any binaries that are running in order for bug fixes and security patches to take effect. Failure to do so, may leave programs open to exploits. The same applies to the Linux kernel itself.

If you are living in a place where daylight savings come into effect in spring, and goes back to standard time in autumn, then you are probably familiar with a few things that you need to do twice a year. These include things like adjusting the clock on your range/stove, or old clocks.

But that could also include things like restarting a program that does not handle timezone changes automatically.

Whatever the case may be, here is a script that allows you to run some of these repetitive tasks, or at a minimum, email you a list of things you need to change manually.

PAM (Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules) has become very verbose in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, causing excessive logging of various events. This has the annoying side effect of making the logs too big, and hard to find information in. It also causes log summarizing programs, such as Logwatch, to generate larger reports.

The goal of this page is to detail how to suppress excessive logging by PAM.

Like many people, I need to upgrade from the used laptop that I am using, to a newer (still used) laptop. This is usually every 3 years or so.

Because I don't want to install the operating system that I use (Xubuntu Linux) from scratch when doing so, I used to remove the disk in the old computer, and install it in the new one, and things would work right away, with all my applications still there, and my desktop the way it is when I shutdown the older computer.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform, written in Python, which I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

I am running it using a less common method (called Home Assistant Core), which will soon not be recommended nor supported for end users. However, I have consciously decided to run it that way, rather than use a docker container, Home Assistant OS, or the other recommended versions.

These reasons for this decision include:

In recent long term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu, Canonical has been adding more and more packages that are installed using snapd.

Snapd is a package manager that relies on static linking of dependencies, contrary to over two decades of Linux managing dependencies via dynamic linking, with Debian being the pioneer of this approach.

A few months ago, Ubuntu started pushing ads for their Ubuntu Pro service to the command line interface apt command. When you run the apt command from the terminal, you see this message:

Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro

Then about a week ago, more messages were pushed about the ESM service saying that more packages that can be upgraded if you subscribe to that service.

The following is a list of talks and presentation that I have done on various topics.

They are sorted by the most recent first.

For over a decade, I was running my home server on a trusty AMD Athlon II X4 PC, without any issues.

After upgrading to a newer motherboard the retired one was left unpowered for several months. Then when powering it up, Linux would not boot on it no matter what I tried.

Various distros were attempted, including Xubuntu desktop, and Finnix (highly recommended for testing and troubleshooting from the command line). The symptoms were the same: the PC reads the media, then the screen flickers and goes black with nothing on it.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform, written in Python. I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

However, I am running it using a less common Home Assistant Core installation method, consciously deciding not to run the custom Raspberry Pi image for Home Assistant, nor the docker container version for many reasons.

These reasons include: