Issue #222 / May 2019

When I started this job 15 years ago, Debian was a really big deal. The whole Linux community paid attention to Debian elections, and this magazine even had a regular monthly column devoted to Debian affairs. It would not be an exaggeration to reveal that I even knew a guy who had the Debian spiral tattooed on his neck.

This month's DVD includes CentOS 7.6 (1810) and Kubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish."

In the news: VMware rolls out essential PKS; Linux 5.0 is here; Kali Linux 2019.1 is available; Linux Foundation releases a new draft of OpenChain specification; hackers start exploiting a Drupal bug;  LibreOffice is vulnerable to a remote code execution flaw; and an early warning system for seismic events.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on printk() wrangling, persistent memory as a generalized resource, making Kernel headers available on running systems, and Kernel licensing Hell. 

Experts agree that you should keep a copy of your data, but restoring from incremental backups takes time and sometimes doesn't work as expected. Alternatively, you can capture your data in a snapshot. Read on for a review of some leading Linux snapshot tools.

KDE Plasma 5.14 brings some highly visible improvements for KDE users.

Redundant Internet uplinks are standard on big corporate networks, but they are still the exception for the home and small-office sector. If you're ready to experiment, you can set up redundant Internet connections on your own home router with OpenWrt and the powerful Mwan3 extension.

As the standard core Linux commands have become more complex due to revisions, new commands have risen to take their place. Bruce looks at seven of these modern commands, plus a terminal emulator.

Sys admin columnist Charly freely admits that he doesn't like SQL and phpMyAdmin any more than he does COBOL. Instead, meet his new best friend; the slim, attractive database tool known as Adminer.

Performing the same Gimp image processing steps again and again is tiresome and error prone. Mike Schilli assigns this task to a Python script via a home grown new menu entry.