Issue #253 / Dec 2021

If you stay in this job long enough, you get to see the progression of technologies as they move from mere ideas, to prototypes, to real-world products ready to challenge the world and ascend the ladder to that mystical measure of success that the venture capitalists call "disruption."

Tails 4.22 and Q4OS 4.6

In the news: Linux Now Runs on Apple's M1 Chipset; MX Linux 21 RC Now Available; Fedora 35 Improves Desktop Performance; Extended Support for Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04; Gnome 41 Adds Desktop Improvements; and Black Lotus Labs Confirms Flaw in Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the renaming SMB and testing standards.

Veteran Linux users and administrators are likely to have heard of the BSD family of operating systems. However, the BSDs remain a mystery to many in the Linux community. With the upcoming release of OpenBSD 7.0, it is time to throw some light on this little gem.

Andrew David Wong discusses the Qubes OS project's security-by-compartmentalization approach, including an endorsement from Edward Snowden.

AltSearch offers extended functionality to LibreOffice Write's default find and replace tools, making it ideal for editing and formatting longer documents.

Linux and the BOINC distributed computing platform help researchers fight the COVID-19 virus.

To write low-level scripts, as an admin, you need to know whether you are currently on a physical or a virtual machine. Charly finds out with a couple of clever hacks.

A quick guide to 10 command-line tools to help you find hardware information.