Issue #291 / Feb 2025

The strange case of James Howells's hard drive reached a judge this week, which should be cause for all of us to pause and reflect. In case you're not familiar with the heart-rending tale, Mr. Howells had quite a sum of cryptocurrency back in 2013, with his private keys stored on a hard drive that he removed from his computer and placed in a black bag.

Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon Edition and EndeavourOS Neo

In the news: Latest Cinnamon Desktop Releases with a Bold New Look; Armbian 24.11 Released with Expanded Hardware Support; SUSE Renames Several Products for Better Name Recognition; ESET Discovers New Linux Malware; New Linux Kernel Patch Allows Forcing a CPU Mitigation; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 Released; Open Source Development Improves Software Security, Says LF Report; AI-Powered GitHub Spark Released for Creating Micro Apps; and Open Source AI Definition Now Available.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

When you're tuning up Linux performance, you need to keep an eye on a number of components and parameters. This article describes some techniques for optimizing performance by tuning TCP/IP, reducing latency, and configuring NUMA-aware systems. You'll also learn about CPU scheduling and memory management tuning.

This Linux-from-scratch distribution does things its own way.

TryHackMe's Capture the Flag puzzles are a useful source for users who want to learn about ethical hacking and penetration testing.

A classic Debian tool, dpkg-reconfigure provides a convenient and efficient way to reconfigure previously installed packages.

Alternative open source metasearch engines offer more privacy than mainstream search engines and can sometimes yield better results. While SearXNG is the best-known open source metasearch engine, 4get is a capable alternative worth checking out.

LocalSend lets you quickly and conveniently exchange data between devices on the same wireless network without the need for cables.