One of my friends lives at a retreat center with a large solar array that powers a large house, chapel, and five separate smaller cottages, all with full electric service. The solar array connects to power inverters, then to a power panel, which feeds all the separate buildings on campus. No one would ever confuse … Read more
A friend of mine contacted me because he said he had “messed up” his computer. His laptop is a Dell 7440 with a BIOS date of April 28, 2016. It’s a dual-core Intel Core i5-4300U with 8 GB of RAM and a modest 256 GB mSATA drive. He said he had been running updates, and … Read more
After successfully using Podman Desktop on my Linux Mint desktop, I wanted to see how Podman would install on my M3 MacBook Air. Although I completed the installation, I struggled to connect to the Linux VM on macOS. That was because I failed to read the excellent documentation from Red Hat on the Podman software … Read more
I regularly use VirtualBox to test new Linux distributions, Windows versions, and sometimes set up WordPress, Moodle, or another content management system. Listening to one of my favorite Linux podcasts recently, I decided I wanted to learn more about containers, which I know dreadfully little about. I decided to use Podman, although I have used … Read more
Learning to use Linux is now much easier than it used to be. However, for someone new to the system, it can still be challenging to figure out where to start. Here are some tips and tricks that can help new users find a smoother entry point into Linux. The first step should be to … Read more
Earlier this week, I received a phone call from a gentleman whom I helped transition to Linux Mint last fall. He had a Dell laptop with an i5 processor, eight gigabytes of RAM, and a 900-gigabyte hard drive. Initially, it came with Windows 10, but he was no longer receiving updates because it had reached … Read more
I recently made an exciting purchase: a Roland FP-10 electric piano, a decision that has reignited my passion for music after several years away from playing. During my time in middle school and high school, I enjoyed exploring various musical instruments, but life took me in different directions, and I let that part of myself … Read more
My neighbor, who is a middle school student, recently sustained a compound fracture of his left arm, which left him unable to play baseball or do much of anything that a young person would enjoy doing in the summer months. I offered his mother the use of an old Xbox, but he already had one, … Read more
This afternoon, while reading about new developments in Linux Kernel 7.0, my browser session locked up, and I received a verbal warning that my system had been hacked, along with a number displayed for me to call Microsoft for help. I could not close the Chrome browser session, so I just shut down the system … Read more
In a previous article, I discussed the evolution of software installation on Linux, beginning with the early days of compiling software from compressed packages known as tarballs. Red Hat developed the package managers yum and later dnf, while Debian introduced apt. Other distributions, such as Arch, use pacman, and Suse employs Zypper and Yast. Although … Read more
