Linuxtastic

Filtering by unit, priority, boot and time; following logs live; the setting that decides whether yesterday's logs still exist; and how to stop the journal eating your disk.

A Staging Environment on One Server

A second copy of your application on the same machine, with its own database and no way to email your customers. What must be separated, how to refresh it safely,…

Disk Encryption on a Linux Laptop, Done Properly

LUKS protects a laptop that is switched off and stolen — and nothing else. Setting it up, backing up the header that everything depends on, and the honest trade in…

Self-Hosting Your First Application, End to End

Taking one application from a compose file to a working service on your own server: bound to localhost, behind TLS, backed up, and alerting you when it stops. About two…

Putting a Database Somewhere Sensible

Installing PostgreSQL on your own server without leaving it open to the internet: scoped roles, socket versus TCP, dumps you have restored from, and the settings that actually matter.

Alpine Linux: Small, Fast, and Not Quite Like the Others

The distribution most of your containers are already built on. What musl and busybox change, the support window people misread, and the DNS behaviour that breaks things in Kubernetes.

Immutable and Atomic Distributions: What You Give Up, and Get Back

Read-only system files, updates that apply completely or not at all, and a previous version you can always boot back into. How Fedora Atomic, openSUSE Aeon and NixOS differ, and…

Pop!_OS and COSMIC: Ubuntu With a Desktop Written From Scratch

Ubuntu LTS underneath, an installer that puts the NVIDIA driver on for you, and COSMIC — a desktop built in Rust that finally shipped. What it does well, and why…

Kali, Parrot and BlackArch: The Security Distributions