TechBlog

In 2022 I published this as a Mainline one-liner: add a PPA, mainline --install-latest, reboot. The commands still work. They were never the interesting part. Ubuntu does not have one kernel you “upgrade.” It has a shipping model. GA stays on the version that shipped on day one. HWE rolls forward from interim releases. OEM is a vendor-laptop cadence that is supposed to fold back. Mainline is a set of unofficial builds from kernel.ubuntu.com that Canonical does not support. DKMS is the reason jumping tracks is not free on a laptop. ...

In 2022 I published this as a sed on /etc/apt/sources.list: replace jammy with kinetic, then apt full-upgrade. I have used that pattern on servers. It can work. It is not how Ubuntu ships releases, and the example was the wrong jump — Kinetic was 22.10, an interim, nine months of support, off the LTS track. Ubuntu does not have one “upgrade” command. It has three different operations that people collapse into that word: package updates inside a release, point releases of the same LTS, and a release upgrade to a new codename. do-release-upgrade is the supported path for the third. Rewriting sources by hand is still how I change series. It is a bad default if apt dying halfway through would leave you without a next step. ...

You’ve heard it again and again: You need to use a password manager to generate strong, unique passwords and keep track of them for you. And if you finally took the plunge with a free and mainstream option, particularly during the 2010s, it was probably LastPass. For the security service’s 25.6 million users, though, the company made a worrying announcement last week: A security incident the firm previously reported on November 30 was actually a massive and concerning data breach that exposed encrypted password vaults—the crown jewels of any password manager—along with other user data. ...

Microsoft researchers found a cross-platform botnet that originates from malicious software downloads on Windows devices & succeeds in propagating to a variety of Linux-based devices by enumerating default credentials on internet-exposed SSH-enabled devices. Microsoft researchers observed that the initial infection points related to the botnet were devices infected through the installation of malicious cracking tools that purport to acquire illegal Windows licenses. The cracking tools contain additional code that downloads and launches a fake version of svchost.exe through a PowerShell command. In some cases, the downloaded file is named svchosts.exe. ...

What is WARP? The Cloudflare WARP client allows individuals and organizations to have a faster, more secure, and more private experience online. The WARP client sits between your device and the Internet, and has several connection modes to better suit different needs. Install Installing Warp Client (aka Cloudflare Zero Trust Client) is so easy, specially if your OS uses AUR. AUR Use your AUR helper to find and install cloudflare-warp-bin, for example I use yay here: ...

TL;DR Install zsh, then run the Oh My Zsh installer on Ubuntu, Manjaro, or Arch. Enable the vscode plugin, add Powerlevel10k, and install a Meslo Nerd Font. Periodically git pull custom themes/plugins under $ZSH_CUSTOM — Oh My Zsh’s auto-update does not cover them. Point the VS Code integrated terminal or Cursor IDE terminal at /usr/bin/zsh in settings.json. On Manjaro, also see How to Install Cursor IDE on Manjaro Linux. If you use the simple Bash Terminal in your OS, you may want to give Zsh a try to use a faster and safer terminal with many more features. The simple Bash that exist in the common dist of Linuxes are not changed over years and just received some security fixes, but the community behind Zsh are improving it everyday and bring new useful plugins. ...

TL;DR Generate a modeline with cvt, add it with xrandr --newmode / --addmode, then enable it on your output. Session-only changes vanish on reboot and never fix the login screen. On KDE/Kubuntu with SDDM, put the same commands in Xsetup so they run before the greeter. After I switched from GNOME/Unity to KDE, SDDM would not pick up my ultrawide panel. It stuck at Full HD instead of 2560×1080. I had hit the same class of problem earlier on Ubuntu with an older monitor whose native mode never showed up in the display settings. ...

Recently I had problem with my Ubuntu, Whenever I tried to open a website my Chromium told me that a Network Change has been detected and after 1-2 reload that sites would load and sometimes failed to load fully. After looking up for that problem, I found out many other people had same problem and it has something to do with “avahi-daemon”. Solution According to the links I found in Ubuntu forums, this problem comes from IPv6 in Ubuntu and disabling that service will fix it, I tried it and it worked: ...

In January I wrote about moving our frontend from AngularJS to Angular. That migration is still running — we are on Angular 4 now, which shipped in March and turned out to be a painless bump from 2.4. The bigger shift landed on the backend: our APIs used to live in Laravel, and we are rewriting them in Java with Spring Boot 1.5.3. This is my first real Java project. I have years of PHP — mostly Laravel — and a few months of TypeScript from the Angular work. I also wrote C# in college, which turns out to matter more than I expected. Java does not feel like learning a foreign language. It feels like meeting someone who speaks a dialect you half understand. ...

How it started A few days ago I just decided to give my Ubuntu a new look and experience. I thought KDE is not in a good situation and maybe Gnome 3 is a better option than Unity. The easiest option to try Gnome on Ubuntu (Without a clean install of OS) is to install it as a package: 1 sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop During the install process it asks for Display Manager, you have options to choose, gdm and lightdm, since I want to try Gnome, I select gdm: ...