Review: Mabox Linux 20.10

For me, running Mabox was a curious experience. The reason being that the distribution never seemed to do anything objectively wrong or buggy. Everything worked properly, the system was fast, stable, and often offered multiple approaches to accomplishing tasks. Mabox inherits Arch Linux's large repositories of software and the cutting-edge packages which make its grandparent famous. The lightweight Openbox window manager is flexible and fast. Plus I like that Mabox doesn't ship a lot of applications, just some good basics, and gives us multiple tools to add more items we might want. However, Mabox never felt like a good fit for me. It's hard to put my finger on why exactly this was because the distribution, objectively, does a lot of things well. However, the style of the distribution isn't at all to my taste. The Openbox session is very busy and I like quiet interfaces. Mabox is a cutting-edge rolling release and I like static and boring. Mabox has a tonne of status panels, shortcuts, and an elegant welcome screen. I want my operating system to stay out of the way and not distract me. Mabox has many configuration tools and they all seem to work, but the number of them (and the lack of a central organization for them) can make it harder to find the options I want to adjust. I guess what made the experience feel odd is Mabox uses a really minimal window manager, but with all the bells and whistles enabled. It ships with very few desktop applications, yet the menu is crowded with options. The system looks really sleek and modern, but a lot of options require we tweak text-based configuration files by hand. It makes for an odd series of juxtapositions. Objectively, I think Mabox is quite good. The only real bug I ran into was Firefox and the desktop panel using the same shortcut, but otherwise the system was fast, smooth, and capable. It just has an unusual approach to several aspects of it. Which makes me feel the distribution is objectively good, but subjectively not to my taste.

Linux 5.11-rc5

So this rc looked fairly calm and small, all the way up until today.

In fact, over 40% of the non-merge commits came in today, as people
unloaded their work for the week on me. The end result is a slightly
larger than usual rc5 (but both 5.10 and 5.8 were bigger, so not some
kind of odd outlier).

Nothing particularly stands out. We had a couple of splice()
regressions that came in during the previous release as part of the
"get rid of set_fs()" development, but they were for odd cases that
most people would never notice. I think it's just that 5.10 is now
getting more widely deployed so people see the fallout from that
rather fundamental change in the last release.  And the only reason I
even reacted to those is just because I ended up being involved with
some of the tty patches during the early calm period of the past week.
There's a few more still pending.

But the bulk of it all is all the usual miscellaneous fixes all over
the place, and a lot of it is truly trivial one- or few-liners. Just
under half the patch is for drivers, with the rest being the usual mix
of tooling, arch updates, filesystem and core (mm, scheduling,
networking).

Nothing here makes me go "Uhhuh" in other words.

            Linus

today's howtos

• Install and Configure Grafana on Kubernetes

  We are going to deploy Grafana to visualise Prometheus monitoring data.

• How to Install and Use Docker on Ubuntu 20.04 | 18.04

  Docker is a free, open-source and cross-platform containerization tool that helps you to deploy and run the application in an isolated environment. Docker has become one of the most important parts of modern software development and DevOps pipelines.

• How to Find Cheap Linux VPS? [Ed: Potentially a bit spammy (the links in there)]

  VPS stands for a Virtual Private Server. This is a virtual machine that is commonly used for hosting a web site. You can buy a VPS from a hosting provider companies such as Routerhosting, and based on your requirements. Each VPS provides you a private resource on a server to host your website. Likewise, you can use a shared VPS that is more affordable but in low security. Another noticeable factor for selecting a perfect VPS is operating system. The operating system that you select for VPS will have a strong impact on your business or the field of your action. There are two options available including Windows VPS and Linux VPS. Although there are many basic functions that are common between them, but selecting the OS completely depends on users and their preferences. As you know Linux VPS is more popular than Windows. You can easily find a cheap Linux VPS with great speed, function, and security.

• 4 ways to identify your current shell (if it’s bash)

  Knowing which run you are using on your system is an important piece of information. Your shell determines your login environment to a large extent as it controls which environment variables get exported, your shell prompt etc. On a Linux system it’s almost certain that you will using the bash shell unless the system administrator has deliberately changed it to something else. In this quick article we will demonstrate four ways you can determines if you are running the bash shell or not.

• Alan Pope: The Black Oblong of Monospace Mystery

  I originally titled this post “Don’t be afraid of the command line”, but decided “Black Oblong of Monospace Mystery” was more fun. Is the command line really scary? It doesn’t feel like that to me, but I grew up with an interface which looks like this on first boot.

• What Is DNS Server?

  What is DNS Server? DNS stands for Domain Name System. This is actually a service that runs on all of our computers but majorly it runs the entire internet. We type a website in the browser and with the bling of our eyes the website is open. Have you ever wondered how does that happen? In today’s article, we will learn the process of how the website opens so fast and how DNS plays an important role in this process. We already know that every website is saved in a server that is located somewhere in the world. We need to reach this server and ask for the website homepage. In order to reach this Server, we need the address. When we want to visit a person in real life, we need his home address but in the world of the internet, we need the logical address. Internet Protocol, also known as IP Address is the logical addressing system. In order to reach a website we need to enter its server IP in the browser and the server will reply with the homepage. Initially, when the internet was in its infancy, people kept the record of IP addresses. Gradually, the internet because huge, and keeping the record of IP addresses was a challenge. The markers of the Internet knew that humans are very good at remembering names than numbers. They came up with the idea of a DNS Server.

• How to install Proton VPN on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Proton VPN on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• How to Install AppImage in Linux

  AppImage is format for packaging applications which is self-contained. It is the universal software package format compatible with various Linux distribution. In the traditional system of installing software packages, you need to download, extract and install on various directories of the system. But with the AppImage there is no extraction, no installation, no root permission, you just download the single package, make it executable and run it with a single click. It includes all the compressed image, dependencies, and libraries needed to run the software. Even to uninstall the application, you will just remove the AppImage file.

TV-Lite – GTK 3 IPTV, Sopcast, Acestream Player for Linux

TV-Lite is a free open-source IPTV player with Sopcast and Acestream handling capabilities, which runs in Linux and Windows. TV-Lite aims to be a replacement for the older TV-Maxe. It so far uses VLC for media playback, and need Acestream and / or Sopcast for this program to be able to handle the respective stream types.