Ubuntu on Lords Of Tech

Emergency recovery of a shared web and mail hosting VPS [Case Study]

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 20:34:25 +0000

A small side-effect of my community and blogging work is, that I occassionaly (a few times per month) have people reach out to me asking for advice on a variety of topics, or for help if they are in a pickle. The lastest case was a guy from Czechia (Let’s call him Mr. D), asking for help with his pwnd web/mail server. It had a multiple glaring issues and even after my intervention is probably a minefield of vulnerabilities and backdoor. Since I am in the last year (hopefully) of my PhD studies and am currently swamped by my regular job as well, I didn’t have time to spend properly investigating and fixing all the issues in a manner that I would feel comfortable getting paid for, I’ve decided to perform the bare minimum to get the site up and running “pro bono”.

Setting up a VPS for several small e-commerce businesses (part 1)

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 20:13:43 +0000

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to set up a few websites, both static and dynamically generated. A few years ago, I’ve settled on Wordpress as my default choice, initially simply building up sites from themes and plugins, until I bit the bullet and started adding my own snippets of PHP and later building a full, albeit simple, custom theme. This series will hopefully prove to you that setting up a web server, mail server and other neat services is not as hard as you might assume and you can even serve several small businesses using a reasonably priced VPS. In this initial article, we’ll deal with initial setup of our Ubuntu 20.04 server and turning it into a nice little LEMP server. I am expecting you to know at least the bare minimum about terminal, ssh and how to install packages in Debian-based distributions. You should also already own a domain and know how to set up A-records.

Adding OpenCV libraries to a QT5 project in Ubuntu 20.04

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 15:55:39 +0000

I’ve recently gained interest in OpenCV. The problem with this is, that in most modern tutorials and walkthroughs it seems like the go-to language for working with this C-library is Python. I have an unreasonable antipathy towards this snake of a language and although I intend to fight through it some day in the future, at the moment I have more important stuff to deal with, so I intend to experiment with OpenCV in my own way - with a blend of noobie C++ and QT. In this quick note I’ll document for my (and whomever happens to land on this blog…) benefit the process of building a recent version of OpenCV on Ubuntu 20.04 and what arcane line to insert into the dark lord of K-prefixed apps - QtCreator.

Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Mega Review - A complex look at the state of Ubuntu

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:32:27 +0000

As somebody who’s always had Ubuntu in his daily life for the past 13 years, I sometimes find it hard to differentiate between all the versions. I do appreciate the progress though, albeit I’ve felt like the direction Ubuntu was taking was going to force me to abandon it eventually. Lately, though, I’ve enjoyed the increased polish and speed improvements of Gnome 3.36 dabbled with snap packaging, understood its “raison d’etre” and had the opportunity of participating in an Canonical hosted webinar for press to pose some questions.

Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine Review

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:17:32 +0000

If you’ve read any of my previous reviews, you know that I have a difficult relationship with Gnome. I love the aesthetics, but I despise the number of desktop crashing bugs, dropped frames and the number of extra clicks you need to make to get anything done. That being said, Gnome 3.34 in Ubuntu 19.10 is a giant leap forward and if the core Gnome team supported by Canonical’s renewed efforts keep tweaking the performance and stability in subsequent releases, I may be tempted to stop distrohopping and stay with vanilla Ubuntu until something exciting happens in the Linux distributions land.

Ubuntu Budgie 19.04 Review

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 03:00:00 +0000

This review is one of the longest in the making ever since starting this blog. I’ve been using Ubuntu Budgie on my desktop workstation even before I’ve installed Xubuntu 19.04 on my main laptop for it’s review. From day one, I kinda liked it, making in my eyes a ton more sense than Gnome Shell and thus entering the ranks of superior GTK3 desktop implementations. Pantheon. please make room for your new roommate!

Xubuntu 19.04

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 17:34:00 +0000

If there is a desktop environment that I always somehow evaded, it’s XFCE. I’ve always thought that I had my DEs well categorized – Unity was awesome, but misunderstood and limited to Ubuntu, Gnome 2 / MATE was/is featureful, but it’s widgets and applets crash constantly, LXDE brought new life for computers with less than 512MB RAM, KDE was bloated and Gnome 3 was meant for the weird unfulfilled future, where all laptops sport a touchscreen and GNU/Linux has great drivers. In the last couple of years, these categories got mixed up and often switched entirely and we’ve got a bunch of new and exciting DEs waiting just a few keystrokes away from our computers.

Ubuntu MATE 19.04 Review

Sat, 04 May 2019 21:58:00 +0000

A biased review of the light-weight, yet incredibly easy to customize flavor of Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo.

KDE Neon (18.04) Review

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:17:14 +0000

My very first experience with KDE was back in the day of Ubuntu 7.10, with KDE 3. I quickly got overwhelmed by the breadth of settings, it’s modularity and default look similar to Windows platform, from which I had just escaped.

Source: By Rbuj – Own work, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7014393

It only took me a few days, before I switched back to Gnome 2 and haven’t looked back until a couple years ago, when Canonical, much to my dismay, announced they were dropping Unity for Gnome 3. That was when I first installed KDE Neon based upon Ubuntu 16.04 and used it for several months. A few months ago, I have decided to give KDE another go and I kept using it to this day on my main laptop computer. What is KDE anyways? It is a Linux desktop environment, based on Qt Framework, as opposed to GTK Framework, used in most other DEs – Gnome, Pantheon, Cinnamon, Mate, etc. In it’s current incarnation, the KDE Plasma 5, it is very lightweight, snappy and clean-looking. It is inherently very modular and can be reshaped to pretty much any look and feel you’d like. However, because of this customizability, it is often looked at as hard to set up and is less widespread than it’s younger cousin.