Yeah but does that really compare to a single man destroying a $44 Billion dollar company?

OK yeah, I wasn’t sure if it had a way to collect debs from other sources. I’ve been using it for years to locally cache the standard Debian repos so I don’t need to re-download packages every time I update my various servers and VMs, but I haven’t really tried using it for anything beyond that.

Sorry to ask, but isn’t this basically the same thing as apt-cacher-ng?

Seriously, why hasn’t there been an investigation since he’s meddling directly with government affairs and working for a foreign enemy?

Don’t forget that Musk is also the one who intentionally blocked paid service from Ukraine during a critical moment in the early days of Russia’s current genocide, because Musk sucks up to Putin. Dude needs to answer for his actions.

My primary domain is something that people have blacklisted because four letters happen to partially match a word that could be spammy (how ridiculous is that?), however the mail servers (the ones they keep blocking) are attached to my computer business name which I registered in 2006, so there’s really no reason why they should block it for that reason.

Unfortunately that’s not true. I’ve been running mail servers under my domain since around 2000, almost as long as Microsoft has been running Hotmail, and I was certainly following good standards like SPF and DKIM well before they considered such a thing… and yet Microsoft is the bane of my mail server’s existence. Despite no compromises resulting in spam blasts, MS still regularly shuts me out with no reason given and no hits showing on their monitors. If I can find their email address to ask what the problem is, I get a generic “your domain has been cleared” sort of reply but never any reason why they blocked me in the first place.

I think I missed something in your description, but what are you running on your local server? I think most people set up postfix to relay the emails over to gmail or whoever, and there are options in postfix for backwards compatibility with Outlook or even Microsoft Mail so your wife could use whatever client she wants. If you don’t have a local mail server set up then this is probably what you want to do. This method allow a local or remote connection from any client so you could run K9 on your phone instead of a VPN.

For opening such a setup to the internet (and allowing access from anywhere), make sure you have strong passwords on your accounts, require SASL authentication, and set up fail2ban to block repeated attempts to hack your mailboxes. Don’t run anything else on the same server (or use virtual machines or strong containers) to reduce the chance of your mail server getting compromised other ways, and you should be good to go.

I remember when me and a friend both had C64s and he got a 20MB HDD for it. He said “bring your floppies over and we’ll swap software, I have tons of space now!” Big surprise, I had way more floppies than he had drive space. 😆 These days I don’t mess around, I have around 105TB of storage with room for expansion as drives get cheaper.

Put me down for one Amiga 1000 (which I still have with the 2MB expansion), I found a used one for sale and snagged it for $300 (before the A500 or any other models were released). I thought it was a great deal.

After the string of bad decisions he’s already made with this company, what makes you think he’s able to make good choices now? He has an echo-chamber where nobody can tell him to GTFO and that’s literally the only thing he’s ever getting out of it. It’s kinda like if someone paid an obscene amount of money for a junker car, then paid 10x that amount to put vanity plates on it.

There’s definitely been a lot of talk about the whole “pay us and we can make that bad review from someone who wasn’t your customer just go away.” Some say that never actually happened, and yet I was IT support for a small business who contacted Yelp to find out why non-customers were allowed to leave bad reviews and they were directly told that for a fee those reviews would be removed.

Sorry, I just realized I crossed up my evil businesses. Yelp did the whole protection-racket thing, it was LinkedIn that hacked people’s computers and keep sending out emails in their customer’s names (“I heard about this great company, you should check them out…”).

Yelp, another major tech company

That’s a curious way to spin “a bunch of con artists who built a business by hacking people’s computers and sending out emails in those people’s names”.

If you already have a router tying these two networks together then you should NOT also have two NICs in one machine tied to both networks. Pick one or the other, you can’t have both. If you think you need both then you haven’t correctly considered your network topology.

This sounds familiar. Can you verify if you’ve enabled net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf? If you have to make a change, then issue sysctl --system to reload the updates.

That’s fine, we’re happy to keep the better choice to ourselves. 😆

I hope nobody lets them know that Firefox on Linux has never shown ads for any of their content.

Sure. You install your DE first, and then start installing software like browsers, email, etc. The net install disk is just a barebones system to get you up and running and then you install whatever you need from there. If you’re building a desktop them you might want a DE. If you’re building a server then you might want web or email services. The basic installation can be expended to include everything you want for that particular machine.

The advantage of using a pre-configured full setup is that you don’t need to know the name of all the packages you want to install, and typically you can still remove the ones you don’t like. Even with the DE you will probably find that the package also installs a number of common tools like task bar widgets or file managers. So in making a truly custom system you will have to hit google quite a bit to find the things you want to install, but then you learn what all those various packages actually do. Even the GUI login screen has multiple choices to select from which give you different ways of managing the logins. That’s one of the things most people really enjoy about linux – almost every type of software has multiple choices (like Firefox vs Chrome) so it’s easy to build up a desktop that suits your particular needs.

1. Have you looked at Mate Desktop? It’s based off of an earlier version of Gnome but I find it much more familiar to the way things used to be managed on Windows.

2. That’s going to come down to the specific hardware. A lot of vendors build their devices to only work under Windows but there are a lot of smart Linux techs who have been able to reverse-engineer working drives. Your best bet is to find a hardware compatibility list and see how much support your particular laptop has.

3. If you look at Debian, you can get the “net-install” image. This doesn’t even install a desktop environment, it simply boots you to a command line and you can install whatever you want to use. Many other distributions probably have a similar installed available, it’s just a matter of deciphering what the names mean.

4. If you install something as root, or if it’s installed by the system during the initial installation, then yes you’ll need root, but more likely you will use “sudo” which gives your user account the temporary access needed (if it was set up with that access). Again, going back to something like Debian’s net-install, everything except the core OS would be installed by you anyway.

5. “Rooting” sounds like a term you brought from an Android phone. In desktop terms, think of the root user as being like the admin on Windows. You only use it when needed, like when you’re performing a system update, otherwise you do everything under your regular user account.

6. When you install a DE like Gnome, it also adds a login to your graphical interface. If you install a second DE, then on the login screen you are presented a choice as to which one you want to use this time. If you want to switch, you just log out and select another one from the login screen. You can have as many as you want, just remember that this loads a ton of extra stuff on your system. It’s ok to play with, but then I would suggest uninstalling the ones you don’t like.

7. Wayland is the core of the DE. The previous system was Xorg, but both are still in common use. Docker is a container system, so like if you wanted to install a web server then Docker would contain all of the modules for that software independently of anything else you have installed. This means that a system update is less likely to break something (although that’s already pretty unlikely), but it does require more storage space.

There was a Star Wars text adventure game on the Apple II released in 1979 that I used to play. I’ve been searching for the code from that game for a long time I finally found it again just this month. Part way through my efforts to convert it to javascript I realized I hadn’t bothered looking for an actual emulator for Applesoft Basic… Sure enough, they exist (jsbasic on github), so I now have that running on my server. Yay, good memories!