January 2026 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

NAS -- what protocol?
by William Park 09 Feb '26

09 Feb '26

To those running NAS, I'm thinking about turning my current i3-4170 desktop into NAS. What protocols do you use? Do you run both "NFS" and "SMB" on it? Or, just "SMB"?

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Not Linux ... Virtual Credit Cards
by Giles Orr 02 Feb '26

02 Feb '26

My apologies, this is not a Linux question. But this crowd is fairly security- and technology-oriented, so it seems like the right place to ask. I'd like to make purchases online with one-time-use credit card numbers (think how nice this would be with dubious websites that have something you really want: their bad security won't ruin your credit rating days or years later). This idea has been around since at least the early 2000s, but it's inconvenient - and as the Dead Kennedys said, give me convenience or give me death! But I'm willing to give up some convenience in the name of security. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_payment_number The idea is that you generate a new credit card number for each purchase, or perhaps each vendor (which can't be used by anyone else - locked to the vendor). And/or put a credit cap on each number. The inconvenience is that they're short-lived and you have to generate new ones frequently. Which is also going to cause overhead for the bank, who will charge you more. What I'm learning is that A) inconvenience and cost makes them undesirable so they're not common, and B) there aren't many in Canada. Most recently, a bank employee has pointed out that RBC does have a Virtual Debit Card ( https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/banking-services/virtual-visa-debit/index.html ) - but what I immediately noticed is that this seems to be managed through a phone app. I really don't want more personal data concentrated in my phone. Yes, I get why it's on the phone for in-store purchases, but my use-case is actually online and I'd prefer to manage it through their website or at worst a plugin. <sigh> According to a four year old Reddit thread, both Koho and Neo offer VCCs in Canada, although it doesn't sound like either is particularly well-loved. And I would prefer (if only by a small margin) to go with a bricks-and-mortar Canadian bank. Does anyone have experience with any Canadian virtual credit or debit cards? Any suggestions welcome. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Linux and the new tpl website?
by Karen Lewellen 02 Feb '26

02 Feb '26

Hi folks, Anyone know if any effort was made to test the new tpl website in Linux at the basic level? Thanks, Kare

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Re: Linux and the new tpl website?
by Evan Leibovitch 01 Feb '26

01 Feb '26

On Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 00:26 Karen Lewellen <klewellen(a)shellworld.net> wrote: Linux also exists as a console command line edition. > That statement isn't really useful. "Linux" is a kernel. Its current edition is 6.18. Various people and organizations package this kernel with various tools, file systems, libraries, shells,installation methods and utilities to create a distribution. And there are literally thousands of these distributions. While most of them now have a graphic interface component, almost every single one of them has a command line interface underneath. And the ones that don't are not intended for human interaction. My understanding was that, at least previously, tpl provided certification > courses in Linux, which would reasonably include its fundamental > foundations. > As the teacher of many of those courses and the co-founder of the certification organization, I'm extremely well acquainted with the relevant subject matter. They did not ever teach or certify knowledge of about browsers. While certainly important, browsers are simply a category of applications. They have NEVER been a "fundamental foundation" of Linux-based operating systems. - Evan

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Anyone using Cockpit
by William Park 31 Jan '26

31 Jan '26

Is anyone using (or used) Cockpit for NAS purpose? Background: ----------- If you can install a new distro for your NAS, then OpenMediaVault would be an answer. But, if - you already have data on disks and they are already mounted, - you are doing few other things (not related to NAS), then you just want GUI frontend to manage NFS/SMB only. Google AI says, "Cockpit". And, you say, ???

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Re: Linux and the new tpl website?
by Evan Leibovitch 29 Jan '26

29 Jan '26

On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 12:10 AM Karen Lewellen <klewellen(a)shellworld.net> wrote: > Honestly, I remain confused why this has anything to do with aoda > compliance? > It has as much to do with aoda compliance as it does with TPL Linux certification classes, which continue to be mentioned despite absolutely no relevance to this topic. First, this is a browser and web design/protocol complaint and not an OS one. Second, Linux (and other IT) courses are done by the e-learning department of the library, which has little to do with its web development. So please stop with the linkage. It's an unhelpful distraction. - Evan

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Distro hopping
by Steve Litt 22 Jan '26

22 Jan '26

I've used a Linux daily driver since March 2001, and when it comes to distros, I'm one of the most monogamous Linux users on earth. I used Mandrake/Mandriva 2001-2008, and Void Linux 2015 to today and beyond. But from 1998-2001, and again 2008-2015, I out-hopped any frog. Starting with Redhat 5.1 in 1998, back when Redhat was an exemplary steward of Free Software, I then tried and failed with Debian, went with Caldara, then Corel Linux, and finally just after Y2K, Mandrake, which had everything I needed. By 2006 Mandrake was getting kind of shaky and unstable with Xfce, especially Kmail, so I started looking seriously into OpenBSD, which, running the same software, was *ROCK* stable. For about a year my main laptop ran OpenBSD while my Daily Driver Desktop (DDD) ran Mandrake or Mandriva or whatever it was called by then. Somewhere around 2008 I switched to Ubuntu to get away from the increasingly twitchy Mandriva, but believe it or not I found Ubuntu not to be tolerant enough of different hardware, so I began the process of switching to Mint by installing Mint on each of my three children's computers. I was all set to convert my daily driver when Mint's Clem Lefebvre said that supporters of Israel weren't welcome. I promptly converted the kids to Ubuntu and canceled my plans for Mint. Ubuntu would have been a perfect distro for me in 1998-2004, but by late 2013 I was sick and tired of working around all of its training wheel restrictions, so I switched to Debian in very early 2014, just in time for the systemd civil war. On first hearing of systemd, I thought it as a joke, a hoax. Nobody would build or accept software so gratuitously entangled, huge and demodularized. On finding out it was true, and that the "Wheezy" version was the last to use sysvinit, with "Jessie" scheduled to be a systemd version. As a guy who has made his living repairing electronics and software, and as a guy who bossed his computer rather than letting his computer boss him, I knew I couldn't have such monolithic entanglement on my computer, so I stayed on "Wheezy" well into 2015 while evaluating the few remaining alternatives after the whole Redhat derived world and the whole Debian derived world went systemd. Trying distro after distro, I was favoring OpenBSD until finding out that OpenBSD had no way to do hardware acceleration of VM guests, eliminating the possibility of using my favorite trick for running software my distro didn't offer, namely, running an appliance for that software with a distro that offered it. I was actually considering moving to a (barf) Mac. Note that Devuan was not yet being distributed in early 2015. Then I discovered Void, asked whether there was any intention of them going systemd in the future, there wasn't, and so even though it was a running release and I'd had big troubles with rolling releases Gentoo, Funtoo and Arch, I made the switch in mid 2015. My first 8 weeks with Void were brutal. XBPS packager instead of the APT and RPM I'd used before, almost no training wheels, and a prioritization of shellscripts over configuration: A prioritization I'd dreamed of, but when diving in I realized how much I'd depended on training wheels in the past. As time went on and I got accustomed to the Void mindset, it got easier and easier for me. Void's not perfect, and I'm always eyeballing other distros and BSDs, but to get a comparable DIY friendly distro I'd probably need to switch to Slackware, and I'm not ready for a package manager that makes me trial and error dependencies on software installation. And my research tells me that OpenBSD *still* lacks hardware accelerated VM guests. Meanwhile, on 7/26/2025 Funtoo stopped being a formal project and limps on in "hobby mode". And with Gentoo offering systemd as an option, I worry that they'll start shipping software requiring systemd. Note that Gentoo's default init is OpenRC, and they also offer runit and s6, so maybe I'm just being paranoid. So I've used Void Linux for ten years and counting, but getting to that point required a lot of distro hopping. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com

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As The Distro Turns, Episode ∞-2
by Evan Leibovitch 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

Some people here may have been informed, some entertained, and others may applaud themselves by having avoided my distribution hopping of the last half-year. TL;DR: I did it. I installed CachyOS. And I'm happy with it so far. (But then again I was happy with Kubuntu and Fedora at the time I installed them too...) Recap for anyone keeping score: My hardware is a GMKTec EVO-X2 which uses the AMD "Strix Halo" architecture (Ryzen AI Max+ 395 CPU/NPU/GPU). My core use cases are running local LLMs, video editing/production, and Steam games. In a quest for the best balance of compatibility, stability and performance I have tried - KDE Neon - TuxedoOS - Kubuntu - Bazzite - Fedora - CachyOS (wouldn't install) - Kubuntu LTS - And now, as of this past weekend, CachyOS again Pretty well the only thing these distros had in common was KDE, a must-have in this search. (There's enough to learn about each distro, I don't need to keep relearning a GUI.) The ability to run AI software stacks and apps on this (relatively) bleeding edge hardware requires a distribution which is either officially supported by the software (Kubuntu LTS) or a community capable of providing sufficient unofficial support (everything else). Early on I learned that I would have to make tradeoffs between having current software and having a stable system. Of the distros above it seemed like only Fedora, Kubuntu and CachyOS even had sub-communities that cared about my use cases and hardware. In Fedora's case, the existence of said community enabled/allowed an update to the "linux-firmware" package to break LLM software on my platform and sat on fix for more than three months (because I no longer run it I don't even know if that fix has been released yet). And then there's Kubuntu LTS. Officially supported by AMD, this approach would, one would hope, avoid such severe breakage. It did, at least regarding the AI and video drivers. However, the 6.14 kernel was simply too old to support important features of this new CPU. Furthermore, going from Fedora to Kubuntu LTS was like a step back in time. My video software and kernel were now many releases older. Old Handbrake on Kubuntu would not read the backup of the config file I'd saved from New Handbrake on Fedora. And it seems unconscionable to me that any distro would not make one single decent browser that didn't force snaps upon me. The process of replacing Firefox-the-snap with Firefox-the-deb is well documented, but, as I found out, not particularly stable. I was receiving error messages upon starting Firefox that not even a purge-then-reinstall would fix. Sheesh, I thought I was going to Kubuntu LTS for its stability; yet mere weeks after installation its browser -- one of the components of it that I use the most -- breaks beyond repair. The fallback Falkon browser that's a part of KDE couldn't render any web page made in the last two decades. So enough of this. Then I recalled William Park's recent GTALUG post <https://lists.gtalug.org/archives/list/talk@lists.gtalug.org/thread/WNBZ36R…> about moving from Slackware(!) to CachyOS and having a good experience. I had to re-evaluate -- I had previously avoided CachyOS because of the instability inherent in its rolling release model. But since "stable" distros such as Fedora and Kubuntu had already let me down, why not try CachyOS again? At very least I would be confident that its rapid release cycle would ensure that I had the minimal kernel rev I need (6.18.4) and that fixes in linux-firmware would not be sat on for months. So then I tried again to install CachyOS and discovered why my first attempt had failed. CachyOS has a very unique install-time quirk -- the EFI partition. This is a FAT32-formatted chunk of your storage that is normally mounted under /boot/efi and has to be at least 100MB (maybe 200MB if you're dual-booting with Windows or want to have multiple boot options). *CachyOS won't let you install without an EFI partition of at least 2GB*. This is fine if you're starting with a fresh drive, but will likely require manual resizing (and maybe movement) of partitions if you want to dual-boot or have anything previous that you want to keep. So I rebooted into my favourite PC repair tool, repartitioned so that my EFI area is now 4GB, and CachyOS is finally happy to install. I understand that all this space is needed to accommodate btrfs snapshots into which you may want to boot if you need to rollback due to an update breaking things. In hindsight maybe Fedora -- which also likes btrfs for its filesystems -- would have benefitted from this too. So far, touch wood, all is good. All my hardware and peripherals were recognized and work fine. In fact CachyOS is the first distro I've ever installed that picked the correct audio device immediately. I note that the EFI partition (here mounted as /boot) already has almost 600MB in use. I have not installed Steam or the AI software suite yet but I see that the documentation to do both appears robust. The video software is current, functioning, and for the most part taking advantage of this system hardware. The software maintenance system is ... different, but having to know one's way around dnf, apt, flatpak and snap this system is easy enough to pick up. Things feel "snappier" but I can't quantify it, and I haven't yet investigated if further system specific fine tuning can be done. If there's interest I'll report back on how well the AI and games work once installed as well as any hiccups in day-to-day use. And thanks, WIlliam. PS: Yes I know that Kubuntu LTS 26.04 is coming up in April and will refresh its app releases. It might even ship with kernel 6.20 which doesn't exist yet. But then it will be frozen in time for another two years. Don't want that, not on new hardware whose features have not been fully exploited yet. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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Minisforum MS S1 Max review
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

At last month's meeting I briefly mentioned my toy, one of these Mini PCs. This review, from a usually reliable source, gives a nice description https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPjA1Lm4ftY

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Explain SteamOS?
by Giles Orr 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

Caveat: I am not a gamer, or at least the games I play are decades old and run fine on any Linux system. So I've never had a need for bleeding edge hardware or the OS to run on it. I'm starting work on a class for TPL called "What is Linux," which may or may not actually be completed or taught. I know SteamOS is used on Valve's hardware (I can read Wikipedia) ... but what about people who want to run recent games but also want to move to Linux? Do they install SteamOS straight onto their hardware? Can it support LibreOffice and other "normal" stuff? Or do they add some large bundle of Steam software on top of their existing OS like Debian or Cachy? Because let's face it, gaming is the critical reason for not leaving Windows for some people. I'd like to be able to at least partially address that issue. As well as I know Linux, I'm pretty clueless about gaming. If I start to get traction on this presentation, I may ask for more advice and/or reviewers. The idea of crowd-sourcing the presentation itself appeals. :-) -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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