For about 4-5 years, I have been off the deep end of Gnu/Linux operating systems. During this time period, many things in my life have changed, new social groups, and friends. After the social rebirth and exodus from high school, a few friends stuck around. Granted, this group is smaller than usual but is more closely intertwined. And yes, I know that's already off-topic for a Linux-based community. But when I like to tell a story, I like to paint a full picture. However, I will try to cut out the fluff, but I digress.

So, like many others on this community of Unix-like operating system enthusiasts, I began the plunge from Windows to Linux. First, I originally started with Manjaro because I learned about it from my very first Linux install on a Raspberry Pi model B+. I used that for a few months and eventually used the "AUR". Much like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun, and my naivety of dependencies and the underlying parts of the OS reared its ugly head. To which, my system became irrecoverably broken, and after much mental berating, I switched to Kubuntu for a year, then back to Arch. Then, my home was Nixos and Gentoo on all my machines, using Gentoo has taught me a lot about Linux as a whole.

Now, to the meat and potatoes: myself and two other individuals have done various things to fill our free time. It originally started with heading over to Friend A's house to play on his Xbox. Which became tiresome quickly, as many people know Xbox series S games are expensive, along with the "fast" NVMe-based storage stick for "internal only games". Friend B saved up for a laptop and bought an MSI Cyborg 15, and I cobbled together a LAN rig from Facebook Marketplace. Lovingly named the Ybox, as a joke of not being an Xbox and running Baztite Linux with Steam Big Picture, we had such a great time playing couch co-op games on the Ybox featuring Ultimate Chicken Horse, Unrailed, and speedrunners. But eventually, everybody in the group grew tired of couch co-op as although quite delightful became limiting in screen real estate and three-player genres. So, we started doing LAN parties like many gamers before have done in the days of Pepsi Free and parachute pants. We played many games locally and online together, and it has been great with fairly minor issues involving Steam and spotty internet.

So over this time period, I have been taking online computer classes specifically a Google IT class which is grossly outdated and feels very cobbled together as it was originally released in 2015. But it has still been useful in basic computer concepts like DNS, TCP/IP, and various Windows and Linux utilities. So, we all have played Minecraft since early days and have all played vanilla. So I said, "Screw it," and looked at some guides. Installed it on a spare laptop and recently switched it to run as a Docker container to run on my NAS and looked for help on port forwarding on Lemmy, to which the very kind people of C/Selfhosted pointed out Tailscale and Wireguard. Which has been rock-solid and much better solution got my friends all wired up to my tailnet, and it has been smooth since!

So we are now at the present where the previous night I was on call with Friend A, and he was honestly confused when there was a GUI installer and buttons. He was used to watching me use SwayWM and Kitty on the Ybox. I guess he thought Linux is for hackers and command-line only. The install went without a hitch; he booted into KDE and felt instantly at home! I showed him how to use the KDE store, in his words, "it's like the Microsoft Store?" and the touchscreen worked out of the box, and man it was PURE BLISS.

Honestly, shoutout to this great community and the very talented people behind Linux and its many, many distributions.

So i recently learned about a distro that has popped up called venom linux. It's a sourced based distro using the package manager called "scratch"

I am very familiar with gentoo linux and this seems like it has heavy inspiration from the gentoo project. Its very cool to see another source based distro come into the picture. The unique part is it has 2 init systems currently, which are neither systemd or openrc?!?!

They are S6 and sysv Which i have never heard of until now. The install looks via similar to gentoo/classic distro install. Which consists of creating partition schemes and filesystems then extracting a archive of the base file.

Some of the main taking points are

"Minimal as possible

Customizable

No systemd (elogind or any part from it)

Centered Around smaller software

That means the lack of huge software like Gnome"

I thought this was a pretty neat project and wonder what other gentoo users think aswell as binary distro users

So i've been hosting a modded Minecraft server for my friends and me on weekends. While it's been a blast, I've noticed that our current setup using LAN has its limitations. My friends have been eagerly waiting for their next "fix" (i.e., when they can get back online), and I've been replying with a consistent answer: this Friday.

However, exploring cloud providers to spin up a replica of my beloved "Dog Town" Server was a costly endeavor, at least for a setup that's close to my current configuration. As a result, I've turned my attention to self-hosting a Minecraft server on my local network and configuring port forwarding.

To harden my server, I've implemented the following measures:

1. Added ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall) for enhanced security.
2. Blocked all SSH connections except for the IP addresses of my main PC and LAN rig.
3. Enabled SSH public key authentication only.
4. Rebuilt all packages using a hardened GCC compiler.
5. Disabled root access via /etc/passwd.
6. Created two users: one with sudo privileges, allowing full access; the other with limited permissions to run a specific script (./run.sh) for starting the server.

Additionally, I've set up a fcron job (a job scheduler) as disabled root, which synchronizes my Minecraft server with four folders at the following intervals: 1 hour, 30 minutes, 10 minutes, and 1 day. This ensures that any mods we use are properly synced in case of issues.

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any suggestions of making the computer any more secure, aswell as backup solutions? thanks!

--added note, what hostnames do you guys call your servers? I used my favorite band albums and singles for hostnames.

Hello, this is John Smith from amazon. here to reach you about your lifelock nortan antivirus. It is currently out of date, and is insecure. To fix it we simply must fix your cars extended warranty. Then we can simply refund your ebay purchase. Please stay on the line as i transfer you to my supervisor, John Smith the owner of chase bank. Thank you for waiting, here at McAffy we care alot about customer service. My apologize for the wait, now lets get that kracken wallet in order.

I recently conmented on a meme with a little personal experience and would like to know what you fine peoples take is?

Thanks!

(Link on top)

So over the weekend me and the lads decided to play Mindustry (i think im addicted). Ive never been a fan of RTS games but Honestly been loads of fun. I usually play on the Ybox which is what i called by LAN rig. but sadly the motherboard kicked the bucket (it was a xeon 2697v3 14 core and a X99 machinist motherboard which ran gentoo). so i dug around in the closet to hopefully salvage game night and found 'yeee old reliable', so the cool part is mindustry has really low system requirements

Linux Minimum: Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: Anything with OpenGL 2.0 Support Storage: 200 MB available space

So me and the Bois played just like normal, except i was running 10+ year old hardware and you really couldnt tell the difference the system specs for the "shitboxPro" as named

Intel core 2 duo E7500 AMD RX 570 2Gb of ddr2 RAM Running Debian 12 with the Mate Desktop (i was originally going to install Gentoo on it but didn't want to spend 3 weeks compiling LMAO)

it kinda blows my mind that this new of a game, granted its writ-in JavaScript and uses so little ram and runs on grandmas pacemaker. it kinda leaves me wondering what happened to the gaming industry? It went from excellent games that sipped ram to storage queued for a 200G update (im looking at you COD war zone). I also want to express my gratitude Towards Debian and Linux as a whole, this computer cannot run windows 10. I live booted just to see the slideshow that was windows 10 on 2GB of ram, and Debian ran really smooth. also shout out to the Dev for a great game that's insanely optimized!

I would love to hear about other experiences you have had with legacy hardware and use cases!

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

--added note, my apologize for the bad punctuation and such i never was good at english in primary LMAO

So over the weekend me and the lads decided to play Mindustry (i think im addicted). Ive never been a fan of RTS games but Honestly been loads of fun. I usually play on the Ybox which is what i called by LAN rig. but sadly the motherboard kicked the bucket (it was a xeon 2697v3 14 core and a X99 machinist motherboard which ran gentoo). so i dug around in the closet to hopefully salvage game night for 'yeee old reliable', so the cool part is mindustry has really low system requirements

Linux Minimum: Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: Anything with OpenGL 2.0 Support Storage: 200 MB available space

So me and the Bois played just like normal, except i was running 10+ year old hardware and you really couldnt tell the difference the system specs for the "shitboxPro" as named

Intel core 2 duo E7500 AMD RX 570 2Gb of ddr2 RAM Running Debian 12 with the Mate Desktop (i was originally going to install Gentoo on it but didn't want to spend 3 weeks compiling LMAO)

it kinda blows my mind that this new of a game, granted its writ-in JavaScript and uses so little ram and runs on grandmas pacemaker. it kinda leaves me wondering what happened to the gaming industry? It went from excellent games that sipped ram to storage queued for a 200G update (im looking at you COD war zone). I also want to express my gratitude Towards Debian and Linux as a whole, this computer cannot run windows 10. I live booted just to see the slideshow that was windows 10 on 2GB of ram, and Debian ran really smooth. also shout out to the Dev for a great game that's insanely optimized!

I would love to hear about other experiences you have had with legacy hardware and use cases!

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

--added note, my apologize for the bad punctuation and such i never was good at english in primary LMAO

As a advid user of lightburn for my business, this truely saddens me.

I loved being able to have the freedom to run linux and have 1st class support.

Lightburn states in this post, about how linux is less than 1℅ of there users. They also state it costs lots of money and time to develop for each distribution. To which i gotta ask WHY not just make a flatpak or distribute source to let the community package it. Like its kinda dumb to kill it off ive been using zoronOS for 3 years running my laser cutter! And it works bloody great!!!! The last version for linux will be 1.7 which will continue to work forever with a valid liscence. I do not plan to switch back to windows spyware or MAC overpriced Unix. I hope the people at lightburn reconsider in the future, There software is the best software for laser cutters period. And when buying my laser cutter (60watt omtech) i went out of my way to buy one with a rudia controller as it is compatible with lightburn.

--edit just got the email this is what they sent

"To our valued Linux users:

After a great deal of internal discussion, we have made the difficult decision to sunset Linux support following the upcoming release of LightBurn 1.7.00.

Many of us at LightBurn are Linux users ourselves, and this decision was made reluctantly, after careful investigation of all possible avenues for continuing Linux support.

The unfortunate reality is that Linux users make up only 1% of our overall user base, but providing and supporting Linux-compatible builds takes up as much or more time as does providing them for Windows and Mac OS.

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we've had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

Finally, we will soon begin building LightBurn on a new framework that will require our development team to write custom libraries for each platform we support. This will be a significant undertaking and, regrettably, it is simply not tenable to invest our team's time into an effort that will impact such a small portion of our user base. Such challenges will only continue to arise as we work to expand LightBurn's capabilities going forward.

We understand that our Linux users will be disappointed by this decision. We appreciate all of our users, and assure you that your existing license will still work with any version of LightBurn for which your license term is valid, up until LightBurn version 1.7.00, forever. Prior releases will always be made available for download. Finally, your license will continue to be valid for future Windows and Mac OS releases covered by your license term.

If you are a Linux-only user who has recently purchased a license or renewal that is valid for a release of LightBurn after v1.7.00, please contact us for a refund.

Rest assured that we will be using the time gained by sunsetting Linux support to redouble our efforts at making better software for laser cutters, and beyond. We hope you will continue to utilize LightBurn on a supported operating system going forward, and we thank you for being a part of the LightBurn community.

Sincerely,

The LightBurn Software Team

Copyright © 2024 LightBurn Software. All rights reserved. "

I appreciate that there willing to refund recently bought liscences and all versions up to 1.7 forever instead of DRM bullshit (you gotta buy the newest subscription service) {insert cable guys from southpark} But if your rewriting the framework then why kill off linux??? They said there working on a native arm build for MacOS which knowing apple your gonna half to buy the new macbook cause the old one is old and apple needs your money. So its not anymore of a reason to kill linux

TLDR: there killing linux support because its less than 1% of there userbase and they spend more money and time maintaining the lightburn build.

I recently spent some time browsing my favorite website, Distrowatch.com, where they provide weekly news updates on the latest developments in the world of Linux distributions. This week, I noticed that a new distro had been added to their list: SDesk. Given its intriguing name, I decided to take a closer look and discovered that it utilizes a programming language called 'Blue'.

What caught my attention was that to use this Blue programming language, one must pay $131! As someone who values open-source principles, I found this surprising, especially since many Linux distributions are built on the idea of free and open collaboration.

Other websites also features links to a previous GitHub page for Blue, which was removed. Without knowing the original license used by that project, it's unclear whether using paid-for programming language in an open-source operating system would be legally acceptable. As I'm not a lawyer nor an expert online, I'd love to hear from anyone who might have insight into this matter.

To me, it seems counterintuitive for a Linux distro to incorporate proprietary programming tools that require payment to edit or modify code. This goes against the fundamental nature of open-source collaboration, where code is freely shared and repurposed. It's an interesting development, to say the least what are your thoughts?

dead-github link https://github.com/SteveStudios/Blue

--edit also when finding the link duck duck go said it was GPL V3 !

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but stackoverflow how i fixy the brokey!

swap feels like cheating

i was just dicking around with ollama+webui and i kept trying to gas light llama2 to think the world spun cause of hamsters. and it have off this subtle but terminator esq response.

what you guys think about world spinny cause hammster theory :D and the term-inator (im joking about the hamster thing... maybe)

I have been messing with my raspberry pi 400 and stumbled across box86. This program converts x86 calls to arm. And it works pretty well, i got the orginal pvz (disk verison) running through wine and box 86! The game is slow on cutscenes but gameplay is suprisingly playable and was more playable then my first pc lmao!

Its crazy that a fanless 15watt arm chip can run old games this well! Compared to a pentium 4 thats is taking off.

Hello and good evening self hosters! so i recently new to self hosting, i just installed my CM3588 DIY NAS with a bunch of services which is very addicting!

but i digress, so i recently found out today that we pay $11 a month to rent our router for our house. Which i personally think is ridiculous! So i am looking into buying to own, not renting to burn money. However the router seems to get internet from the ISP through moCA which looking at router that support moCA are rather limiting in speeds and very expensive. So my query for this fine, fine community is if i were to buy a coax/moCA adapter that then coverts it to Ethernet and then plug it into my router and and then by proxy my access points. would it work, wifi 6E looks super nice and there are very few options that are very pricey for modem/router combos that support moCA.

I am open to alternatives and ideas, and please correct me if i made any mistakes on terminally or my diagram

thanks folks!

Edit--- my current router is a ARRIS Surfboard TG3452 DOCSIS 3.1 Cable Voice Gateway Modem Router with 802.11ac Wi-Fi & MoCA 2.0

So

So for the last month-ish Ive been working at my new job as an injection mold operator, which has been rather interesting. I first thought of injection molding as a basic concept of hot plastic gets shot into a mold and gets ejected. But there is so much more that goes into injection molding. There is back-pressure 5 heating zones a TCU which helps the plastic cool in the mold before it is ejected. Then the eject pins extension length and speed. There is probably a lot more as-well but that's just to name a few. There is so many variables into running a injection molding machine, luckily the company i currently work for is teaching me everything and im trying to learn as much as i can (which is slightly overwhelming).The only real annoyance is the plastic smells quite a bit and i read all the MSDS's i can. Something i learned that was a neat tidbit is that plastics like Acetal and TPV, and many other co-polymers is they have alot of nasty stuff in them, and the nasty stuff is only released if it gets above the recommended plastic temperature which is rather important to keep it with a safe range.

On a side note the last place i worked, i liked the people but hated the job and lots of people said the equivalent of "same shit different pot" aka the job you had is going to be alot of the same even if you move. And there mostly right, instead of carbide and kobalt its plastic. The only big diffrence is this place is full time and actually doesn't bully you for wearing PPE, as-well the people there are also rather nice just like the old place.

also any other injection molding operators in the community, and if so do you like the job? as-well as any experiences with it.

also huge thanks to everybody in the thread for helping out and getting me to this point!

its an enco and i cant find much info on it is most likely not more than 2 horse. i dont plan to do any crazy pocketing and REALLY WANT A MILL to match the sexy tractor lathe and use it for hobby projects.

whada u think machinists? i cant imagine it going for more than $500 as its not a knee mill

So your probably reading this thinking, OK its a PC same old stuff. Well here is a long story.

so about a year ago myself and 2 friends would get together on weekends, my friend who we will call ash. Owns a Xbox One S, so we all were hanging out on Friday night the weekly ritual , and we got tired of playing UNO. so we Decided to play the Xbox we played about every game and it was starting to get quite dry on selection. Ash read off many games from the roster, to which just sounded repetitive, So at this point we all kinda agree there wasn't a game we wanted to play. So we checked out the Microsoft store, this was around Christmas so games were on "Sale". More like for sale not on sale, every game was just so expensive compared to Steam at this point lightning struck me. what if i built a PC to use as a console, so the following day after the rather dull Friday night. I went onto the apocalyptic wasteland that was Facebook marketplace, full of tweakers and entitled Karrens. To which i found a i5-2500 motherboard CPU combo, Sweet i thought now i just need a few more parts. I used a 550W Bronze PSU, bought some used ddr3 ram from eBay as-well as a 1tb ssd and had a rx570 laying around. All i then needed was a case, Now im a cheapskate and wanted a nice case but couldn't feel the need to buy one. So i went to a junkyard and found some recently thrown away office PC case. however the case was to bland to me, so i made the joke of its not an Xbox its a Ybox when myself and the boys hung out. So i attempted to do a paint job the PC case, ! which wasn't a Picasso but it started to rain and i was to lazy to redo it. So the other thing i wanted this PC case to have was a handle, so i took a piece of 6061 extruded aluminum and some bolts and nuts that i bought at a flea market and made my handle. Originally the nut could fit with the PSU in but the bench grinder fixed that.

I was rather giddy at this point, as it is now time for the OS. I am a real big fan of Linux as i run Nix-OS on my main system, so i decided to use Chimera. i unveiled the Ybox to the boys and we play many many cheaper steam games that are rather fun. Eventually Chimera felt rather closed because there wasn't a traditional package manager. I installed Ublue Bazzite (i stole the idea from action retro trash can mac video). We played on the Ybox for many many months and eventually i talked my friends into building PC's and they went with some pretty good specs. ryzen 7 5800x, 6900xt, i7 12th gen NVIDIA 4050. so we had LAN partys playing lots of games. The Ybox was pretty good for the 300ish dollars i had in it, however i wanted something that looked nicer and could run higher end games. as alot of the time when we would group buy games my PC was the biggest qualm.

So the Ybox Pro was born, it is my tote-able gaming/VR-rig. I built it using a machinist x99 motherboard with a 8 core Intel Xeon E5-1680 V2. 16Gb of ram and a junky vega 56 bios flashed vega 64 graphics card. It Runs VR great games look awesome. However one design choice i did not like about the case i bought was a glass side panel. Now for alot of people they really like tempered glass however i am always paranoid about the glass breaking in transit. And i bought a 120mm thermal take AIO which i couldn't find a good mounting place for. it was rather going to be at the bottom of the case or mounted sketchily on the roof of the case. So i have a side business where i have a Omtech 60Watt C-02 laser and a little bit of an engineer background. and decided to engineer a wood side panel which would have a mount for the AIO and look nice. I laser cut the side panel out of cherry paneling and stained it. I am very happy with the end result.

also i plan to like the cheap case i bought and a thingiverse/printables file for the side panel if anybody want to replicate my build.

(printables)https://www.printables.com/model/818028-gopie-t07-mini-tower-pc-case-wood-side-panel

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pc parts used in build (Case) https://www.amazon.com/GOPIE-T07-Portable-Computer-Al-Alloy/dp/B0CGD9PSPH/ref=sr_1_21?keywords=microatx%2Bpc%2Bcases

(PSU)https://www.amazon.com/Seasonic-SSR-850FM-Semi-Modular-Warranty-Application/dp/B08YJBYPCF/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=seasonic+850w

(AIO fan) https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NF-F12-iPPC-3000-PWM/dp/B00KFCRATC

(Cpu) https://www.ebay.com/itm/174921523223?itmmeta=01HSCGQXKWTGX429ZVZJWZBWN7&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA4K8X6zQtoq1II2nxPzvabkV615jSft6DfH3lDVYnZuYb2MUrVCd60I10AdFYuNhFXN42kRQbUtUoCu0nhrR%2FZrugPnJIv7TFfdkQ%2Bh45rCN1auE6vY5s4IZxZMzf523v2Wl3wLcCJrQNJODGflJs6jmby1AHfwiMpPr%2BPWsoIXUOxQ4vV1AtvysxSUNqC3ilc8kKpSohPXB%2ByfCLt6Q2YhG5NvcqkWaZMtNnlN%2FS%2F9u4%2BWopWITVzEfp3jA4lYnFgGLv9d7oeM%2BAmP%2BlwN2iWdMC%2BB6Nr5OdNbeUGLI3dVii%7Ctkp%3ABFBMkNrfkMtj

(AIO) https://www.amazon.com/Thermaltake-Cooling-500-2000-Waterblock-CL-W361-PL12SW/dp/B0CCXNXVFC?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.78cSPk_ZdMiBktASbBbAJRdRCSGVMpjCy7LGsxjFqT5cIcjkc_Jmug8yinT8Vy0dZvmEp-astC-d_DZfnTDkhcakg1x8BtJb4-0hjvEFi5LzoKYArr85v9_QSk8bg0Zt4HQkVJOdRAAsAUn-Fg-DiiVRYGtW4_zOhAP7e2pPQUr_IwWO3slvVXexinI5z9Z8MVt02DyVdtceAKU3C-7P-A.vqfN14Vukp1VPc7bUYgc3eAZ9CmBhZ2iXDB8h6znOqw&dib_tag=se&th=1&psc=1