I can’t remember ever having an issue with updating the firmware of my XPS 13 7390 on Ubuntu. Today, however, Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) decided to throw an ugly-looking warning in my face after proudly proclaiming that it had a new device firmware update ready to be installed. To add insult to injury, Ubuntu told me to reboot the system to install the new firmware, after GNOME Software correctly informed me that it had failed.

With the release of Tor Browser 11.0, I remembered that I have an onion site so I figured it was a good time to see how it was doing. However, I must have been sleeping in class because the Tor Browser informed me that the site was most likely offline.

Understandably, I was burning with a desire to upgrade the Windows 10 virtual machines in my Testlab to the latest and greatest from Microsoft. To my dismay, my old Asus G771JM Arch Linux-powered host did not meet (by a long shot) the highly artificial requirements to run Windows 11.

If your Fedora Linux installation had only one hour left to live, where would you go and what would you do? Welcome to another brand new installment of my adventures in enterprise Linux’ing.

So .buzz is another one of those new gTLD’s that saw the light of day during ICANN’s “show me the money” run back in 2013. It’s managed by dotStrategy, and it’s advertised as a great domain name for generating buzz around your product.

I always keep a terminal window open to monitor system logs in real-time when I’m in front of my computer. Therefore, it immediately caught my attention when the systemd journal offered zero new lines of output. The most recent entry simply contained information about the previous shutdown.

Today I struggled with an annoying issue concerning the sound system on my Dell XPS 13 7390. Ignoring whatever output sound device I selected, Ubuntu would instead play the audio directly through the built-in speakers. To quote what I regularly hear from my users, “it worked yesterday, and I didn’t change a thing!”

In the modern computing era, Slackware might be considered an old relic of a long-forgotten past. The old king may have abdicated the throne, but the embers of past glory still smolder. As we’re on our way towards the release of Slackware 15, allow me to share a few amusing Slackware tales I’ve collected over the years.

Slackers rejoice! The dark ages have finally come to an end. Our benevolent dictator for life has spoken, and KDE Plasma 5 has arrived in /testing on Slackware-current. Patrick Volkerding announced the update with his usual lack of fanfare on the Slackware-current changelog:

The other day I got an automated alert from our managed WordPress hosting service, notifying me of an issue with resource exhaustion for a virtual site. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the adversary was not your everyday aimless botnet, but something darker, and far more sinister.