Creating a bootable USB drive is often necessary when you want to install or repair an operating system. This guide provides detailed steps on how to create a bootable USB drive for Windows 10 or 11 using Linux (both Debian and RPM-based distributions).
Our handy script does all the heavy lifting, making this task a breeze. The script operates by formatting the USB drive, and then copying the ISO file to the USB drive.
Pandas is a free and open source Python library released under the BSD license. Originally developed by Wes McKinney in 2008, and supported by companies like Intel and Nvidia, it is targeted at data analysis and manipulation. It can be easily used to read and write data from a variety of sources such as Excel spreadsheets, Comma-separated Values (CSV) files, and many more.
Graphical environments on Linux can basically be divided in two main groups: full-featured desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE Plasma or XFCE, and barebone, minimalistic window managers, such as i3, openbox, or sway. The former come with a set of applications and utilities designed to work well together, while the latter are meant to perform just one task (or little more): managing windows. When using those environments additional functionalities must be implemented via separate tools.
Everyone, nowadays, has several accounts and credentials to take care of, that’s why everyone needs a decent and possibly open source password manager. When it comes to managing passwords there are many choices available on Linux: in the past, for example we talked about “pass”, a great, command line oriented, password-manager based on standard tools such as GPG and git. In this article we explore an alternative which can be the ideal solution for individuals and small organizations: Vaultwarden.
Git is, by far, the most used version control system. Being it “distributed”, means that each user can clone its own full copy of a repository on which he can work even if offline, pushing changes to a remote only when ready. Git repositories are not designed to host sensitive information, but in certain situations, the ability of transparently encrypt the content of a repository can come in handy. The git remote-gcrypt helper is designed with this goal in mind.
In a world where Google Chrome is, by a large margin, the most used web browser, Firefox represents the only relevant open source alternative. The Mozilla browser is installed by default (or at least available in the official repositories) of all the most used Linux distributions. In order to configure its behavior we can change settings interactively, or, more conveniently, we can create and deploy “policies”.
SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol used to establish an encrypted connection with a remote machine using a client-server model: the ssh server runs on the machine we want to access remotely, while a client is used on the machines from which we want to connect. Thanks to sshfs, we can use an existing SSH connection to mount a remote directory in a secure way, without using additional services like NFS or Samba.
Power-profiles-daemons is a free and open source project designed to handle system power profiles over D-Bus. The two major Linux desktop environment, GNOME and KDE Plasma, are nicely integrated with it, allowing the user to easily manage power profiles from their dedicated power manager interfaces, but it is also possible to switch profiles and retrieve information about them from the command line, using a dedicated utility.
Signal is a free and open source messaging application developed by the Signal Foundation: it is available on all the major operating systems such as Linux, Windows, Android and iOS, and supports all the major features one can expect, such as encryption, the ability to send files and make group calls. All the infrastructure behind Signal is open source, including the messaging protocol and the server software: the source code is available on github.
Thunar is the file manager included in Xfce, a free and open source Desktop Environment which implements the traditional desktop metaphor, and has become the favorite of many users which switched to it when the GNOME project introduced the GNOME shell. Thunar is light on resources but doesn’t lack functionalities which can be extended further by creating custom actions.
Dmidecode is a free and open source utility we can use to retrieve hardware information on Linux. The tool is available in the repositories of all the major Linux distributions, and is able to inspect and dump the content of the SMBIOS table.
One of the first – and most crucial – decisions that a website owner will need to make is what type of web server to use. The decision to host your website on a Linux system is a no brainer, but when it comes to web servers, there are a few choices and they all come with their own pros and cons. Among the most popular on Linux is NGINX and OpenLiteSpeed, both well known for their speed and ability to host concurrent connections.