Changing the timezone in Debian Buster
I recently spun up a couple of virtual servers with the Mythic Beasts provisioner, which didn't give me the option of selecting my timezone. As a result the servers were…
Opening start menu with the Windows key in Xubuntu
My distribution of choice for all my non-server machines is Xubuntu, due to its stripped down and low resource usage desktop environment. One thing that has irked me for ages…
Ubuntu security podcast
The Ubuntu security team have recently started the Ubuntu Security Podcast. Released every week and lasting around 10 minutes, the podcast features a round-up of the Ubuntu security news. It's…
From Debian to Ubuntu on servers
Over the past few months, all the new servers I've set up have been running Ubuntu, rather than Debian. The three killer reasons for me are: Package versions: Debian is…
Canonical’s cloud certification policy
Canonical's recent announcement that they will be taking a stand against risky unofficial Ubuntu images has been causing a bit of a stir this week, most notably on Matthew Garrett's…
Checking why a restart is required on Ubuntu
All of the servers that I run for myself or clients have a small script installed which runs every night to download the list of packages and email me with…
Low Cost Computing with Linux
Today I gave a talk entitled Low Cost Computing with Linux at the Manchester Linux Users' Group, which I've been attending for more years than I care to remember. The turnout…
Which version of PHP will be in Ubuntu 16.04?
Ubuntu 16.04 is only about 6-8 weeks away from final release, and there's still a debate raging about which version of PHP should ship with the distrubtion. At the moment, both PHP…
Filesystem format type in Linux
Earlier this week I needed to find out how a given partition was formatted in Linux. Normally I'd use the mount command, but in this case the filesystem wasn't already…
Converting JPG to PDF in Ubuntu
Earlier this week someone sent me a scanned document with each page as a separate JPG file. I prefer to keep documents as single PDFs, as they're easier to file…