Woke up this morning with zero agenda. No pressing tasks, no urgent errands—just a blank slate and the sweet freedom to figure things out as I went. And what did I figure out? Today was the day to replace the NVMe in my trusty Lenovo X1 Carbon (2018 model). This laptop’s been a total workhorse for me, still rocking an i7 and 16GB of RAM, so it felt like the perfect candidate for a little weekend refresh.
Now, for the big decision: the operating system. I’ve been really digging my recent server-side work with Alpine Linux, and its minimalist vibe is fantastic for what it is. But as a daily driver? Eh, not quite. It feels like almost everything requires a bit of a workaround compared to a more traditional Linux setup. Don’t get me wrong, Alpine’s got a unique set of goals, and I still love it for its niche, but for my everyday grind, I decided to return to an old friend: Ubuntu.
Normally, even with Ubuntu (which I’ve got plenty of server-side experience with), I stick to the LTS (Long Term Support) releases. But today felt different. I wanted to see what the bleeding edge had to offer, so I threw caution to the wind and went with Ubuntu 25.04. Go big or go home, right?
As expected, the installation was pretty much a breeze. A few quick questions, and the installer hummed along, doing its thing. Once that was done, I dove straight into getting my daily tools set up. It’s funny how that list keeps shrinking, mostly because so much of what I do is browser-based these days. But here’s the essential lineup:
Google Chrome (Had to snag the .deb file directly from Google’s site for this one—a minor hiccup!)
Joplin
Owncloud Client Sync
Draw.io
PowerShell
Signal
Pretty straightforward, huh?
So far, the graphics are behaving perfectly, and YouTube streams without a hitch. I’m no gamer, but I did a quick test just to see how it handled. And speaking of tests, Wine is a new “thing” for me; I’ve never actually needed it before. But seriously, the installer just did its magic without any input from me. Big win!
Alright, now for the real test: actually using it day-to-day. I’ll report back with how it holds up! Catch ya later!
I’ve been on a homelab kick as of late and get annoyed by the constant barrage of browsers warning me that the site I’m going to isn’t safe. There’s a few ways to skin this potato but I’m going to go with a self signed wildcard certificate signed by a self signed certificate authority. I’ll apply the cert to the servers/services or to my Nginx Proxy Manager to handle the certificate side of things and add the CA to the Trusted Root Certificate Authority repository on my computer(s).
I’m running all of these commands on a stock Alpine Linux VM with curl and bash installed, however you’ll be able to do this on most linux distro’s. Windows 10 information below as well.
NOTE: This creates a certificate for homelab.local and *.homelab.local. Feel free to change to a domain that reflects your own setup/needs.
Create the CA Certificate
First the Key to sign the CA with:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out homelabCA.key 4096
When issuing this command, you’ll need to enter a pass phrase. I used Bitwarden to generate a 32 character one, but you can do as you wish.
Create a CA Certificate with the newly created CA Key.
Make the SelfSignedCA Trusted by your browsers/computers
Import homelabCA.crt and homelabCA.key into your Trusted Root Certificate Authorities repository and use wildcard.crt and wildcard.key for your servers/services and/or proxy.
As long as you have your DNS up to snuff, you should be able to navigate to your apps with https://appname.homelab.local and not be annoyed with yet another warning.
tl;dr, here’s a lazy script to do this for you, you just need to enter your pass phrase and answer your normal certificate questions then move the certificates/keys to their respective places (proxy, app/service, Trusted Root CA, etc.)
I won’t write up the whole thing, as it’s largely the same, however I did have to install OpenSSL vis the winget cmdlet and set the PATH before it worked. Here’s the script (save as a .ps1):
Alpine linux, from their website, is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. I don’t 100% know what that means, so here’s their site 😄
To kick this off, we are going to install Apline on Proxmox, do some basic configurations, install the Alpine Configuration Framework, install and configure WordPress with lighttpd, mariadb and php, then tie it off with a simple Samba share.
Install Alpine Linux on Proxmox
You can deploy with the resources you wish, however, for this I’ll be using 32Gb Disk, 1vCPU, 2Gb RAM.
Once the VM is booted, you’ll be asked to login. Typically just type root and hit enter. You should be logged in.
Now you can run the setup process. Run the command:
setup-alpine
From that script, you’ll be asked a series of questions. I’d like to eventually develop an answerfile for this as most of my stuff is the same across the board. Here are the answers I used:
keymap: us ushostname: alpinevminterfaces: eth0networking: dhcproot password: 'somethingstrong'timezone: America/Chicagofqdn: alpinevm.domain.tldproxy: nonerepos: c ruser: nossh: opensshdisk: sdainstall mode: sys
Once the setup finishes, it’ll ask you to reboot. Since I went with the sys install mode, I’ll remove the ISO from the VM before.
Get logged back into the VM through Proxmox console.
For this example only, I’m allowing password login via root on the VM by modifying /etc/ssh/sshd_config.
AllowRootLogin yes
At this point you can now SSH to the VM to work with it. It’s a functioning Alpine OS VM with no services at this time.
Alpine Configuration Framework
I’m not a linux guru by any stretch of the imagination, so I’ve relied on other tools to help me at least visualize or read data from linux systems in the past to aid in configurations. Many times that was Webmin/Virtualmin. You can run Webmin on Alpine but it’s a bit of a hack and I don’t recomend it. Aline ships with a WebUI of sorts that may help you to get started. That’s called the Alpine Configuration Framework (AFK).
To install ACF, simply run the command:
setup-acf
By default the mini_httpd server runs on port 443, so I’ll update that to run on port 10443. Modify /etc/mini_httpd/mini_httpd.conf to to show port 10443 instead of 443 and restart the mini_httpd service:
service mini_httpd restart
Now open a browser to https://<yourvmip>:10443 and login with root.
WordPress
WordPress, while being a huge player in the Web CMS game, is also super easy to use and a great starting point for your new website/blog. To deploy WordPress, we will install lighttpd, mariadb, php, and more to get it all up and running.
Now let’s create some usernames (create the same user/pass 2x) with the following:
adduser usernamesmbpasswd -a username
Finish by starting samba and setting it up to start at boot:
# rc-update add samba# rc-service samba start
All done. Now you can navigate to \ipaddress\data to access your share with the user/pass you created. Possibly bad advice: create the same user/pass combo your workstation is using to access the samba share (i.e. usernamexyz/passwordabc on Windows 10 and usernamexyz/passwordabc on Alpine/Samba).
Windows is definitely the big player in the game still, however Linux usage is gaining some steam. This post is going to concentrate on what programs you can use to make the switch to Linux. This process is not going to be entirely pain free if you are an avid user of all things computer related, however, if you are just a basic office user/worker or only need to check your email and play a few basic online games, Linux might be for you. There are literally thousands of choices for most applications out there so I’m only going to name the ones that I like or use and also only ones that work on Ubuntu. If you have any additions, please let me know.
Windows vs. Linux (Ubuntu)
Internet Browsing W – Internet Explorer U – Firefox
Email Clients W – Outlook, Outlook Express U – Thunderbird, Evolution
Chat Clients W – MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, mIRC U- Gaim / Pigdin, xChat, BitchX
Com Port Communications W – Hyperterminal U – MiniCom
FTP Client W – Filezilla FTP Client U – Filezilla FTP Client
Remote Access Servers W – Terminal Server, RealVNC, TightVNC, WinVNC U – FreeNX, RealVNC, TightVNC
P2P Filesharing W – Limewire, Bearshare, Bittorrent U – Limewire, Azureus
VoIP Clients W – Skype, X-Lite U – Skype, Linphone, Twinkle
Drawing / Photo Editing W – Paint.net, Photoshop, MSPaint U – GIMP 3D Annimation / Rendering W – 3D Studio MAX, Blender U – Blender, Maya
DVD Players W – Windows Media Player, PowerDVD U – MPlayer, Kaffine, VLC
MP3 / Music Players W – Winamp, iTunes U – RhymeBox, K3b
Office Productivity W – Microsoft Office U – OpenOffice.org
Network / Relation Mapping W – Microsoft Visio U – Dia
Accounting / Financial W – Quicken, Microsoft Money U – GnuCash
Desktop Publishing W – Microsoft Publisher, Quark U – Scribus
PDF Editing W – Adobe Acrobat Professional U – PDFEdit, pdftk
Imaging W – Norton Ghost U – G4u, dd
Partition Resizing W – Norton Partition Magic U – GParted
Backup Software W – Symantec Backup Exec U – BackupPC, Amanda
Web Servers W – Microsoft IIS U – Apache
File Servers W – Microsoft File Services U – Samba
Email Servers W – Microsoft Exchange U – Postfix, Sendmail
AntiVirus Software W – Symantec AV, Mcafee U – ClamAV, AVG
For more of these “like” software lists, please visit what I believe to be the most complete list on the internet, Table of Equivalents.
Quite recently my eyes were opened to a Linux distribution called Ubuntu. The latest release from the open source company Canonical is called Feisty Fawn. How can you deny or refuse a name like that. 🙂
Well, I figured I would dedicate a post to how much I truely enjoy the OS vs it’s or Linux competitors as well as the big Microsoft. The installation disk is easily available via http://www.ubuntu.com where you can either download it or have 1 or more copies sent to you via snailmail (I get 25 because I’m a consultant). On the install CD (not DVD) there are a few cool features that make the product stand out from the rest like a suite of open source Windows apps that can be installed directly from the CD to include Firefox, Thunderbird, Clam AV, and others. Truly unique. Then when you boot from the CD you actually boot to a live distribution where you can either use the live CD to see if you will actually like the or install it to your hard drive via a very intuitive wizard. The wizard asks you a few non technical questions and guides you through the install. You can dual boot with Windows or another OS or just wipe the drive and start fresh.
On a side note, because of how well setup the live CD is, you can actually read and write to the NTFS, FAT or other drive that you have in your computer as a quick and easy disk recovery tool. Still not impressed. Ok, I really haven’t told you very much but for the novice user these fundamental options make the OS very attractive. After you go through the install, you reboot and come up to a login window and then into the operating system. The only thing that my laptop needed done in addition to the OS install is the installation of the Broadcom WIFI card firmware for my specific hardware which was easily done in Ubuntu’s intuitive package manager, Synaptic. Synaptic is a front end for apt-get that makes installing and updating packages a synch.
I usually judge a product by it’s “Out of the Box” features. As for Ubuntu, the OS installs, Firefox, Evolution Mail, Gaim, OpenOffice, graphics rendering software, a photo viewer, a suite a games, and a terminal services client. So in my opinion, it’s already a step ahead of Microsoft. Accessing shares and other network resources is quite simple just like in XP and has a neat feature that saves the user name and password for a particular network resource in it’s password manager.
I plan to do a few more blog entires regarding the use and utilization of Ubuntu in the home, business and corporate environment on both the client and server end of the spectrum. As the OS is still a Linux derivative, it can run Postfix, Sendmail, Apache, MySQL, Spam assassin, and all of the server centric applications that we rely on everyday. Hope you all at least give the OS a try, I’ll have my first Ubuntu “how-to” on here soon for your enjoyment.
