dboth

David Both is an Open Source Software and GNU/Linux advocate, trainer, writer, and speaker who lives in Raleigh North Carolina. He is a strong proponent of and evangelist for the "Linux Philosophy." He’s been in the IT industry for over 50 years. He taught RHCE classes for Red Hat and has worked at MCI Worldcom, Cisco, and the State of North Carolina. He has been working with Linux and Open Source Software for over 25 years. David likes to build his own computers to ensure that each new computer meets his exacting specifications. He has written articles for magazines including, Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, and Opensource.com. He currently has five books published with Apress, "The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins", a self-study training course in three volumes “Using and Administering Linux: Zero to SysAdmin,” that was released in late 2019, and “Linux for Small Business Owners” with Co-author Cyndi Bulka.
Lazy SysAdmin Linux

The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 06 — Be the Lazy SysAdmin

I am a lazy SysAdmin. I am also a very productive SysAdmin. Those two seemingly contradictory statements are not mutually exclusive, rather they are complementary in a very positive way. This article is about working hard at the right tasks to optimize our own efficiency. It’s about finding a few of the myriad ways to use the short cuts already built into Linux.

David Both
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Linux

Top Five reasons to use KDE Plasma desktop

As many of my readers know, I have had problems with KDE Plasma in the past. I won’t bore you with a rehash of those problems, but for many years I used KDE and was very happy with it. While it was having problems I tried several other desktops but finally switched to Xfce.

KDE Plasma 6.1 is included with Fedora 40 and I always try new major releases of KDE Plasma and other desktops. I did this time, too and I’m very happy to report that all the problems I’ve experienced in the past have been completely resolved.

David Both
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David Both
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Linux Swap System Administration zram

How to remove existing traditional swap partitions

Swap space is a common and important aspect of computing today regardless of operating system. Linux uses swap space to substitute for RAM when it becomes too full to effectively support additional programs or data. It is a way to temporarily enable the system to keep running albeit at the cost of reduced performance. However the use of zram for swap space has provided an interesting, if counter-intuitive, method for providing a reasonable amount of swap space while significantly improving swap performance.

David Both
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Command Line Linux System Administration Terminal

Getting started on the command line

As a SysAdmin, the Linux command line is typically my happy place. The command line interface, the CLI, is the closest I can get to the raw power of my computers. It gives me access to tools that make my work easy, fast, and even fun. I use the command line so much that I sometimes forget how much power I have to manage my computers.

I also forget that it took me a long time to really understand the terminology that applies to the various tools that I use to access that command line. This article is about those tools and the sometimes confusing terminology necessary to function on the CLI.

David Both
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