October 14, 2025, sees the End of support for Windows 10.

This leaves users with Several choices

Upgrade to Windows 11 on current hardware. This may or may not work and will only work if your current hardware meets with Windows 11 requirements.

Option 1, Replace Windows with something Like Linux Mint, you can keep working, use Firefox, LibreOffice, cloud services e.g. Nextcloud (even Windows drive) etc. Option 2. Keep using Windows 10 without support, updates etc Option 3. buy new hardware just so you can run Windows 11.

Linux Mint is Free (as in freedom) software, but does have some closed source components to make things work, this is fine, at least from my view point as most users, just want things to work out of the box.

There is an active support community on the Open Communications platform Matrix [3].

Links

1. MS WIndows End of Life
2. LinuxMint
3. Matrix
   • Linux Mint community chat – Matrix
4. End of 10 – get help with installing a Linux distro
5. Article on The Register
6. End of 10: The Open Source alternative to forced obsolescence
7. KDE for Windows 10 Exiles
   • KDE Website
   • KDE Social

Tags

#MSWindows,'#EndofLife,#Linux,#LinuxMint,#FreeSoftware, #NextCloud,#Cloud,#EndOf10

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Secure shell is a remote login client. The following is from the man page

DESCRIPTION
       ssh (SSH client) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing  commands on a remote machine.  It is intended to provide secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network.  X11 connections, arbitrary  TCP  ports  and  Unix-domain sockets can also be forwarded over the secure channel.

So as mentioned before, vfsync can't do everything, so if you do need a full Linux system to log in to and install what you want. By this, I am saying you also need to at least have sudo access to that remote system, even if this is a Raspberry Pi.

While being able to log in with

ssh user@host 

Is useful, you still need a password, which is fine. If you want to use some services provided by [vern.cc] then you need to be able to log in with an authentication key. This can be generated with

ssh-keygen

DESCRIPTION
       ssh-keygen generates, manages  and  converts  authentication  keys  for  ssh(1).  ssh-keygen can create keys for use by SSH protocol version 2.

Which will generate a public / private key pair

man ssh-copy-id 

NAME
       ssh-copy-id  —  use locally available keys to authorise logins on a re‐mote machine

DESCRIPTION
       ssh-copy-id  is  a script that uses ssh(1) to log into a remote machine  (presumably using a login password, so password  authentication  should be enabled, unless you've done some clever use of multiple identities).  It  assembles  a  list of one or more fingerprints (as described below) and tries to log in with each key, to see if any of  them  are  already installed (of course, if you are not using ssh-agent(1) this may result  in  you being repeatedly prompted for pass-phrases).  It then assembles a list of those that failed to log in and, using ssh(1), enables logins with those keys on the remote server.  By default it adds the  keys  by appending  them  to  the remote user's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (creating  the file, and directory, if necessary).  It is also capable of  detecting if the remote system is a NetScreen, and using its ‘set ssh pka-dsa
       key ...’ command instead.

There is some good information here too

• ssh cheat sheet

The following allowed me to remote login to my Raspberry Pi from my desktop

cd .ssh (I did this so I was in the right place to generate the key)
ssh-keygen
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/Pi4.pub paul@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
ssh paul@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Login with password, and you will be asked for the passphrase the first time you do this. After which, you will be able to just ssh in without the password.

Replace the x's with your IPv4 address.

While using vern, I had to use

ssh-keygen -lf ./key.pub

To address an error, it came up with about keyboard authentication. This worked for me, but should not 'just' be used in every situation.

Graphical ssh

With Linux mint, it is also possible to connect the file manager nemo to a remote server.

File –> Connect to server, then fill in the credentials.

With folder, it is probably a good idea to enter the path to your home directory on the remote server, so for a Raspberry Pi with a default username of pi, this is:-

/home/pi

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Bash,#Linux,#ssh,#RemoteAccess,#Security,#SSHKeys,#SecureShell

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Linux developers consider discontinuing support for 486 and other CPUs

Linux support for 486 processors

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#IT #Linux #LinuxKernel #Prozessoren #news

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Fail2ban is a program that will help you with the security of your system.

There is a tutorial for this at Linux Handbook, so I have quoted the description, or part of, below.

This is where a tool like Fail2Ban comes into picture. Fail2Ban is a free and open source software that helps in securing your Linux server against malicious logins. Fail2Ban will ban the IP (for a certain time) if there is a certain number of failed login attempts. [1]

Links

[1] Linux handbook : fail2ban

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Linux,#Bash,#ssh,#Security,#fail2ban

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If you don't have access (direct or remote) to a computer running GNU/Linux there are several options, one of which is vfsync.

VFsync (for Virtual File Synchronization) is a secure file synchronization system.

 *   In a web based virtual machine. The files can be manipulated with all the standard Unix commands and imported or exported to the host system.
 *  In a small Desktop based virtual machine. It is faster than the web based virtual machine and unlike other virtual machines, no disk image needs to be downloaded.
 *  With a small standalone client directly running on the host system. 

Links

• vfsymc

Notes

You won't't be able to do everything in the posts on this site, or tutorials elsewhere, however you can still do quite a lot, so this should be a good opportunity to learn until you can find other solutions. There are a few links below. I am not going to recommend or endorse a particular solution..

As there is a demand for technical skills in areas such as cloud compiuting and cybersecurity then knowing how to use GNU/Linux and similar unix systems is probably essential, as would be understanding powershell, I am not sure if this is the case, but AI needs to run on servers, which are mostly likely to be powered by GNU/Linux. I will leave readers to do their own reserach.

More Links

• Raspberry Pi
• Banana PI
• Tinkerboard
  • Armbian
• Windows subsystem for Linux
• Wikipedia – Virtual Hosting
• GNU/Bash
• DuckDuckGo
• PowerShell

There are numerous options at

• Vern.cc
  • Vern.cc Matrix
• https://tildeverse.org/
• Open Source Labs

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Learning,#GNU,#Linux,#Remote,#Shell,#Vfsync,#vern,#Virtual,#VirtualMacine,#VM#BASH,#Bash

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BBC NEWS:

Interesting article from BBC news on 9th April, Devon needs AI skills for growth. The Devon & Somerset Local Skills Improvement Plan are looking at ways to help people develop the skills for the future.

I think AI can sort of be put in to 3 boxes

• Machine Learning (ML)
• Generative AI (GenAI)
• Large Language Models (LLM)

I have put a Blog post on Linux foundation training which has some links, to courses run by the Linux Foundation, EdX and others and in fact EdX, offer a number of AI courses, but as everything needs something (usually a server running Linux) to actually run on, it seems that learning how to use, maintain and administer GNU/Linux operating systems is also essential. There are a lot of AI software / Tools or Libraries under a GNU or similar licences anyway.

It could be an opportunity for the Devon and Cornwall GNU/Linux user group to expand and gain new members, who can at least get help and advice to get started, even though it is much easier to install than it was 25 years ago.

Tags

#Devon,#SomerSet,#Skills,#AI,#LLM,#GenAI,#ML,#Training,#Jobs,#Linux,#GNU,#GNULinux.

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Open New Career Paths (updated)

Prove You Have the Right Mix of Command Line & Cloud Skills with IT Certifications

• Linux Foundation Certification journey
  • Free Linux Foundation courses
• LinuxFoundation Mastodon
• EdX LinuxFoundationX: Introduction to Linux
• EdX Linux foundation courses
• Related Humble Bundle offer networking and security cert prep
• EdX AI Courses

Tags

#LinuxFoundation,#Training,#Skills,#Courses.#Certifcation,#Linux #CloudNative #AI #SysAdmins

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Following the recent release of Linuxmint 22 [1] Users can now upgrade directly from the previous 21.3 release to Linuxmint using these instructions [2]. The usual warnings with regard to backups apply. Thank you to the support channel [3] on matrix for these instructions.

1 Linuxmint 2 Upgrade 3 Mint support channel on Matrix 4 Matrix

Tags

#Linux,#LinuxMint,#Upgrade,#MajorRelease

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Debian have just announced the latest release updates for Debian 11 & 12.

• Updated Debian 12: 12.7 released
• Updated Debian 11: 11.11 released

Links go to the associated blog posts on the Debian website.

• Debian

Tags

#GNU/Linux,#Linux,#Debian,#Updates,

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My first post on this was back on the 7th September. Since then I have made a few more videos and posted to my peertube account.

Any questions, you can e-mail me or follow me on Mastodon @zleap@qoto.org.

I am also re posting some links posts that link to the learning the BASH shell videos.

BASH Basics 1 BASH Basics 2 BASH Basics 3 BASH Basics 4 BASH Basics 5 BASH Basics 6 BASH Basics 7 BASH Basics 8 * Bash Scripting tutorial – free code camp

TAGS

#Video,#BASH,#bash#Usage,#GNULinux,#Linux,#GNU,#CyberSecurity,#InfoSec,#CodeClub,#PaigntonLibrarySTEMGroup

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