A computer's firmware is low-level software, with an associated data area, that comes pre-installed in flash memory on the motherboard. The first software to be run when the computer is booted, firmware is generally customised to be motherboard-specific and designed to communicate with other hardware in the system. The two main firmware types used nowadays are BIOS and the more recent UEFI. This article does not cover other firmware interfaces such as libreboot and coreboot.

Originally...

Machine Description

I have a six year old desktop machine from Pogo Linux (my hostname: "Pogo2011"). The machine has been running Ubuntu since it was new and is now at 16.04.2 LTS. The machine has an AMD Athlon(tm) II X3 450 Processor, 64 bit, 8 GB RAM, and two 500 GB SATA hard disks. One drive contains the OS and the other, my own data files. This is my primary desktop, though I have a 14 year old desktop ("Pogo2003" running Debian 8.8) and a 9 year old HP laptop...

GENERAL INFORMATION

Source - ArchLinux Wiki and linoxide.com and PowerDNS Website

The PowerDNS recursor is part of the source tarball of the main PowerDNS distribution, but it is released separately. It is known to power the resolving needs of over 150 million internet connections.

This particular setup will use powerdns-recursor caching with Adblocking and DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) and DnsCrypt-Proxy to encrypt all DNS queries.

...

RAMBOOT is an initrd hack that loads the entire OS partition in RAM, making it run like an extremely fast SSD, at the expense of perhaps 1.5+GB of RAM.

Previously I described RAMBOOT using a compressed OS tarball. This is good for boot time, but it takes time to create a new tarball. This new How-To takes a different approach - simply copying an entire directory tree using piped tar commands (cp won't work because of the limited initrd environment). This increases boot time, but allows...

Well, let's see, there was a life upgrade. I got married in November. I gave the X130e to my wife, and last month upgraded her to a T430 like mine.

My machine is now running ferenOS as the main distro. Great configuration is the main thing, being built on top of LinuxMint 18.2 helps. Secondary distro is SolusOS -- while Solus is still struggling with things like my printer and using a 3rd-party office package, I have my best Kodi configuration there. And just for fun I trotted out...