Teach Mutt yet another trick: how to filter messages in your Inbox with a simple macro. I'm a longtime Mutt user and have written about it a number of times in Linux Journal. Although many people may think it's strange to be using a command-line-based email client in 2018, I find a keyboard-driven email client so much more efficient than clicking around in a web browser. Mutt is extremely customizable, which presents a steep learning curve at first, but now that I'm a few decades in, my Mutt configuration is pretty ideal and fits me like a tailored suit.

There's an ongoing series of skirmishes between corporations who want to sell products that users don't fully control and the kernel developers who want users to be the highest authority. Sometimes these skirmishes manifest in the form of security patches intended to lock down the kernel. Do they lock down the kernel against outside attackers? Or do they lock down the kernel against change from anyone at all, including the user who owns the device?

The question of the earliest GCC compiler version to support for building the Linux kernel comes up periodically. The ideal would be for Linux to compile under all GCC versions, because you never know what kind of system someone is running. Maybe their company's security team has to approve all software upgrades for their highly sensitive devices, and GCC is low on that list. Maybe they need to save as much space as possible, and recent versions of GCC are too big. There are all sorts of reasons why someone might be stuck with old software.

First came branding through sponsorship. Then came eyeball-chasing through adtech. Now comes sponsorship again, this time supporting a mission as big as Linux. This editorial is my first and only sales pitch. It's for brands to sponsor Linux Journal. I'm also not just speaking as a magazine editor. I've studied advertising from inside and out for longer than most people have been alive.

This article was derived from a talk that GitHub Universe faithfully rejects every year. I can't understand why.... For better or worse, git has become one of the Open Source community's more ubiquitous tools. It lets you manage code effectively. It helps engineers who are far apart collaborate with each other. At its heart, it's very simple, which is why the diagram in so many blog posts inevitably looks something like the one shown in Figure 1. The unfortunate truth that's rarely discussed in detail is that git has a dark side: it makes us feel dumb. I don't care who you are—we all hit a point wherein we shrug, give up and go scrambling for Stack Overflow (motto: "This thread has been closed as Off Topic") to figure out how best to get out of the terrible situations we've caused for ourselves. The only question is how far down the rabbit hole you can get before the madness overtakes you, and you begin raising goats for a living instead.

The /boot partition sometimes needs a bit of attention. If you enable automatic updates, it will fill up with old kernels that you'll probably never need. It also will stop you from running aptitude to install or remove anything. If you find yourself in this situation, you can use dpkg to get around it. dpkg is the higher-level package manager in Debian-based distributions, and it's very useful when aptitude has broken. To see the status of your partitions, run: df -h:

I heard that Microsoft would be buying GitHub just a couple days before it happened when Carlie Fairchild at Linux Journal told me about it. I replied to the news with a solid, “Get! Out!” Needless to say, I had my doubts. As someone who remembers all too well the “Embrace, extend and extinguish" days of Microsoft, the news of this latest embrace did, however briefly, bring back those old memories.

It's like an extra-geeky episode of Cribs featuring single-board computers.

I started writing this on Privmas Eve: the day before Privmas, aka GDPR Day: the one marked red on the calendars of every company in the world holding an asset the GDPR has suddenly made toxic: personal data. The same day—25 May—should be marked green for everyone who has hated the simple fact that harvesting personal data from everybody on the internet has been too damned easy for too damned long for too damned many companies, and governments too.

Dave starts a new method for generating secure passwords with the help of 1Password. A while back I shared a script concept that would let you enter a proposed password for an account and evaluate whether it was very good (well, maybe "secure" would be a better word to describe the set of tests to ensure that the proposed password included uppercase, lowercase, a digit and a punctuation symbol to make it more unguessable).