Linux Prepper

Living Cartoon Company

Details

A podcast about FOSS, Linux, open‑source tools, self‑hosting, homelab tinkering, and the evergreen practice of DIY, hands‑on learning. Linux Prepper explores open systems, simple workflows, resilient infrastructure, and local‑first approaches through calm, reflective narration that treats experimentation and failure as a path to understanding. The show documents a long‑term practice of building, breaking, questioning, sharing, listening, and iterating. Chaos is welcomed as part of the process, and minimalism shapes the choices—using what you have, keeping setups practical and low‑overhead, and focusing on skills that last. Episodes offer results and insights from a place of honesty, without prescribing how anyone “should” do things. Listener questions, stories, and shared experiments influence what comes next, creating a collaborative space where learning happens through doing. You’re encouraged to explore alongside the show, submit your findings, and help form your own conclusions. If you appreciate open‑source creativity, low‑overhead setups, practical tech, and a thoughtful approach to hands‑on exploration, then welcome. Let the mess teach the lesson.

Recent Episodes

MAY 14, 2026
Repurposing Battlestations from old hardware, local sharing offline and LinuxFest Northwest Trivia
(00:00) Previous episode on local networking and off-line tooling (00:37) Ameridroid Sponsor - Linuxprepper at checkout (01:20) Battlestations, and how they relate to Linux Prepper (02:35) Your input much appreciated on this long term exploration (03:08) Two Desktops from Thin Clients, Detailed Notes (07:00) Older Intel Graphics and X Window Manager Support vs Wayland LXQT Openbox Xfce Anti-X MX Linux Arch 32-bit (07:52) 32-bit and Multi-Architecture Support, Wine, Proton (12:00) Love 2D Engine and Compiling Back 32-bit Support (13:07) Moonring, Free RPG Game inspired by Ultima (13:21) Balatro, Card Game (13:27) Arco - Turned-based, Meso-american Adventure Game (14:03) 100 Tools You can Selfhost on Minimal Hardware (14:57) Pipewire, Wireplumber, QPWGraph, pw-jack (18:30) Aphex Twin Premium Episode Coming Soon (19:22) Memory Management from 16gb to 1gb RAM (20:11) Zram, adding efficient memory compression (21:26) 12GB RAM total notes on setting up Zram, Swap, Swappiness (22:39) 16GB RAM total notes on my other Intel NUC (23:37) EarlyOOM Daemon monitoring Zram and Swap (26:14) Swappiness, what triggering it does (27:55) Considerations for 8gb to 1gb of total RAM (32:08) DURP Challenger downgrading to Pi 3 as appliance (33:02) File Management with Core Utils through SSH (33:31) SCP for One-Way Transfers (34:29) Rsync - One-way Transfers with Comprehensive Control (36:02) Unison - Resilient Bi-directional Rsync for Two Locations (38:09) Scaling up without cloud services or servers (39:34) Syncthing - P2P Real-time Sync with client support Sushitrain - Open Source Client for iOS Syncthing-Fork for Android Syncthing Tray for KDE Plasma & Dolphin (42:24) Rclone - Rsync-like support for Cloud Providers: Dropbox, Google Drive, S3 (43:30) Minimal Homelab Implications; Try The Tools and Win (45:01) Container Concerns vs Understanding Tooling Understanding how tools actually work when deploying (45:42) Trivia Winners from LFNW and Named Projects! (46:13) LinuxFest Northwest 2026 Wikipage with Youtube Links (48:01) SeaGL Call for Speakers Open Now! Ways to Support the Show! Share it with others! Enroll in Linux Prepper Premium as a Patron of Living Cartoon Company to support the show! Gets you access to more content. Join #linuxprepper:matrix.org chat on Matrix! Follow from the Fediverse: Mastodon, etc. @[email protected] Lemmy community, which x-posts across the Fediverse. Send in anonymous feedback with one click! See more detailed notes and info at the forum Email feedback to [email protected] I do not promise to respond, but I promise to read your words!
49 MIN
APR 3, 2026
Local Tools, Offline Networking and Building Resilience
Why Offline & Local-First Rising Cost of Consumer Technology Cloudflare Outages - interest in local hosting Re-purposing older machines into functional use! (00:11) Offline Tooling, Local Tooling, Resilience Introduction (00:50) Sponsor Ameridroid LINUXPREPPER code (01:14) Domain Changes and thoughts after years on .network, xyz and org (01:32) Forum posts related to simple, resilient setups Show notes listed there as well (02:21) Do you have a device in a drawer that might be useful as-is? (04:38) KDE Connect - Thoughts after Three Years (08:30) Unbound, DNSMasq - Local DNS Caching, Recursive DNS and Resolvers (09:30) Quad9 - Global Public Recursive DNS for Public Benefit, alternative to Cloudflare and Google (09:55) Local DNS Resilience and Why It Matters (12:15) Connecting Multiple Services and What DNS Adblocking Actually Does with Pi-Hole, Adguard Home, etc. (13:04) Dividing IP Ranges for Custom DNS, Adblocking assignments (13:55) Adding Resilience, Privacy and Speed Most Routers Do Not Offer Natively (15:20) Challenges You Can Try at Home! (15:59) Wiki in early development as plain text. Learn more on the forum (17:00) Low Key Gear Exchange for LFNW. Details for forum users! Forum post for registered users (17:36) 100 Selfhosted Services for Low End and 32-bit Hardware (19:11) HomeLab Episode to be released with Robin Monks. Unedited interview available on Premium (19:29) Nginx, Caddy - Reverse Proxy via DNS Challenge for Local HTTPS Testing (20:00) mDNS and Avahi for remote machines gifted to others without https (22:35) Become a Premium Subscriber to Support the Show (23:36) How resilient is your setup? Let me know! [email protected] (24:05) Discord and bridged Matrix Chats for discussing the show! Please Share with Others! (24:55) LFNW Schedule, should be live shortly. April 24th - 26th (25:11) AI Scanned My Brainrot, Live only at LFNW, on 04/26 at 3pm! (26:17) Upcoming Episode on SeaGL, LFNW and Conferences! Ways to Support the Show! Share it with others! Enroll in Linux Prepper Premium as a Patron of Living Cartoon Company to support the show! Gets you access to more content. Join #linuxprepper:matrix.org chat on Matrix! Follow from the Fediverse: Mastodon, etc. @[email protected] Lemmy community, which x-posts across the Fediverse. Send in anonymous feedback with one click! See more detailed notes and info at the forum Email feedback to [email protected] I do not promise to respond, but I promise to read your words!
27 MIN
JAN 26, 2026
Approaching Docker, Containers, and Compose for curious Self-hosters
This is a bonus Linux Prepper podcast, available as a detailed companion to “A Great Year for Linux”. This is a discussion with HB, stemming from this post on Lemmy learning from admins who avoid container technology. We discuss our experiences with containers, who they are for, and the contexts in which we find them useful. If you are self-hosting, and are container curious, this one is for you! (00:00) Welcome to Linux Prepper Podcast (00:19) Bonus episode connected to Season 1 Episode 1: A Great Year for Linux. Time to get technical! (01:29) This discussion will not cover Permissions, File Systems, or Backups. (02:32) Lemmy Discussion - What is keeping people away from Containers (02:47) Ameridroid Sponsor: LINUXPREPPER code (03:16) What are Containers for? (04:05) HB describes making a text adventure game (in Docker) (04:42) MagPi Magazine (05:09) TTYD: Share your Terminal on the Web (06:12) Why containerize TTYD? (07:05) Managing multiple iterations through containers (07:47) Use of containers, as opposed to Python virtual environments (08:53) When does it make sense for someone to consider containers? (10:30) Docker run commands. similar to bash scripting (12:30) Compose Files, migrating from docker run commands (13:03) Portainer - WebUI Management for Docker services (HB) (13:16) docker ps - Management from the terminal (James) (13:34) James using Docker to test for NextcloudPi and write documentation (14:41) Using containers in order to define your own image (15:50) Running a fleet of AI services through Compose: “Ultimate Bacon Cheeseburger” (17:17) James migrating to Compose files to manage variables across many services (18:54) Composerize - Turn run commands into compose files (18:58) Storing compose files to avoid confusion (20:21) Noisebridge Unicorn services run via compose files on a VPS (26:34) Docker Networks - connecting services internally, even to a reverse proxy (27:46) Aria Download Protocol (28:04) HB describes using multiple, simulateous networks in isolation (30:00) James describes complexity of modular tools like Nextcloud (31:37) Testing Locally (32:30) People leaking their private credentials in their Docker images on the web (33:09) Docker Secrets (33:42) HB suggests storing environment variables as files (34:52) Understanding git.ignore files for people hosting files on public repos (35:32) Using public sharing to learn, share and problem solve (36:31) Lemmy comments of those opting out of containers (38:03) There is nothing wrong with running services directly, aka “bare metal” (43:20) HB’s Github Ways to Support the Show! Share it with others! Enroll in Linux Prepper Premium as a Patron of Living Cartoon Company to support the show! Gets you access to more content. Join #linuxprepper:matrix.org chat on Matrix! Follow from the Fediverse: Mastodon, etc. @[email protected] Lemmy community, which x-posts across the Fediverse. Send in anonymous feedback with one click! See more detailed notes and info at the forum Email feedback to [email protected] I do not promise to respond, but I promise to read your words!
43 MIN