After several years using other OSs as my day-to-day environment, I have decided to once again run Linux as my main desktop OS and I wanted to have an installation that was reasonably secure, where I could have a fair amount of control over what was running and where different tasks / environments could be isolated from each other. The rationale for my choices and links to the posts describing how to set the system up are discussed in this post

This site has been set up primarily to capture how I have configured this environment and any other tips / gotchas / software / information I have found useful, I have many times in my personal and professional life benefited from others sharing their work, and hopefully what I write here will be beneficial.

If anything is unclear, or wrong, or you see any issues with the site in general, please send me an email at issues@ this domain and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

THANKS

I have used the following packages to generate this site:

• Hugo ( Apache 2.0 license: https://gohugo.io/about/license/ )
• SASS ( MIT license: https://github.com/sass/sass/blob/stable/MIT-LICENSE )
• Compass ( modified MIT license: https://github.com/Compass/compass/blob/stable/LICENSE.markdown )
• Susy ( BSD 3-clause license: https://github.com/oddbird/susy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt )
• breakpoint ( GPL/MIT licenses: https://github.com/at-import/breakpoint )
• sass-math ( MIT license: https://github.com/adambom/Sass-Math/blob/master/LICENSE )
• CSS3 breadcrumbs ( Public domain license: https://github.com/komputerwiz/css3-breadcrumbs/blob/master/README.md#license )
• normalize.css ( MIT license: https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/LICENSE.md )
• modular scale ( MIT license: https://github.com/modularscale/modularscale-sass/blob/2.x/license.md )

The site is in general plain html+css, however in a couple of posts I might use javascript for specific requirements (for example to show a live terminal demo) and hosting it locally. The following are the current packages I am using.

• Webcomponents polyfills ( BSD 3-clause license: https://github.com/webcomponents/webcomponentsjs/blob/master/LICENSE.md )
• term.js ( MIT license: https://github.com/chjj/term.js/blob/master/LICENSE )
• tty-player ( MIT license: https://github.com/chris-morgan/tty-player/blob/master/LICENSE )

and I wish to thank to all the people that have worked on the above for their excellent products and for choosing to release them under licenses allowing me to use them. The initial version of the site was developed using Pelican, many thanks also to its developers for their efforts.

The technique used on this site to generate the archive page was described by Parsia Hakimian on his blog¹

The logo image on this page, which is also used for the main site’s logo background, has been sourced from Wikimedia ², other pictures are shots I took myself. The images on this site have been compressed with MozJPEG ³ and Zopfli ⁴ and diagrams have been created using Dia ⁵.

I am a back-end developer by trade, so hopefully the CSS theme I put together renders properly in whatever browser you are using to access this site, I have written ALT tags for all the pictures so the site should be usable even if you are using a screen reader or text browser in general, let me know if this is not the case.

Posts on this site have both a first-published-on date in the header as well as a changelog entry at the bottom right of the post, if changes are required due to errata or other issues, information about the modifications will be added to the relevant page’s changelog.

LICENSE

When writing posts I have always tried to give credit and link to sites where I found particular ideas or techniques, let me know if I missed anything, any other content written by myself is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License ⁶

DISCLAIMER

As much as I have spent significant effort to make sure the instructions provided here are correct, if you decide to follow them and something bad happens, you are on your own: besides many steps that could end up causing data loss, the security aspects of the installation rely on all the software you are using not having any exploits, so if tomorrow a VM-escape critical bug is discovered in VirtualBox, you will obviously be at risk; security is always an ongoing exercise in balancing security and convenience, the tradeoffs between the two are dependent on your particular environment.

THIS SITE AND ITS CONTENTS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SITE, ITS CONTENTS OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN IT.