If you are just looking to repurpose an old device for around the house use and it won’t ever be leaving your home network, then the simplest method is to set a static IP address on the device and leave the default gateway empty. That will prevent it from reaching anything other than the local subnet.

If you have multiple subnets that the device needs to access you will need a proper firewall. Make sure that the device has a DHCP reservation or a static IP and then block outgoing traffic to the WAN from that IP while still allowing traffic to your local subnets.

If it is a phone who knows what that modem might be doing if there isn’t a hardware switch for it. You can’t expect much privacy when that modem is active. But like the other poster mentiond a private DNS server that only has records from your local services would at least prevent apps from reaching out as long as they aren’t smart enough to fall back to an IP address if DNS fails.

A VPN for your phone with firewall rules on your router that prevent your VPN clients from reaching the WAN would hopefully prevent any sort of fallback like that.

In any KDE app you can connect with SFTP in the open file dialog. Just type sftp://user@server/path and you can browse/open/edit files the remote server. ssh keys+agent make things a lot easier here obviously.

I believe so. The package descriptions for most of the ZFS packages in Ubuntu mention OpenZFS, so it certainly appears that way.

You can still create pools that are compatible with Oracle Solaris, you just have to set the pool version to 28 or older when you create it and obviously don’t update it. That will prevent you from using any of the newer features that have been added since the fork.

Well worse than that, Oracle closed sourced ZFS, so OpenZFS was forced to become a fork, and they are no longer compatible with each other.

As for GPL the CDDL license that ZFS uses made sure that code contributions attribute copyright to the project owners, which means they can change the license as they please without having to track down contributors.

You would think with their investments in Oracle Linux and btrfs they would welcome that license change, but apparently they need excuses to keep putting money into Solaris, and their Oracle ZFS appliances instead.

August 15th. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-schedule/35649

Digitizer issues are usually from getting the wrong digitizer. They are programmed differently for the HAC-001(-01) (v2 classic switch) vs the HAC-001 (v1 classic switch).

More specifically the game card reader board that the digitizer plugs into needs to match. So make sure you buy your digitizer to match the game card reader version, or buy a game card reader to go with it (you can get them for ~$14). Unfortunately many digitizer sellers on eBay don’t say which model it is designed for.

Alternatively you can mix and match those versions if you have an unpatched/modded switch. Just launch Hekate, go to tools and run the digitizer calibration.

I haven’t repaired too many switches but the first time it happened to me I had a spare v2 game card reader and that fixed it immediately. Second time I used the Hekate method and that worked just as well