Well it is that time again for the ritual of installing a clean version of ParrotOS for the perilous journey to DEFCON on the ole Thinkpad X220. And it just so happens that 6.4 just came out. Right out of the box Parrot as always just feels right with very little tweaking. The new parrot is as much a smooth and clean Linux hacker disto as it is a cyberpunk work of art!

I have been using VScode for some time now and I did agree that it was a bit slower than it was 9 years ago but never felt ohh wow I need a change or to return to vi or emacs my 1st <3’s. Then I installed 6.4 which comes with VScodium and I never thought VScode was slow until I finally tried it. Now I can officially say WOW I may have to consider switching. That same snappy feeling I get with using Linux was present in giving VScodium a spin. And having that during coding is immediately attractive.

Few tweaks I like to make immediately after install:

Enable Zswap⌗

Backup grub if you’re into that sort of thing.

cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.bak

Add zswap.enabled=1 to the /etc/default/grub file as shown below.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash zswap.enabled=1"

Then run:

sudo update-grub

Choose between lzo / zstd and disable autodefrag in /etc/fstab⌗

So the devs have both lzo and zstd in the fstab for disk compression. Linux will choose the last one so default is to use lzo. Remove both to disable compression. Also remove autodefrag on SSD drives so the fstab looks something like this.

UUID=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXX /              btrfs   subvol=/@,defaults,noatime,discard,compress=lzo 0 0

-OR-

UUID=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXX /              btrfs   subvol=/@,defaults,noatime,discard,compress=zstd:1 0 0

lzo will be the absolute fastest, will consume the least cpu and is best for old hardware. Most hardware even older should be fine with zstd:1-3 and be as fast as lzo. Levels range from 1 to 22 (default is 3). If compression is required and cpu and battery are of the utmost, lzo would be the recommendation.

Now that is done, up next, refresh of cloud Kali for them sweet sweet RCE h4X!