Ben Santora

Linux Operating System

March 2026

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Ben Santora - Bio

Linux power user and systems optimizer working at the intersection of software configuration and low-level hardware communication. Systems-level driver tuning, display server, audio pipeline configuration, and general optimization of Debian-based environments with minimal window manager setups.

FOSS and Right to Repair Advocate. Active in hardware restoration and rescue — returning aging or broken machines to productive use through careful diagnosis, component-level reasoning, and a preference for lean, purpose-built Linux environments over heavy defaults.

The through-line across all of it: a conviction that modern systems are over-abstracted by design, and that real ownership of a machine means understanding what each layer is doing and why. Recent work includes running small language models in CPU-only mode - bare metal inference on Linux Debian OS.

Running llama.cpp Bare-Metal on Linux

A step-by-step guide to compiling llama.cpp from source with native AVX-512 optimizations, bypassing Ollama for faster local LLM inference without a GPU. Covers hardware requirements, AVX-512 detection, source compilation, model quantization, and command-line operation.