General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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I like how Guix sounds based on what I've read, and I want to try it. However, my partitioning scheme is a bit complicated. With Guix it appears like my biggest concern is hardware (I will regretta...
I have an Arch Linux machine connected to a LAN by ethernet. The router runs OpenWRT. DHCP assigns IPs to this machine like 192.168.1.* - quite typical. I want the IP to always be 192.168.1.10. I...
After a force shutdown on Ubuntu 22.04, installed on a Lenovo Legion 5, the OS seems to have lost its ability to recognize the built-in touchpad or to connect to the internet. For the backstory......
At the moment GPG only offers the following options when generating a new subkey the with the addkey command: gpg> addkey Please select what kind of key you want: (3) DSA (sign only) (...
SSH agent prints some envar commands for sourcing in a shell. However, these are bash-style, and I use fish. Fish barfs at the bash syntax. How can I fix it?
I have my key added to ssh-agent and they show up in ssh-add -l. When I try to actually SSH to a host that requires the key, I still get prompted for a password. I enter it again and again and it s...
How do you securely erase data from a thumb (USB/flash) drive? With traditional (magnetic/spinny) hard drives, it used to be that you could use various tools to simply overwrite with random data, ...
When formatting drives with Gnome Disks, there is an option to "Erase". The help text says this takes longer, but "completely" erases data. What exactly does this option do? Is there a CLI equival...
I somehow managed to unknowingly change the default app for opening directories on my laptop. E.g. when I use the option open containing folder in a program like Evince, my editor (vscode) opens u...
I have a script that does git fetch for a repository. When I run this in my shell it works fine. I want to run it in a systemd user unit. However, I am using an SSH url, and the systemd unit fails...
I can start services with systemctl start. I can see logs with systemctl status or journalctl. But by the time I run the second the process has already started. I'd like to start a service and imme...
I'm going to write some systemd services. All of these can only be run if a certain website is up. I thought I could create a ~/.config/systemd/user/website.service this: [Unit] Description=Confi...
My system occasionally has an issue that looks like this: I run pacman -Syu Many things get updated Many GUI apps (including all display managers and Xorg) start refusing to run and throw up O...
I am using Linux Mint 20.3, with Cinnamon as a window manager. I have a folder named .pytest_cache on my Desktop: $ ls -1A | grep '^\.' .pytest_cache I know that if I open a Nemo window, navi...
I was looking into unlocking my login after too many incorrect password attempts. I found this post about it. Doing faillock -user $(whoami) --reset did indeed unlock the login. However, what exac...
I am running X on Arch Linux without a desktop environment, only i3. Sometimes I need to switch between typing in different languages. How do I switch my keyboard layout?
When I enter the login password incorrectly 3 times, my computer locks me out from attempting a login for 10 minutes. How can I change the timeout?
When I enter the login password incorrectly 3 times, my computer locks me out from attempting a login for 10 minutes. How can I increase the number of attempts?
My goal is to use a french AZERTY keyboard layout with Arch linux and Gnome desktop environment but use US English as "OS language". Note that I am also open to a "working" solution on any other d...
$ echo "4c 6f 72 65 6d 20 69 70 73 75 6d 20 64 6f 6c 6f 72 20 73 69 74 20 61 6d 65 74 2c 20 63 6f 6e 73 65 63 74 65 74 75 72 20 61 64 69 70 69 73 63 69 6e 67 20 65 6c 69 74 2c" | xxd -r orem ipsum...
I want to have a local DNS server on my home LAN, say at 192.168.1.123. All of my machines will use 192.168.1.123 as their only DNS server when connected to my home network. By default, my DNS ser...
I got this message: Bad owner or permissions on /Users/rbiaa065/.ssh/config What should the permissions be to make ssh happy?
Hello everyone, I am encountering an issue when running pytest in my virtual environment. Although I have installed the required modules in my virtual environment using pip, I am still getting a M...
What is the simplest shell idiom for stripping leading and trailing whitespace from a file or program output? Ideally I am looking for the equivalent of trim or strip methods in some languages. Th...
I was told that an IPv6 link-local address — typically starting with fe80:: — is derived from the interface's MAC address. Here are some instruction on how to do the conversion. But the conversion...
I'd like to debug NetworkManager by stepping through it using GDB. I assume I'll have to compile NetworkManager from source to get debug symbols since file /usr/bin/NetworkManager indicates that th...
It is often taught that in Unix/Linux text files should end with newline characters. The reason given (orally) to me by various sources was that "some commands (such as wc) assume or require a newl...
My keyboard has keys for mute, volume up, volume down. In i3wm, I used to have these bound with: bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id pulsemixer --change-volume +10 --max-volume 100 ...
I uninstalled PulseAudio and installed PipeWire. It seems like now, every application gets an independent audio configuration. When I go into pavucontrol I see "Spotify" where I configure the volu...
I have always found PulseAudio to be difficult to use and overcomplicated. Recently I also discovered that it is written by Lennart Poettering, whom I dislike. I am now very motivated to use someth...
I am unable to create new tablespaces on a fresh Postgres 15.3 installation on Ubuntu 22.04. I tried the following so far: re-install Postgres fully loosen file system permission disabled SELi...
With Debian 12, it seems that mysql-server is not available in the "default" package distribution and thus, cannot be installed with sudo apt install mysql-server or sudo apt-get... (I know that ma...
When I try to start MariaDB server (same problem with MySQL) on a fresh Debian 11 install in a Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) I got the following error: $ sudo systemctl start mariadb System has n...
SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 are user-defined signals. Imagine there is a tool designed to do something useful upon receiving one or the other. The problem is the default action for these signals is Term (...
Whenever I do a big system update, OpenGL stops working until the next reboot. This also prevent OpenGL apps from launching. Example: $ glxgears X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer par...
I noticed that downloading all the pacman packages for a full system install takes a lot of time, so I want to create a systemd time that will periodically download them for me. That way, most of t...
Unix is very permissive with filenames, and this can sometimes lead to a bunch of annoying corner cases when printing files. A well known example is when you put a newline in a filename, and it bre...
****Since upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 recently, immediately after a reboot I have WiFi to an internet hotspot as I did prior to upgrading. After suspend then resume, the network is no longer working...
I'm trying to help fix a Debian installation that has ended up with a mix of Debian release repositories, aka a "FrankenDebian". This one has the bullseye and unstable repositories listed in /etc/a...
Suppose I have a command that takes filenames as arguments, like: diff foo.txt bar.txt What if instead of actual files, I want to use the results of a command in each? I can use temporary files: ...
I can easily run Windows games with wine by running: wine game.exe However, if I want to use Proton I have to run Steam, add the game as a non-Steam game, and run it that way. Since Proton is ...
After installing the InconsolataGo font from the Arch package extra/ttf-inconsolata-go-nerd, I see there is an Inconsolata Nerd Font, Regular and an Inconsolata Nerd Font Mono, Regular. Both are mo...
I run Windows games with Wine, and use bwrap to sandbox them. I've noticed that passing --unshare-net to disable the network breaks many, many games (they fail to start with no obvious error messag...
I use Wine to play Windows games. As is well known: Wine is not a sandbox Windows games are proprietary blobs and can contain malware Windows malware can potentially harm Linux through Wine ...
Suppose I have a list of files on standard input. These may be the output of find, cat filelist.txt or something else. How can I run a command on each file in turn?
How can I view font files, like .ttf, in Linux? I'd like to see a sample of the font (quick brown fox...) and metadata about it (like exact name).
I have a directory filled with Flac audio files and I would like to convert them all to Mp3. How do I go about this using FFmpeg? I am using the git FFmpeg and Slackware -current.
Question How can I view storage usage breakdown by media type? MWE Notes Commandline would be great, but open to anything.
Trying to understand what exactly <!nocheck> does next to a package in build-depends (for example, Perl). Debian Wiki says: Terms can be negated by using an exclamation mark as a prefix ...