General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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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'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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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'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...
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...
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...
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) (...
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...
Guix is a rolling release distro. Another well known rolling release distro is Arch Linux. In Arch, you are expected to frequently do system updates. Partial updates are not supported. In my exper...
You often have to read man pages to use Linux/Unix software. However, many man pages are not easy to read. They are very long, not always conveniently arranged, and man does not appear to have any ...
Spotify runs on my computer with higher DPI (bigger UI elements) than I'd like. How can I reduce it?
How do I configure my system so that all GUI apps use a consistent DPI, without configuring each app individually?
How can I search for files on my system? Ideally, I would like to search by various criteria, like date, name, extension, etc.
I installed the Nvidia container toolkit so I can use GPU acceleration in Docker containers. However, I can't get the containers to work: $ sudo docker run --runtime=nvidia nvidia/cuda:12.2.0-base...
Why does XDG_DATA_HOME default to ~/.local/share? Why not something less cryptic, like ~/.data? Why did they decide use that path?
I want to generate a list of trending Arch/AUR packages that focuses on user-facing applications rather than background libraries and dependencies. I wrote a script that uses the data from pkgstat...
A little while ago I was helping someone with running Python in a virtual environment, as root, for some specific purpose. I determined easily enough that this requires explicitly specifying the pa...
When you first connect to a host, ssh asks you about saving its fingerprint. If you do, on subsequent connections it will check the fingerprint and refuse to connect if it changed. I get that this...
I compressed some JPEGs with curtail it messed up the filenames. It was supposed to only add -min at the end but ended up adding a random string after the extension 😠: prs@PC:/DOWNLOADS/Pictures$ ...
Suppose I have a PDF which is 2x3 in. I want to create a PDF with a single page, which has multiple copies of this. For example, if the small pieces are in landscape, and the large page is in portr...
How to open a port when using firewalld as the system firewall?
I recently updated Gnome to 1:44.0 and since the update my dark mode settings seem to be ignored for Gnome applications. When setting the dark style in Settings > Appearance, the desktop backgr...
Using For the console: /etc/vconsole.conf ---- KEYMAP=dvorak For X Session: .xinitrc ---- setxkbmap -layout us -variant dvorak & Problem For the console, it applies the dvorak lay...
When hardening my system with Lynis I had information about /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net being found weak. Lynis redirects me to Enterprise, which is a paid product and a bit overkill for my home...
I have multiple screens and I often connect and disconnect monitors while the system is running. i3 assigns a workspace to each monitor, but does so unpredictably. Both workspaces are highlighted a...
Let's say I have workspaces 1, 2, 3 on screen A and 4, 5 on screen B. Currently workspaces 1 and 4 are active. With my current config, moving a window to another workspace never activates it. How...
I have multiple screens and I often connect and disconnect monitors while the system is running. i3 assigns a workspace to each monitor, but does so unpredictably. Sometimes my main monitor is work...
In i3, is there a way to move an entire workspace to another monitor, including all windows it contains?
The systemd manual gives a list of path where systemd looks for unit files. However, I want to isolate my units in a path of my own choosing. Is it possible to configure systemd to add some path t...
~/.config/systemd/user intended purely for units created and managed by the user manually, or are there any automated processes that expect to control it? For example, do packages or programs ever...
Problem How do I find product and vendor names for use with a xorg.conf file? Neither the xorg.conf nor the xinput manuals specify how to do this. xinput lists info, but the output lacks column ...
Some pacman functions require sudo. When I forget the sudo, you get: error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root. I then have to press the keys: up, home, s, u, d, o, space, en...
How can a file list be manually filtered with a gitignore file. I want to do the equivalent of git ls-files, but it should work even if I remove .git, so I can't use git(1). Currently, I'm doing ...
I use unrar to extract rar archives sometimes: UNRAR 6.24 freeware Copyright (c) 1993-2023 Alexander Roshal Sometimes the archive root has several files, so if I do unrar x foo.rar it will...
How to pretty print XML in a shell? I have command-line tool which outputs XML in a single line, totally unreadable. I would like something to pipe this into, to turn it into human readable XML wi...
Of course every language has some kind of random library... But can you generate custom random strings with just basic CLI tools? For example, we have /dev/random which provides a stream of random...
On my current setup (running Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon), I have an administrative user and several ordinary users. I intend for all of these users to be in the same group, which happens to have the ...
I want the cd command to automatically change to the first directory that matches a fuzzy search, without prompting me to select between multiple options. This is what I've tried: cd() { loc...
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...
How can I rescale the Linux virtual terminals (ctrl + alt + {f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6}), so that a high-resolution display doesn't make the letters too small? I'd like to use 1080 or even 720 resolu...
How one may unpack .zst archived on Ubuntu? I received .zst archive file and I am looking for a way to unpack it.
I have a custom, ARM Cortex A53 based Linux system, based on Buildroot one RaspberryPi CM3 module, connected to the other system via USB The USB gadget is correctly set up on the CM3 module ...
I was reading the documentation. In Debian based Linux, I have to install build-essential, libssl-dev. But, what about Arch-Based Linux? I had tried sudo pacman -Syy build-essential libssl-dev ...
Is it possible to install .deb extension file in Arch-Based Linux? I saw there's no dpkg package. But, if installing .deb file possible than, how?
I was using Linux mint and Windows 10 together (in different partitions). Few months I was using it freely. Today I got a message in Windows 10 (new updates available or shutdown and update) then, ...
I have Prime OS and Windows 10 alongside Linux Manjaro. I was using Prime OS nearly 2 hours. Then, I turned off my laptop for 30-60 minutes. Then, I turned my laptop on and I was using Windows 10 f...
