General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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I switch between three computers and have never been able to keep my dotfiles in sync. I cannot put them into source control because they contain sensitive data. So, my question is: how do I share ...
$ 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 saw another post recommend using Fedora if you want cutting edge features. Is Fedora really a "cutting edge" distro? I am not very familiar with Fedora, I know it's a community counterpart to R...
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 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...
Spotify runs on my computer with higher DPI (bigger UI elements) than I'd like. How can I reduce it?
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 ...
How to get the number of lines in a file? I.e. for a file like this: Line one Line 2 Final line I would like to do something like this: $ count-lines /path/to/the/file/above 3
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...
Is there a way in Ubuntu (22.04) to run a given bash command for a given Key combination in Gnome (42.9)? This Ubuntu is running in Hyper-V on a Win10 host. (I would like to run the setxkbmap us a...
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 ...
How to apply a logical not to a shell command, e.g. in a Bash script? So if the command exited with 0 (success) I would like it to be changed to a non-zero value, and if it exited with a non-zero ...
I got this message: Bad owner or permissions on /Users/rbiaa065/.ssh/config What should the permissions be to make ssh happy?
I want to remove all files with the ".part" extension in the current directory and its subdirectories, including files with the same name but different extension. Is this correct? find . -name '*...
~/.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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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'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...
Where can I find documentation on double asterisk in glob expansion? It is discussed in the .gitignore section of Pro Git. It works in ls **/* to list all terminal files. It is supported by py...
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) (...
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...
Question How do I copy to clipboard from terminal with yy, assuming it's configured to use Vim bindings? I am using zsh with bindkey -v. MWE Enter something on the commandline (without pressi...
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...
When I run Kmail on i3, and then close it, it appears to continue running some stuff in the background. For example, I periodically get notifications about new mail from dunst, even though I have c...
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...
****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 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...
Why does XDG_DATA_HOME default to ~/.local/share? Why not something less cryptic, like ~/.data? Why did they decide use that path?
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 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...
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...
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 (...
How to open a port when using firewalld as the system firewall?
flatpak uninstall --unused currently tells me that there is Nothing unused to uninstall. This seems wrong to me, based on the list of packages I see vs. the "root" packages I explicitly installed p...
Question What partition type should I use for FAT partitions such that Linux and Windows systems both recognize the drive? Notes I am partitioning the drive with fdisk and making the filesystem ...
How can I convert PDF to docx using the terminal or a Linux app? The output docx must be formatted with editable text. Some alternative solutions I've seen online using soffice and abiword output...
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 ...
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...
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 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$ ...
I am trying to run a DNS server on my LAN. I set it up where: Dnsmasq is the "initial" server that clients see Dnsmasq resolves internal domains, and handles overrides (such as if I want to blo...
Question How do you specify underscores as Vim word boundaries when using vim mode in either bash or zsh? MWE w on this_word should place the cursor on the underscore. A second w should place th...
How do I make my computer request a new IP from DHCP? I am using Arch with NetworkManager.
