General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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Occasionally I ask how to do some configuration, and people tell me to do stuff like edit some config file in an XYZ directory. But if I configure everything this way, it will turn into a mess, and...
Do any of the cron implementations allow you to manually trigger cron jobs (stuff in your crontab) right now, in the exact same manner as they would have when triggered on their usual schedule, exc...
It seems like systemd labels every boot with some ID. Suppose I have some sporadic issue that happens only on some boots. I want to search logs for only the boots that have the issue, not all boot...
My primary drive is partitioned basically like so (only roughly to scale): / /home junk v v v |xx###############...
Is it practical to use libostree for user files? Or is it too specialized for tracking an entire OS? I am not familiar with libostree, but sounds like it's "Git for filesystem trees". Seems like t...
Currently I set my wallpaper by having a call to feh in my i3 config. This does set the wallpaper, but it seems buggy. Whenever my monitor configuration changes, the wallpaper gets moved partially ...
After many years of using Arch, and many applications, my home directory is completely cluttered with junk. Of course, much of this is useful and needed for the normal operation of programs. For ex...
How do I install and run Windows applications downloaded from a website? Windows applications do not run natively on Linux, but can be run using Wine. When downloading these applications from a we...
When I boot my computer, I want the sound to start out muted, even if it wasn't before. For bonus points: It should also reduce volume to 0% This should also happen when coming out of hibernat...
I added IdleAction=hibernate IdleActionSec=30min To my bat /etc/systemd/logind.conf. Then I waited 31 min, but nothing happened. It didn't hibernate. Presumably, the config changes are not loa...
If I have an application such as the EA App running from Lutris, after starting the computer from hibernation, it sometimes doesn't render correctly; the window renders some areas fine, while other...
I use pipewire. When I list devices with pactl, I see some ugly device.name values. Some of these I changed in the past, but forgot how. I want to change some more. How?
I have installed the Flatpak version of Lutris from Pop_Shop in PopOS. From within Lutris, I have installed the EA App, which I have then used to download several games from my library. Unfortunate...
What command can be used to download the TLS certificate of a site such as https://wikipedia.org?
Suppose you have two Linux distributions installed in a dual boot situation. One issue that can happen is when you need to frequently switch. Rebooting is disruptive if you have a bunch of things ...
In PopOS's standard System Monitor application, how do I see the GPU usage? I can see the CPU, RAM, disk and network usage, and graphs for them, but GPU usage is listed nowhere. It's available in M...
Ever since systemd was adopted by mainstream distros, there's been many reactive projects aiming to provide a distro without systemd. I've often had the impression that a lot of these were motivat...
I have multiple systems, each of which has two different hard drives: one fast SSD and my good old spinning rust. Originally, I had set up the drives to have my root directory / on the SSD and my ...
How do you monitor GPU usage on Linux? I am most interested in a "% GPU usage" and maybe "GPU temp" statistic, not so much very detailed stuff.
I wanted to download C++ documentation and found cppreference-doc-en-qch in Debian's archive: Description: C and C++ standard library reference (English, Qt Help variant) A version of online C ...
I have / mounted on a relatively small partition and /home on a larger one taking up most of the rest of the drive (as seems to be common practice). I'd like to move certain other parts of the file...
How can I grow a libvirtd VM's LVM-backed virtual disk online, without rebooting the vm. My host has an LVM VG for VMs. Each VM disk is an LV to the host. It's easy to grow the VG by adding a PV...
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...
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?
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...
