General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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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...
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?
Suppose I want to limit what characters are allowed in filenames. For example, I want file creation to fail if there is a \n in the name. Is there a way to enforce this? If it matters, I prefer a...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
There are many GUI apps on my computer that show up as eg. items in the start menu. When I launch these, what if I want to control how exactly they are launched, such as setting environment variabl...
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...
Neomutt (and probably Mutt too, but I didn't try) seems to be hiding header fields from email, such as the Message-ID field, and fields that are added by SMTP servers when they receive the message....
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...
How do I make my computer request a new IP from DHCP? I am using Arch with NetworkManager.
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...
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...
How can I search for files on my system? Ideally, I would like to search by various criteria, like date, name, extension, etc.
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 ...
For some time pacman used to have a problem where: Occasionally Arch maintainers introduce new GPG keys They start signing packages with the keys Your local pacman doesn't receive these until ...
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...
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...
I store my address book with abook(1). https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/abook/abook.1.en.html Let's say I want to introduce some contact in some field that accepts the usual name <email>...
How can I run a command later? I'm looking for a CLI way to schedule a command to be run later. I know that I could create a systemd timer, install it, activate it... That is too much work. I want...
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 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...
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 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$ ...
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...
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, ...
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...
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...
What switches do I need to add to see my video RAM (VRAM) with inxi? inxi -G shows my video card model and other info, but not video RAM.
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...
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) (...
How to open a port when using firewalld as the system firewall?
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
Why does XDG_DATA_HOME default to ~/.local/share? Why not something less cryptic, like ~/.data? Why did they decide use that path?
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.
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...
I'm using the Gnome System Monitor in Linux Mint. Whenever I attempt to "End" or "Kill" a process, I am given this warning via a modal dialog (emphasis mine): Killing a process may destroy data,...
Sorry it was a typo, _ instead of -, that caused the problem. I want to have a key combination to alter the keymaps. It worked with one for us and one for hu, but now I want to use one key combina...
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 ...
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've met with the phrase RTFM often. I recognize it's value. However the manual pages are often hard to understand and written by people who know so much about the topic at hand, that they don't ev...
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...
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...
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 (...
