General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
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Some context menus in my KDE installation show the following problem: When the menu is opened it shows normally. But as soon as I move the cursor over the menu, it becomes transparent and whate...
I want my SysRq key to be fully functional. When I look in sudo sysctl -a I see kernel.sysrq = 1 in the output. This tells me it should be working. To test, I run echo h > /proc/sysrq-trigger ...
Docker stores data under directories like /var/lib/docker/overlay2/xyz123. These sometimes grow very large, and Docker does not provide good instructions for how to easily manage the space used by ...
Some Linux users prefer to have /home mounted on a separate partition from the filesystem root, while others prefer a unified partition. I can find plenty of tutorials out there for moving /home on...
How do I solve the error 'Dependencies installation failed' when installing a program using an installer in Bottles? I'm using Bottles 51.15. Console log 15:08:16 (INFO) Installing dependenc...
I have a laptop running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS that I would like to access with Remote Desktop (or VNC)[1] from a Mac. I found the Ubuntu system settings to enable Remote Desktop and am able to connec...
I came across this in a bash script: excludes+=("${2-}") What is the meaning of ${2-}?
Suppose the machine is short on memory and the OOM Killer has selected a target process to shut down (in order to reclaim memory). How does the OOM killer actually kill the process? Is it done usi...
I have a partition and directory structure that looks like: small partition: / usr var ... # etc. large partition: /home shared other_stuff large_folder ...
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...
Can I disable the ability of regular users to enable lingering in loginctl? By default every user on a systemd enabled Linux can run loginctl --enable-linger and have a personal systemd instance s...
.tar.gz is a pretty common archive format. How to extract its contents, "unzipping" it in the command line?
I want to create a collage of 20 screenshots from a video, arranged in a 5x4 grid, regardless of the video’s length. How can I do this efficiently on a Linux system? Specifically, I’d like a way t...
I have a static website I serve with Caddy. The Caddy is inside a container. I notice that occasionally I get malicious requests, looking at the paths requested. Some examples are: /cgi-bin/luc...
You've just run df -h and are shocked how little disk space you got left. You'd like to find where all the space has gone. How to find big(est) files and directories on your system? (So that you c...
How do you find out the number of files in a directory from the command line?
Context I can't switch between keyboard layouts with Alt+CapsLock with Awesome WM (v4.3) on Debian 12. I would like to use a French layout and the Programmer Dvorak layout (dvp). I succeed to us...
I can't set two keyboard layouts with Awesome WM (v4.3) on Debian 12. Using the following configuration (in rc.lua config file of Awesome WM), only the french layout seems to be usable. The us lay...
Headless chromium gives me many errors: $ chromium codidact.com --headless [0914/093555.796025:ERROR:angle_platform_impl.cc(44)] Display.cpp:1086 (initialize): ANGLE Display::initialize error 0: ...
I want to run programs foo and bar with supervisord. Both programs produce a continuous stream of occasional output (stdout and stderr) as they run. When I run supervisor with nodaemon=true, I wan...
I'm using Awesome WM (v4.3) with Tyrannical plugin on Debian 12 and I observe an unexpected behavior of VSCodium. Using the following configuration (in rc.lua config file of Awesome WM), when I st...
How to migrate a single device BTRFS filesystem to a new drive? I don't want to send individual subvolumes, but instead the entire filesystem with its subvolume layout intact. Changing the filesyst...
Looking for a command to show the model(s) of the system's GPU(s). It doesn't matter if it shows other related info too, as long as the model doesn't get buried.
How to find the exact path to an executable file present in your PATH. I.e. commands you can call by just their names. E.g. what executable gets called when I type find and hit enter? $ hypotheti...
I searched for "what is the most accurate lines of code counter linux", but didn't get relevant results. This tcount CLOC project says that it's somehow better than others ones. I don't really beli...
I'm a complete beginner, and just installed Linux for the first time. I chose a popular distribution, but I've run into some issues, or have a few questions. However, I don't know if I have Gnome, ...
I just installed an SSD into my motherboard's third M.2 slot. After I booted up the computer, the secondary disk is now displayed like an externally connected one. There's an icon for it on the des...
Problem I have Super+. mapped to Switch to workspace on the right in gnome settings keyboard shortcuts. It works everywhere except when focus is on the terminal. There, it enters an e in the termi...
I am experiencing hardware or software problems that I cannot explain, or find a solution for. As part of the troubleshooting process, I have now arrived at running an older version of the OS from ...
I have a TLS certificate, let's say codidact.pem (downloaded as in https://linux.codidact.com/posts/292251/292257#answer-292257). But when I view it the file it appears to be base64 encoded: $ cat...
What command can be used to download the TLS certificate of a site such as https://wikipedia.org?
How to display details about a site's certificate using CLI tools?
Online, I often see someone tell people to run a command like /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" (example from https://brew.sh/). The g...
At the most embarrassing time, Firefox on my Ubuntu laptop wouldn't connect to any websites. I've narrowed it down to a DNS issue. I can ping IP addresses, sftp to the computer, etc. The problem af...
A lot of games are made for Windows, and don't have an official Linux version. Can you play these on Linux? Asking specifically about games, not all programs, because games have a lot of additiona...
According to a post on the Nvidia forums, my EGL installation is broken, as eglinfo should say the vendor is Nvidia; on my system it returns: EGL API version: 1.5 EGL vendor string: Mesa Project ...
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?
Sometimes I work with Git repos that have some changes fetched but not yet merged to the local branch. Occasionally I make commits without noticing this, which necessitates rebase/conflict resoluti...
I'm fond of the one-line tabular-like output of aptitude search, but not all systems have aptitude installed. How do I customize the output of apt search (or apt-cache or whatever default tool is a...
Suppose I have some hypothetical CLI program. It is important that only one instance of this program runs at any given time. When multiple instances run concurrently, bad things happen. Normally, ...
I have a systemd unit that runs hourly, but when the computer has just booted/logged in it will "catch up" on the previous run, so it ends up firing right after I log in. Is there a way to make it...
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...
I have a crappy USB hub. I connect some devices to this, like a USB microphone, which don't matter at all until I've booted successfully. Sometimes these devices cause an issue and my boot gets stu...
If I run journalctl --list-boots I get a list of my previous boots. How can I tell which ones of these were resumes from hibernate, and which were booting "from scratch"? I want to do this becaus...
I have a command check_mail that checks my mail. I have it configured to run hourly because I don't want to hammer the server too much. But, sometimes I am really at the edge of my seat for a resp...
How do I find all actual files (not devices, sockets, etc) on my system that are: Not part of a package Not under /home (I assume that packages are supposed to never put files there) on Arch...
I want to download an application from the internet, but the website is listing versions for "bookworm", "bullseye" and "buster". I do not know which version of these to download, as I don't know w...
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 ...
When I use my computer, one question I commonly want to answer for myself is "how much space is being used by the contents of this folder?". Typical file/window managers, IMX, answer this question ...
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...
