General Q&A about Linux and Unix-like operating systems
Filters (None)
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...
How to calculate the SHA1 digest of a file in a shell?
I want to switch hard drives. How do I migrate my root FS from the drive it's on, to the new one, so that everything is exactly as it is?
BTRFS is capable of spanning over multiple drives. How to add one more to an existing filesystem?
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
Desktop files always have either %u or %U as an argument for the program being launched. E.g. here's a line from my firefox.desktop: Exec=/usr/lib/firefox/firefox %u What does it mean?
Every time I open EA Games from within Lutris, the desktop's UI/screen scaling is reset from 150% to 100%. This is in PopOS running with a 4K resolution on a 4K screen. The resolution is not change...
~/.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...
I want to connect to my university network via OpenVPN under Fedora GNOME. I imported the openvpn configuration provided by the university in the Network Manager GUI and specified the user certifi...
For reasons of my own, I have services on my LAN which use HTTPS and I create my own certificates for these. Over the years, the usage of TLS has evolved considerably. Many features that were once...
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 ...
What is a modern and practical way to handle scheduling tasks on a Linux desktop? Modern means basic features should not rely on obscure or convoluted commands and standards Practical means you...
How can I remap buttons on my mouse, especially for more exotic ones like MMO mice?
GPG stores keys inside an internal database of some sort. How to export your public key in the familiar -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- format so that it can be imported to other software? E.g...
How does the init process play a role in the booting of Linux?
On Arch Linux, I installed albert (from AUR) and picom as the compositor. I am using i3 as the window manager. When I bring up the albert window, it is surrounded by the ghost of a window in the b...
When I create the initramfs, I sometimes see messages like: ==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: 'xhci_pci' I get many for different modules. What do they mean? Should I in...
Will the overall unit status be failed if either ExecStop or ExecStopPost fail? I would expect it to be so, but the documentation isn't very explicit about it.
I am trying to debug an issue with audio playback in MuseScore. During this process, I realised that I had/have no clue about audio playback in Linux (or in general for that matter). I already le...
My VISUAL setup interferes with my cron jobs. crontab -l works all right, I see my previous jobs. crontab -e, crontab -e -u user-here - opens GVIM on an empty file checked cron.allow or .deny,...
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>...
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...
My primary drive is partitioned basically like so (only roughly to scale): / /home junk v v v |xx###############...
I am testing some DHCP stuff, and I want to manually end a lease so I don't have to wait hours for them to expire. How can I do this with OpenWrt?
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) (...
The local port range on my Arch Linux installation is 32768-60999 according to cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range Wikipedia states that this range is "used by many Linux kernels" and th...
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 ...
How do I configure my system so that all GUI apps use a consistent DPI, without configuring each app individually?
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...
Say I have some Bash function my-func, that expects a filename and does some processing on the corresponding file. For demonstration purposes, my-func() { cat "$1"; } If I want to apply that fu...
Sometimes I share Unix commands online, and people chastise me for "useless use of cat" (UUOC) or "cat abuse". My cat is quite comfy and doing very well, thank you. What are they talking about?
I have a systemd unit that does some stuff on the internet. Sometimes this gets fired at startup. I want to make sure it's delayed until the computer is connected to the internet. In my notes I fo...
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...
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...
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 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...
Can I restrict myself from certain actions when I SSH in from outside a certain IP range? For instance no sudo? Maybe with ~/.ssh/authorized_keys having a from="!1.2.3.4/26" option with some kind ...
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 ...
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 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 Solr 9.5.0 on Windows Subsystem For Linux 2. It crashes with a Segmentation Fault and does not start. I can run it on Windows without an issue. Java version on WSL2: 17 Java ve...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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?
From what I can tell, both NixOS and Guix are built around a package manager which, instead of installing package into the "common environment" as is traditional, isolates them to mitigate issues a...
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 to open a port when using firewalld as the system firewall?
How to lookup user-id with the user's name? E.g. What's the UID of user linus?
