Posts by matthewsnyder
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...
Let's say I have workspaces 1, 2, 3 on screen A and 4, 5 on screen B. Currently workspaces 1 and 4 are active. With my current config, moving a window to another workspace never activates it. How...
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...
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...
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...
Why does XDG_DATA_HOME default to ~/.local/share? Why not something less cryptic, like ~/.data? Why did they decide use that path?
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...
There's multiple, sometimes overlapping ways of altering the DPI globally on Linux. You should first ensure these are properly configured and Spotify is still not using them correctly. However, Sp...
How do I configure my system so that all GUI apps use a consistent DPI, without configuring each app individually?
Spotify runs on my computer with higher DPI (bigger UI elements) than I'd like. How can I reduce it?
Not a real answer, but these days there are some nice LLM models and they're good at summarizing text. If you have the CLI scripts to interact with them, you can submit the man page as the "system ...
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 ...
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...
The obvious way to do it is: Find some way to get a list of the files Pipe it into wc to count Classically, this would be find /path/to/dir | wc. However fd does the same thing with better u...
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...
I don't use Gnome, but I'm guessing it relies on xdg-open to figure out what program to use. Your first step would be to do xdg-open ~ to see if it uses the same incorrect program. If so, great - ...
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...
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...
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...
This appears to be set by the option deny in /etc/security/faillock.conf.
systemctl is a tool for controlling systemd, the "new" Linux init system (actually it's been widely used for 10 years now). Systemd is the first process that runs at boot, which then brings up all ...
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...
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...
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: ...
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...
