today's howtos
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How old various Unix signals are
Process signals are a famously tricky part of Unix in practice (although they can sometimes seem simple in theory). Recently I found myself wondering how old various Unix signals are. The answer turns out to be older than I expected for most signals, although it's difficult for me to tell exactly how far back they really go because of our limited sources for very early versions of Research Unix.
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The yearly "On self-hosting e-mail."
Carlos Fenollosa recently published an article titled “After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.”.
It gained quite a bit of attention in my online social circles, and while I do agree with some of the points they made (specifically that e-mail isn’t as simple as it used to be a decade ago), I disagree with fair bits of their opinion. I know that I’m late to the party, but I want to use this post to elaborate why nonetheless.
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Linux BTRFS continuous snapshots
Snapshots are not backups! It is important to understand this. If your storage is damaged or the file system get corrupted, or the device stolen, you will lose your data. Backups are archives of your data that are on another device, and which can be used when the original device is lost/destroyed/corrupted. However, snapshots are superfast and cheap, and can be used to recover accidentally deleted files.
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VirtualBox: Beginners Guide and How to Setup Ubuntu Virtual Machine
VirtualBox (VB) is a cross-platform hypervisor or virtualization software developed by Oracle Corporation. Basically, VB allows user to run guest operating system on another host operating system virtually without need for partitioning of hard drive or running another OS on dual boot which involves risk of crashing host system.
VirtualBox creates virtual hard drive and installs guest OS on it. Virtual hard drive is nothing but the big size file stored on the computer hard drive. This file works as a real hard drive for the guest OS.
Running any application software or video game on virtual machines is sometimes not as smooth as running them on OS installed on full hardware. Everything depends on amount of hardware resource allocated to virtual machine.
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How to Install HandBrake on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Anyone who has ever had to deal with video files knows they can be a pain. Different devices use different formats, and you’ll often have to convert a video from one format to another to watch it on your chosen device. This can be a time-consuming process, especially if you’re dealing with large files. Fortunately, there’s a solution: HandBrake.
HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder that supports Mac, Windows, or Linux. It can convert videos in many different formats into more commonly used ones like MP4 with minimal file size reduction – making it efficient at reducing the amount of data consumed on your hard drive while also helping save time! Whether you need to take a video from your phone and watch it on your laptop, or you want to download a movie from the internet and watch it on your TV, Handbrake is the tool for you.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Handbrake on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal with various methods to install the transcoding software and update and remove the software if the need arises.
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How to Install GNOME on Ubuntu 22.04 - Linux Nightly
The GNOME desktop environment is the default GUI for Ubuntu systems. However, if you’re running Ubuntu Server or one of the other flavors of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu or Lubuntu, then you won’t have GNOME installed by default. Follow along with us below to get GNOME installed on Ubuntu.
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How to Install VMware Workstation Pro on Debian 11 / 10
In this guide, we will cover how to install VMware workstation Pro on Debian 11 / 10 step-by-step. At the time of writing this guide, VMware Workstation 16 Pro is available.
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How to Add a Directory to PATH in Ubuntu - Pi My Life Up
On Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu, the PATH environment variable is used by the system to search for commands.
For example, when you type in a command like “nano”, Ubuntu will search any directory listed in the PATH variable for that program.
If the PATH environment variable didn’t exist, you would have to type in the full path to every file you want to run.
It is possible to add directories temporarily or permanently to Ubuntu’s PATH variable. By adding a new directory, Ubuntu will check it for any new binary files the next time you run a command.
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Running Paperless-NG on the Raspberry Pi - Pi My Life Up
Paperless-NG is a powerful software designed to act as a digital archive/index for all your paper documents.
When you feed Paperless-NG a document. it will perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) over it, turning images into searchable and selectable text.
This is just scraping the surface of what Paperless is capable of. You should definitely check out this software if you need a central place to aggregate your documents.
The Raspberry Pi is an excellent device for Paperless-NG as it uses a low amount of power, making it cheap to run continually.
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How to Restart Ubuntu using the Terminal - Pi My Life Up
Knowing how to reboot Ubuntu is one of those simple but crucial to know tasks for managing your system.
There are numerous reasons why you need to reboot Ubuntu. An example of a reason you would want to restart is if you changed the size of the system’s swap. Unfortunately, applications aren’t aware of changes to the swap till they are restarted.
Another reason you may want to update the terminal is if you updated your Ubuntu kernel, it won’t be utilized until the system is rebooted.
Over the following few sections, we will cover three commands you can use to restart your system.
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How to kill a process on Ubuntu - Pi My Life Up
If you have ever had a process on Ubuntu that wouldn’t close, no matter what you did, it is possible to force kill the process.
By killing a process, it will be forced to close immediately, meaning if it were just saving, Ubuntu would terminate the process without waiting. This sudden termination could potentially lead to data loss or system instability.
You should typically only kill a process on Ubuntu if it no longer responds to normal stop commands.
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Playing Media in Linux Terminal (Including Youtube)
This tutorial explains how to play media from the Linux terminal in Linux, including Youtube.
In many scenarios, we may need to play media from the terminal. After reading this tutorial, you will know how to play local media and how to play and download Youtube media from the Linux console.
Except for installation method examples, made on Debian, this content is valid for all Linux distributions.
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How to Check the Version of Python - Pi My Life Up
Python is a commonly used programming language that has received many updates over its lifetime, so you will likely need to check the version a system is running.
It is important to know the Python version running on your machine as each version has changes that may impact whether the code will behave how you expect it. The most significant changes usually occur between major updates. For example, going from Python 2 to Python 3.
The version number in Python is split into three numbers, 3.10.1. 3 represents a major update, 10 is a minor update, and 1 is a micro update. Each update will also have a “release level” such as alpha, beta, candidate, and final. Final is the version you are most likely to use.
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How to Fix Connection Refused by Port 22 Debian/Ubuntu
SSH provides a secure channel to access Linux servers. Sometimes we come across the error “Connection refused” while connecting to SSH servers. There could be several reasons behind the error like the SSH service is inactive, the port is blocked by ufw firewall, the server is using a different port, or because of some IP conflict.Today, we will explore different ways we can resolve the ‘Connection Refused’ issue on an Ubuntu/Debian system.
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How to Generate and Use SSH Keys on Ubuntu - Pi My Life Up
SSH Keys are a critical way to significantly enhance the security of your Ubuntu device’s SSH connection.
These keys are the recommended way for securely connecting to a device, over as someone would have to steal the entire SSH key to gain access to your system.
Every SSH key is a pair, where one key is used to verify the content signed by another key. The key used to encrypt the connection is called the private key. The key used to verify the contents of this connection is called the public key.
Over the following few sections, we will show you how to generate an SSH key on Ubuntu and then use it to make a connection.