today's howtos
-
How to Flush DNS in Linux
Is your internet browsing experience slow on your Linux device, or are the websites you’re visiting outdated or the wrong website altogether?
-
Looking at user login time with the ac command | Network World
The ac command can provide very useful summaries of how much time users spend logged into a Linux system. It gets its data from the wtmp file.
-
Libre Office Draw, set up unit measurement and ratio for technical drawings
If you want to create some basic 2D plans, Libre Office draw does a pretty good job and is quite easy to pick up and use. I use LibreOffice Draw myself to plan out some of my own small woodworking projects.
-
How Linux swap files (and swap partitions) find where to read and write
The kernel has two ways to build these swap extents for a swap file. First, a filesystem may support an explicit way of obtaining these swap mappings through a swap_activate method it provides. How these functions work depends; the ext4 one uses a generic 'iomap' system with an ext4-specific callback (cf fs/ext4/inode.c), while the NFS code basically pretends that the NFS swap file is a block device, creating a single file-wide direct mapping (see nfs_swap_activate() in fs/nfs/file.c).
Second, for filesystems that don't have specific support, the kernel will go through every block in the file and attempt to map it to a disk block, then identify contiguous runs of blocks and merge them together in a single extent (see bmap() in fs/inode.c and generic_swapfile_activate() in mm/page_io.c). This only works if the filesystem can map file blocks to disk blocks for you, which not all filesystems can. Presumably it's potentially rather slow, especially for large swap files. I believe that most filesystems that expect (and want) to be used for swap have their own fast swap_activate function because of this.
-
How to Install GNOME Desktop Environment in Linux Mint - It’s FOSS
Linux Mint is an excellent Linux distribution, especially for beginners.
I like that it stays on the familiar Ubuntu/Debian front and yet it does several things better than Ubuntu. One of them is that it doesn’t push Snaps down my throat.
However, I am not a fan of the Cinnamon desktop as I never really liked the Windows XP or 7’s default setup either.