Practical Linux tips and tricks – terminal shortcuts, productivity hacks, and configuration tweaks for Ubuntu and other distros.
Sooner or later you end up with a file that should not sit around in plain text: a database dump with customer data, a document with credentials, or a backup you want to park on cloud storage you do not fully trust. Encrypting the file before it leaves your machine solves the problem, and GPG…
The German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is done with Microsoft SharePoint, ditching it for a self-hosted Nextcloud deployment that is already serving around 5,000 employees. Eventually, that number will be scaled up to 50,000 public sector workers, covering agencies ranging from ministries down to municipal offices. What’s happening? Currently, Nextcloud is handling file sharing, and features…
The Harmonic Firmware Initiative “HFI” is trying to provide a generic, standardized power-on firmware experience for RISC-V boards. Akin to the x86 world with having immediate graphics card initialization to provide a display while the system is booting and also having a BIOS setup utility for system configuration, HFI is trying to do the same…
PeaZip 11.1 has been released as the latest version of the open-source, cross-platform archive manager. A key addition is read support for ZIM archives, a format widely used to distribute offline copies of large collections like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. Under the hood, PeaZip 11.2 updates its 7z/p7zip backend to version 26.02. The bundled PEA…
Switching between a terminal and a browser can slow down routine GitHub work. You may only need to create a pull request, check a workflow failure, or open an issue, but each task normally requires finding the right page and clicking through several screens. GitHub CLI, available through the gh command, brings these operations into…
As consumers, we are used to correlating handhelds with the big names like Valve’s Steam Deck, Lenovo’s Legion Go, and ASUS’ ROG Ally. But these machines are geared towards gaming and are priced like it too. Lately, a different segment has been getting just as much attention. Indie creators and small hardware outfits who are…
Stanford researchers have been developing Lightweight Fault Isolation “LFI” compiler passes and targets for LLVM as a means of efficient, native code sandboxing. The AArch64 LFI target was previously upstreamed while this week the x86/x86_64 LFI target was also upstreamed for this means of in-process sandboxing. Lightweight Fault Isolation is a compiler-based approach for efficient,…
Navidrome, the open-source, self-hosted music server and streaming platform, has released version 0.63 with full support for synchronized sidecar lyrics in formats such as TTML, ELRC, SRT, YAML, and LRC. In other words, the app now supports word-by-word timing for a karaoke-style experience and multiple vocal or “agent” layers for songs with more than one…
A program exits with a vague error, or hangs, and the logs say nothing useful. Before guessing, you can watch exactly what the program asks the kernel to do. Every time a process opens a file, reads a socket, or allocates memory, it makes a system call, and strace records each one along with its…
I have been gaming on Linux more than usual lately; that’s part due to my main gaming rig being out of reach and part me wanting to play more on this platform than Windoze. I played a few indie games to pass the time and eventually went looking for new games to check out during…
