Linux Articles

@font-face Crashes Firefox on Fedora 11 (Obsolete) Until Fedora updated one of its libraries, Firefox on Fedora 11 would crash on any website that uses an embedded font.
Add a Gemini filetype to Gnome You might need to create a gemini.xml file and/or a .desktop file for your favorite Gemini clients. Here’s how and where to put them.
Airport Extreme vs. Linux (Obsolete) Broadcom refused to release drivers or specs for the chipset, so for years no one could even write their own.
Apache, mod_ssl, and syntax errors in krb5.h (Obsolete) Syntax errors in krb5.h usually mean your Linux distro put Kerberos somewhere Apache isn’t expecting to find it.
Batch Adjust Photos for DST with ExifTool I always forget at least one camera when switching to/from DST, and I always forget the command for exiftool to batch-adjust the image timestamps.
Double Lock Screen (Obsolete) Usually multiple desktops on Linux will stay out of each others’ way when they aren’t running. Not always.
Fedora 7 Problems With Glint Video Driver (Obsolete) Grab the Live CD first and make sure that all your hardware works properly. If not, see if the fix is available before you actually upgrade.
Firefox Thinks It’s Running an Older Version Than Last Time (But Isn’t!) Look for the compatibility.ini file in your Firefox profile, and delete the LastVersion line.
Fix for “Among Us” not joining games on Linux Change your server region and change it back. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either. But at least it works.
Fixing a Blank Article Pane in NewsFlash There’s a bug in WebKit that can prevent articles from displaying in NewsFlash, but there’s a workaround.
Fixing Flash in Fedora Core 5 (Obsolete) Flash hard-codes the paths where it looks for fonts, instead of letting the X server tell it where to look.
Fixing Twhirl (Obsolete) Just delete the entire ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS/ folder and start from the ground up.
Geary With Gmail, (Mostly) Without GNOME Install GNOME, add Gmail to your online accounts, then uninstall the rest of GNOME. But keep gnome-online-accounts!
Get the Date/Time in ISO 8601 Format on the CLI On Linux: Just type ‘date -Is’ in the commandline. On macOS: type ‘date -Iseconds’
Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux (Obsolete) Flash works on the Google Chrome beta for Linux, but may need an extra symlink for the 64-bit Chrome to use the 32-bit Flash.
How Many Bits of Pi? Apparently all Raspberry Pi CPUs show up the same in the Linux kernel, so you have to look at the actual hardware to verify what processor you’re running on and whether it’s 32 or 64-bit.
Install Vivaldi on Arch Linux for Arm64 If you don’t want to use Flatpak or Snap, here’s how you can modify an AUR package for x86_64 to build an Arm64 package for Arch.
Installing Valhelsia on Linux MultiMC no longer downloads mods from CurseForge, and CurseForge won’t run Minecraft on Linux. But AT Launcher will, and has a workaround for CurseForge’s API limits.
Invisible Grub Boot Menu (Fixed) If your GRUB menu isn’t showing up, but your system still boots… check splashimage and make sure it points at a real file
Keep Your System Updated! Most drive-by computer infections use old vulnerabilities for which patches are already available.
KeePass Password Managers KeePassXC, its browser extension, and KeePass2Android are a nice, clean set of apps to manage your passwords on your OWN desktop and mobile devices, auto-fill websites and apps, and sync over your own server or cloud provider.
KeePassXC Browser Extension vs. Flatpak (Not Working Yet) Web browsers running through Flatpak have trouble interacting with KeePassXC.
Let’s Encrypt on Alpine Linux The Easy Way Don’t use acme-cert. Use certbot.
Linux Ejecting DVD Drawer on Wake (Fixed) (Obsolete) It’s a recent bug in the Linux kernel. Wait a couple of days and it’ll be fixed and Fedora will ship the new one.
Mac OS X Finder Deleting Files on a Linux Share If you connect to a Samba share from MacOS and it deletes files after telling you it can’t copy them, try turning off unix extensions in Samba.
Nepomuk is Not Running (Obsolete) KMail kept tossing errors on launch because an old config was trying to load the wrong Nepomuk backend.
Nextcloud Needs Me To Sign In Every Time (Desktop Linux) Make sure your keyring manager is starting before the Nextcloud client.
Nextcloud Tasks: Mobile, Recurring, and Compatibility Gotchas Which desktop, web and mobile applications have and haven’t worked well for me since switching my personal to-do lists to Nextcloud Tasks.
NVIDIA on Fedora 27: Bad Resolution and Painful Mouse Lag (Fixed) (Obsolete) As of 2017, Wayland didn’t work with the binary NVIDIA drivers, and the system would lag painfully. If you tell GDM not to use Wayland, it will fall back to the older display system.
NVIDIA/Nouveau picture extending beyond screen (Solved) After switching video drivers, my display extended past the edges of the screen. It turned out to be a monitor setting hidden by the old driver.
PineTab2 Notes: Getting Things Working Things I’ve had to do on my PineTab2 to get various features working and/or usable.
Promise SX6000, FreeBSD, and Linux (Obsolete) If you want to build a Linux or FreeBSD system around a RAID array, don’t use the Promise SuperTrak SX6000 controller. At least not for now.
Remove GPS Tags After Taking a Photo Google Photos won’t remove GPS data from an image, but you can easily remove just the location data using a desktop or laptop.
Repair missing UEFI entry for Fedora Linux Boot to a live image and either manually edit the menu with efibootmgr or use a specialized tool like boot-repair.
Resolving SELinux audit errors on boot in Fedora Core 4 (Obsolete) Rebuild the initrd so it can label the boot filesystem with the new policy.
Running Mac Software on Linux: Good Luck Out of curiosity I went looking to see if there are any macOS compatibility layers for Linux these days. There isn’t much.
s3cmd crashes with ‘expected str instance, bytes found’ s3cmd 2.3.0 breaks on Python 3.12. The fix is simple, and will be in the next s3cmd release, but here’s how to fix your local copy before it’s released.
Seeking the Perfect Balance for BOINCing After a brief stint at distributed computing early in the pandemic, I came back first to Folding@Home, then BOINC, with the goal of only using spare power to help out with research.
Setting up a Wireless Network on Linux 2.6: Ralink 3062 and Network Manager (Obsolete) Wifi on Linux can still be a pain to get working. Here’s how I set up a Zonet ZEW1642 on Fedora 13 using the Ralink 3062 drivers.
Tell (most) Linux Web Browsers to open Gemini links with your favorite client Most Linux web browsers will open unfamiliar URL schemes with XDG, which will look for .desktop files for the applications that can open it.
Tell Firefox to open Gemini links with your favorite client You’ll need to click on a Gemini link to get the config options, and then you can choose what to open it in.
Using Plasma Discover on GNOME in Fedora Fedora’s packages for Discover are missing dependencies, so you have to install kf6-purpose and kf6-kitemmodels on the command line to use it.
Using vi Without an Escape Key Ctrl+[ usually works as ESC, and if you can send that combination somehow, you can still use vi!
What do GNOME Online Accounts Do? It’s not obvious which services GNOME will use from each provider. Here’s where to find it.
When digiKam Failed to Connect (Obsolete) File permissions. Always check the file permissions.
Windows Losing Drives After Sleep (Solved) It turned out the motherboard had two SATA controllers, one of which worked properly and one which didn’t. I just moved the cables over.
Workaround for Gmail being blocked by “Temporary Error” in Firefox on Fedora (Obsolete) In this case it was a Fedora-specific issue, but it could be worked around by holding down shift and hitting reload.