Ansible, Molecule, Docker and GitHub Actions

UPDATES: 19 February 2023: exclude ansible-lint problems on tests/test.yml 27 April 2023: updated the molecule docker plugin Last year, I got familiar with Ansible, the automation platform I now use to install and configure my Linux installations. I must thank Jeff Geerling and his excellent book “Ansible for DevOps“, which I highly recommend! I have […]

Installing Ubuntu Linux on an Acer Aspire Vero

As I wrote in this other article, I recently bought an Acer Aspire Vero, which I greatly enjoy. Of course, I immediately installed Linux on this machine. In this article, I’ll report my experience installing Ubuntu (Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu”) on this Acer Aspire Vero. Although nowadays I’m mainly an Arch Linux user, when installing […]

Installing Amarok on Arch Linux

I have always liked Amarok, the (initially) default KDE media player. It’s very feature-rich, nothing compared to Elisa. Moreover, it has two crucial features that I haven’t found in any other players: it saves statistics (play count and stars) directly into the music file it synchronizes statistics with iPod Unfortunately, while still maintained, you won’t […]

Installing Arch Linux the (not so) hard way

After using EndeavourOS, an Arch-based distro, for some time with much pleasure and appreciating Arch mechanisms (packages and AUR), I decided it was time to try the “real thing” and install Arch the “hard way” 🙂 Spoiler: it’s not that hard! I thought it was hard. For sure, it’s more complicated than other distro installation […]

Enabling Hibernation in EndeavourOS (with dracut)

EndeavourOS is an Arch-based Linux distro, so the technique for enabling hibernation for an Arch-based distro should work out of the box. That was true until the new ISO released this December, “Cassini”, where they switched from “mkinitcpio” to “dracut”. Now, a few things must be adapted to make hibernation work in EndeavourOS, and the […]

Acer Aspire Vero, Unboxing and First Impressions

During the last “Black Friday,” I bought this laptop: Acer Aspire AV15-51-58J2 39,6 cm (15.6″) Full HD Intel® Core™ i5 16 GB DDR4-SDRAM 512 GB SSD Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) Windows 11 Home. (Intel Evo certified, by the way) I paid 599 instead of 899 euros, that’s a significant discount (especially for its features, mentioned above […]

Installing Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro (external storage)

This post will describe my experience installing Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro on external storage (USB stick in this example). Thus, the Manjaro default installation on the eMMC will not be touched. You should use a fast USB Stick, or the overall experience will be extremely slow. I’m using a SanDisk Extreme PRO, which […]

Maven profiles that are really active by default

While working on my TDD book, I played with Maven profiles to write the chapter. If you use Maven profiles, you might want to use an activation strategy to enable the profile under certain circumstances automatically. There’s also a particular option, “<activeByDefault>”, which seems self-explanatory. This must mean that that profile will be constantly active […]

Developing Ansible roles on a PineBook Pro with Gitpod

In a previous post, I showed an example of an Ansible role tested with Molecule and Docker using the Gitpod development environment. With such an approach, you develop using Visual Studio code on your browser. Resources and computational power is provided by Gitpod, not by your computer. When your computer is a PineBook Pro, an […]

The Overview effect got better in KDE 5.26

I’ve updated KDE to version 5.26, which arrived in Linux Arch. In particular, I’m testing this new version in my XeroLinux installation. One of the improvements that caught me immediately was how this version’s Overview effect has improved! In the previous version (KDE 5.25), the Overview allowed to search both in applications and in currently […]

Timeshift and grub-btrfs in Ubuntu

UPDATED 22/Dec/2022, ChangeLog: 22/Dec/2022: added the flag “-czstd” for defragmentation and compression. 20/Nov/2022: documented the new version of grub-btrfs and its new grub-btrfsd daemon; the configuration for Timeshift is much simpler, but you have to install another package: inotify-tools. 17/Nov/2022: documented that I could also create additional subvolumes and move existing contents from the running […]

Taming KDE baloo

Quoting from https://community.kde.org/Baloo, Baloo is the file indexing and file search framework for KDE Plasma, with a focus on providing a very small memory footprint along with extremely fast searching. Unfortunately, it has a bad reputation for being a resource hog. However, it all boils down to configuring it appropriately (of course, according to your […]

Fixing Docker problems in Fedora

In this post, I’ll describe a few problems with Docker in Fedora and how to fix them. In particular, I’ll try to provide an analysis of the problems and the sources of the solutions. I’ve experienced a few problems with Docker in Fedora (35 and 36). I first installed docker-ce by following the official documentation: […]

VirtualBox in Fedora Linux

I have no problem installing VirtualBox and the related tools and extensions in Ubuntu and Arch. In Fedora, things are a little bit harder. First, I think it’s better NOT to download binaries distributed by VirtualBox: I’m using Fedora packages that are available from RPM Fusion Free. Thus, first of all, you have to enable […]

Again woes for KDE and Google Accounts

TL;DR If you want to access your Google Calendars from Korganizer or Kalendar, remember to enable “Enable the KDE wallet subsystem”. I had already written about the cumbersome procedure to access Google accounts in KDE, and I thought I had learned enough to “easily” set my Google calendars in KDE. I was wrong. Today I […]