Category Archives: Tutorials

Using Dropbox on a PineBook Pro with Maestral

Dropbox does not provide a client for the Linux Arm architecture, so you don’t have a client for a PineBook Pro. However, you can use the open-source project Maestral: Maestral is a lightweight Dropbox client for macOS and Linux. It provides powerful command line tools, supports gitignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing and […]

Network Printers Discovery in Arch Linux

In Arch Linux (and Arch-based distros like EndeavourOS), it’s easy to add a network printer if you already know its address. Still, network printer discovery does not work out of the box as it happens on other distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu. The procedure to enable network printer discovery is, of course, documented in the […]

Ansible, Molecule, Docker and GitHub Actions

UPDATES: 19 February 2023: exclude ansible-lint problems on tests/test.yml 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 already started blogging about Ansible and its testing […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

SSH into a VirtualBox machine

I use VirtualBox a lot for testing purposes, mainly to experiment with a Linux distribution (to see whether it’s worthwhile to install it on bare metal) and to test procedures that might involve some complex (and maybe “dangerous”) operations. After you install VirtualBox Guest Additions, things like bidirectional copy-and-paste will work. Some distributions seem to […]

Enabling Hibernation in Arch-based distros

I had already posted about enabling hibernation in Linux, particularly in Ubuntu. Thanks to the script hibernator, the procedure is much more straightforward in Arch-based distros (including Manjaro and EndeavourOS). First of all, make sure you first install the package update-grub. The package hibernator is available from AUR, but currently, there’s a problem with the […]

Timeshift and grub-btrfs in Linux Arch

UPDATED 02/Jan/2023, ChangeLog: 02/Jan/2023: documented that the new version of grub-btrfs is now an official package (you still have to install another package: inotify-tools); 02/Dec/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. After looking at the […]

Multibooting with GRUB

4th July, updated with BTRFS installations. Besides Windows (which I rarely use) on my computers, I have a few Linux distributions. Grub 2 does a good job in booting Windows and Linux, especially thanks to os-prober, in autodetecting other operating systems in other partitions of the same computer. However, there are a few “buts” in this […]

Getting started with KVM and Virtual Machine Manager

After playing with VirtualBox (see my posts), I’ve decided to try also KVM (based on QEMU) and Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager). The installation is straightforward. In Ubuntu systems:

In Arch-based systems:

Then, you need to add your user to the corresponding group:

Reboot, and you’re good to go. In this post, I’m […]

How to install Linux on a USB drive with UEFI support using VirtualBox

That’s the third post on installing Linux on a USB drive! Remember that the idea is to have a USB drive that will work as a portable Linux operating system on any computer. In the first post, How to install Linux on a USB drive using Virtualbox, the USB drive with Linux installed could be […]

Accessing Google Online Account from GNOME and KDE

In this post, I’d like to share my experiences in setting a Google Online Account in GNOME and KDE. Actually, I have more than one Google account, and the procedures I show can be repeated for all your Google accounts. First, a disclaimer: I’ve always loved KDE and I’ve used that since version 3. Lately, […]