Category Archives: Tutorials

Hyprland and notifications with mako

Here’s another post on how to get started with Hyprland. This time, we’ll see how to configure notifications with mako, a lightweight notification daemon for Wayland, which also works with Hyprland. (you might also want to consider and experiment with an alternative: dunst). If you followed my previous tutorials, you have no notification daemon installed. […]

Hyprland: getting started (part 2)

This is the second blog post on getting started with Hyprland (see the first post here). In this article, we install and configure a few other tools. We will also look at the customization of keyboard shortcuts. Other tools As noted here https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/Must-have/, you need an Authentication Agent: Authentication agents are the things that pop […]

Installing Arch Linux with BTRFS on a PineBook Pro (external storage)

This is a follow-up to the article Installing Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro (external storage); differently from the previous post, this one is based on more automatic mechanisms, so it will be easier to copy and paste commands once a few variables have been correctly and carefully set. Moreover, in this post, I’ll install […]

KVM Virtual Machine Manager and Virtual Machines on external drives

Last year, I blogged about my first experiences with KVM and Virtual Machine Manager. Then, I stopped using KVM because I’ve always found VirtualBox easier for my experiments. In particular, with VirtualBox, it is trivial to store virtual machines on an external drive (I mean, a fast external SD, of course): you specify to use […]

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 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 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 […]