If you’ve installed Linux on your MacBook Air, you’ve probably discovered that while most hardware works out of the box, the built-in FaceTime HD camera is notably absent from your video applications. Don’t worry—you’re not alone, and there’s a solution that doesn’t involve external USB webcams or complicated workarounds. The issue stems from Apple’s use […]
I have already blogged about managing KDE dotfiles with chezmoi and chezmoi_modify_manager. But what about maintaining them? For example, one of the KDE configuration files changes, and you want to update the version managed by chezmoi. Here’s an example where the Kate configuration file changed on the system and chezmoi detects that:
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❯ chezmoi status MM .config/katerc |
You can […]
Let’s install Ubuntu 25.04 on Apple Silicon (M1) in a virtual machine using UTM. We must first download an Ubuntu ISO for ARM. Go to https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop and search for “ARM 64-bit architecture”; if not available for the specific version you want to install, then you’ll have to install the Ubuntu Server and then install the “ubuntu-desktop” […]
On some computers, like the new Dell Pro Max Tower T2 and the old XPS 13, the SATA operation mode for the SSD is set to RAID by default. Linux will not be able to see the SSD in RAID mode: you need to change it to AHCI. If you just change it to AHCI […]
If you’re a KDE user who wants to keep your desktop configuration under version control, you’ve probably discovered that KDE’s configuration files can be quite challenging to manage with traditional dotfile tools. KDE stores settings in complex INI files that frequently change, contain system-specific data, and include sections you may not want to track. This […]
Let’s see what Eclipse looks like in Wayland in 2025. I report some screenshots of a few Wayland Window Managers and Desktop Environments. Sway Eclipse looks good in Sway: Hyprland The same can be said for Hyprland, especially now that the infamous bug has been solved: GNOME No problems on GNOME either; I’d expect that […]
I bought this laptop in late 2016. It’s still a good laptop (8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) and very light. However, I cannot use it with macOS anymore. I previously blogged on installing Ubuntu on my old MacBook Air. Everything mainly went smoothly, except for the WiFi, which was not working during and after the […]
Zram, https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html, is a Linux kernel module that creates a compressed block device in RAM. This device can be used as swap space or a general-purpose RAM disk. By compressing data in memory, zram allows your system to store more data in RAM, reducing the need to swap to slower disk storage and improving overall […]
Using “pip” is the supported installation method for Ansible and Molecule. Let’s install Python libraries and applications (in this case, Ansible and Molecule) in a Python virtual environment. (This post is similar to the one about Ubuntu.) First, install the required packages, including the Python virtual environment package:
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sudo pacman -S python-pip python-virtualenv |
Create a virtual environment somewhere (in […]
Using “pip” is the supported installation method for Ansible and Molecule. In Ubuntu, just using “pip” will lead to the error “externally-managed-environment” because of the Python environment that is “externally managed” by the package manager (this prevents direct use of pip for system-wide installations to avoid conflicts or issues). (This post is similar to the one […]
I bought this laptop in late 2016. It’s still a good laptop (8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) and very light. However, I cannot use it with macOS anymore. Let’s put Ubuntu Linux on the laptop! I’ll write the installation instructions and the configurations for a fully functional Ubuntu on this MacBook Air, which runs […]
I like the tracker service in Gnome, which indexes files so that you can easily search for them from the Activity view or the file manager. However, I don’t like tracker-extract, which also indexes the file contents: I use Recoll for such a service, and tracker-extract uses too much CPU (it indexes new or modified […]
Updated on 26 March 2025 with more screenshots about the new font. GNOME 48 has just been released on Arch Linux! (And thus, also on EndeavourOS). Unfortunately, many extensions have been turned off because they are not yet compatible (that’s quite usual with new versions of GNOME): The most critical one is the first one […]
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 the iPod. I have always liked Amarok, […]
I’ll briefly review the (currently in alpha 6) Cosmic DE in Pop Os 24.04 from System76 implemented in Rust. The installation is smooth and easy to follow, based on standard dialogs: I’m selecting “Clean Install” here because I’m testing it on a virtual machine. There’s also the chance to encrypt the drive, but I’m not […]
I haven’t blogged about the EndeavourOS installation for a while. Let’s have a look at the new EndeavourOS Mercury. I will install it with KDE Plasma into my LG Gram 16. The installer has been featuring KDE Plasma instead of Xfce for a while: Unfortunately, the screen isn’t automatically scaled, so it’s a bit too […]
Installing Nerd Fonts is easy in Arch Linux: they are in the official repositories. That’s not true for Ubuntu and Fedora. Of course, installing them in these distributions is also not complicated. Still, it is a manual procedure: download the font archive, extract it in a specific directory, and regenerate the font cache. That sounds […]
Ubuntu has forced the installation of Firefox and Thunderbird as snap packages for some time. I don’t like snap packages since they’re a bit slower to start, take much more space on the disk, and store the profile files into the “.snap” directory folder, while I want them in the standard place in my home […]
Up to now, I have shown how to get started with Sway with the initial configurations and some other configurations. Now, I’ll show how to install another status bar in Sway: Waybar (which is more powerful than the default Sway bar). Again, I’m going to do that for Arch Linux. As in the previous posts, […]
Let’s continue the Sway window manager (in Arch Linux) series I started in my previous post and continued in the other post. Screenshots We can use “grimshot”, part of sway-contrib, to take screenshots, which requires the main program for performing the actual screenshot, “grim”.
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sudo pacman -S sway-contrib grim |
By default, such utilities are installed in “/usr/share/sway-contrib”, which is […]