Tag Archives: linux

Speed Up Your Linux System with Zram

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 […]

Installing Ansible and Molecule in Arch Linux

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:

Create a virtual environment somewhere (in […]

Installing Ansible and Molecule in Ubuntu Linux

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 […]

Amarok is finally available on Flathub

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, […]

A first look at Pop!_OS Cosmic DE

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 […]

EndeavourOS Mercury

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 […]

My Ansible Role for Nerd Fonts

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 […]

Ansible tasks for installing Firefox and Thunderbird as DEB packages in Ubuntu

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 […]

Sway in Arch Linux: other configurations

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”.

By default, such utilities are installed in “/usr/share/sway-contrib”, which is […]

Sway WM: Notifications with Mako

Let’s continue the Sway window manager (in Arch Linux) series I started in my previous post. In this post, we deal with system notifications. (This post is similar to the corresponding one about Hyprland.) We use mako, a lightweight notification daemon for Wayland, one of the optional software suggested when we installed Sway. We also […]

Speeding up AUR package installations in Arch Linux

This post can be used for Arch Linux and EndeavourOS. Recently, a change was committed that highly compresses AUR packages before the actual installation. This takes a lot of time: even on a fast machine, installing something like Chrome or Visual Studio (AUR packages) takes even minutes just for the compression phase. Since I typically […]

Hyprland EndeavourOS on a PineBook Pro

After installing EndeavourOS on a PineBook Pro, I tried to use Hyprland on this PineBook Pro. Since I have already blogged about Hyprland a lot, I want to report that Hyprland runs smoothly on this PineBook Pro. I basically reused all my ricing and customizations that I blogged about in my previous posts about Hyprland. […]

Sway in Arch Linux: getting started

I’m starting a new blog series about Sway, a Wayland Tiling Window Manager (the Wayland version of i3). Though I’ve already blogged about Sway, this post (and a few future ones) are intended as “getting started tutorials”. I’ll focus on Sway in Arch, in particular, EndeavourOS. Let’s start by installing EndeavourOS with no graphical environment […]

Installing EndeavourOS ARM on a PineBook Pro (August 2024)

I have already blogged about installing EndeavourOS ARM on a PineBook Pro (and previously, directly Arch ARM: the first article and the second article). This blog post will describe the new procedure for installing EndeavourOS ARM on a PineBook Pro. As usual, the instructions can be found here: https://endeavouros.com/endeavouros-arm-install/. Previously, there used to be three possible […]

Eclipse in Hyprland 0.43

I hadn’t used Eclipse in Hyprland for a while. It used to work correctly; however, starting from somewhere in version 0.41, something broke, and it’s still broken in the current (at the time of writing) version 0.43. When I execute Eclipse in Hyprland, i.e., in Wayland mode, the trees in Eclipse, e.g., Package Explorer (but […]

Sway: monitor configuration for different computers

I’m using Sway (not as my daily driver) on different computers: PCs and laptops. For the PCs, I’m using an HDMI monitor. Laptops have different display sizes, e.g., small displays with low resolution and more extensive displays with retina resolution. Thus, I need to set different scaling factors for the different displays. It’s pretty easy […]