Quick links to some useful software on Windows including Web browsers, Video/audio player and ssh/scpsftp/vnc tools for connecting to Linux. ssh/scp/sftp/vnc for connecting to Linux For Linux users, it is sometimes unavoidably to use Windows. With Windows, the Linux users will need to connect to Linux for some tasks. Some general software are needed. The…
The encoding of x86 and x86-64 instructions is well documented in Intel or AMD’s manuals. However, they are not quite easy for beginners to start with to learn encoding of the x86-64 instructions. In this post, I will give a list of useful manuals for understanding and studying the x86-64 instruction encoding, a brief introduction…
The metadata checkpointing in HDFS is done by the Secondary NameNode to merge the fsimage and the edits log files periodically and keep edits log size within a limit. For various reasons, the checkpointing by the Secondary NameNode may fail. For one example, HDFS SecondaraNameNode log shows errors in its log as follows. 2017-08-06 10:54:14,488…
This post introduces how to install a paravirtualized CentOS 7 DomU on Xen. The very common way of installing DomU does not work for CentOS 7. A little trick to set the repository and the network used by the VM should be used by adding a setting strings to the “extra=” field for this VM….
The USB standards have evolved to 3.1 and the supported throughput have been increased too. On Linux, the support to USB standards are following the standards development. In this post, we will survey the standards that common hardware support and the support in Linux. USB standards USB 2.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB_2.0 Speed: <= 60MB/s, or 480 Mbps…
Building Linux kernel may sound a complex and geek-only thing. However, as Linux kernel itself has much less depended tools/packages compared to other software packages, it is quite easy to compile, build and install a Linux kernel from the source code in an existing Linux OS. Building Linux kernel is needed if you need to…
There are many Vim tutorials and Vim tips on the Web. However, I find the vimtutor provides the best tutorial among those so far as I found on the Web while the vimtutor seems usually reachable from a terminal which is not obviously known to Vim beginners who are usually Linux beginners too. This page…
Gnome Shell has a clean design. But many users want to get more from the desktop environment. Gnome 3’s extension system can help users customize the Gnome Shell’s look greatly. In this post, we summarize 6 extensions we considered essential to make Gnome Shell great. AlternateTab Make Alt-Tab “classic” instead of grouping windows by application….
Since version 7, RHEL has only x86-64 versions. The same thing happens to CentOS 7. In CentOS 7/EPEL, there is only package for Wine x86-64. However, many Windows .exe files are 32-bit. Even there are 64-bit versions for some software, their installation file is 32-bit. And for some certain software such as Office 2007, 32-bit…
CentOS is a super solid Linux distro. However, its default repository’s packages are limited compared to Fedora. Even Fedora needs some additional repositories to have software packages for daily usage, such as MPlayer, ffmpeg. Fortunately, some community maintained repositories provides these software. In this post, we introduce theses additional common repositories and how to install…
Many Linux distros, such as RHEL/CentOS 7, Fedora, Ubuntu 16, are now using systemd instead of init as the init system. It is common for Linux users to set Linux to boot to “GUI” or “Text” mode. The old way of changing ‘/etc/inittab’ for choosing Linux runlevels is not working for sytemd. This post will…
People are sometimes given access to Linux/Unix and asked to change their initial passwords. But for beginners, changing a Linux/Unix password is not an easy task, especially when there is only SSH log on allowed to the Linux/Unix server. This post introduces how to change password of user USER on host HOST remotely using SSH….
Linux may report “device is busy” when we try to umount a filesystem. This behavior is reasonable as it can help us avoid data loss by disallowing unmouting a filesystem when it is being used. But for situations when we are sure there is something wrong happened or we care not data lost such as…
Attaching a USB keyboard to a laptop is common when using a laptop because a normal keyboard may provide a more convenient typing experience. The laptop keyboard is not used in these situations. However, the laptop keyboard may still be touched by accident. In this post, we will discuss how to disable and enable the…
Junk Emails, or Email spams, are annoying and they cost time to deal with. While they are something we need to cope with, we can use tools to help us. Thunderbird has an adaptive junk filter that can learn from user’s actions to identify junk messages. I find that Thunderbird default settings are not fully…
Bash script may need to get its own path. In normal Bash script, $0 is the path to the script. However, when a script is sourced, such as . a.sh, a.sh‘s $0 does not give a.sh while the caller’s name. How to reliably get a bash script’s own path no matter whether the Bash script…
How to set the static IP address for CentOS 7/Fedora 22+ is introduced in this post. Here, we assume the Linux is using NetworkManager to manage the network. All steps are done as root. Find the interface you want to set the address Command ifconfig -a lists all interfaces. Find the interface name to set,…
It is common to execute commands on many nodes/hosts via SSH for managing a cluster of Linux servers. On Linux, there are many choices for this task. Generally, to run commands on many nodes, there are two modes: serial mode and parallel mode. In serial mode, the command is executed on the node one by…
In Firefox on Linux Mint, Google is not in the default list of search engines. Linux Mint has its criteria for adding search engines while Google seems not in those suggested by Linux Mint because “Amongst commercial search engines, only the ones which share with Linux Mint the revenue Linux Mint users generate for them…
Linux is a great platform for software development targeting servers or backends. In general, working on Linux is very productive. The problem that beginners on Linux face is the the learning curve is steep at the beginning. But believe me, after you get through the initial green steep learning step as in the figure below…