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MPlayer reached end-of-life years ago. Its active fork, mpv, maintains all screenshot functionality with identical or simpler syntax. This guide covers mpv, which handles both single captures and burst sequences. Enable Screenshot Support Screenshot support is built into mpv by default — no filter loading required. However, you can customize behavior by adding configuration to…
Running 32-bit Firefox on a 64-bit Linux system is less common than it used to be, but there are still valid reasons: testing web compatibility across architectures, supporting legacy plugins, or working with older systems. This guide covers Fedora and RHEL-based systems, though the core approach applies to other distributions. Prerequisites Ensure you have multilib…
Mistakes happen during development. Git provides several commands to undo changes at different stages—before committing, after committing, or in specific files. Understanding which tool to use depends on where you are in the workflow. Revert the entire working tree before committing If you’ve made changes to multiple files and want to discard everything back to…
The uptime command is the quickest way to check how long your system has been running: $ uptime 22:19:29 up 10 days, 22:26, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.01 This output shows: Current time: 22:19:29 System running for: 10 days, 22 hours, 26 minutes Active user sessions: 5 Load averages: 1-minute, 5-minute, and 15-minute…
PuTTY remains a solid choice for SSH access from Windows. It’s lightweight, portable (no installation required), and handles key-based authentication well. Download the .exe version for portability. For a more modern terminal experience, Git Bash (included with Git for Windows) gives you native OpenSSH on Windows. If you’re on Windows 10+, the built-in OpenSSH client…
Connecting servers with internal IPs across multiple clusters over the internet is a common infrastructure requirement. While a traditional VPN is the standard approach, you can implement similar functionality using iptables and Network Address Translation (NAT) rules, often with lower overhead than VPN solutions. This method works by forwarding traffic between clusters at the IP…
pgrep and pkill are essential tools for finding and signaling processes by name and attributes. They’re far more precise than grepping ps output and should be your go-to for process management scripts and one-liners. pgrep: Find Process IDs pgrep searches running processes and outputs matching PIDs. All selection criteria must match unless you use alternatives…
Fedora’s default font rendering can look subpar, particularly on laptops with standard LCD screens. TrueType bytecode interpreter (BCI) support significantly improves rendering quality, but licensing restrictions have kept it disabled in Fedora’s default FreeType builds. The TrueType bytecode patents expired years ago, so BCI is now safe to enable. While FreeType 2.13+ ships with BCI…
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) lets you combine multiple physical disks into flexible storage pools. This guide covers creating a volume group from multiple disk partitions—a common setup for servers that need flexible storage allocation across Xen guests, databases, or other demanding workloads. Prerequisites This assumes you have two or more unformatted disk devices available. In…
LVM logical volumes are a practical choice for Xen guest storage. They support dynamic resizing, snapshots, and efficient cloning — capabilities that make capacity management and guest provisioning straightforward compared to fixed disk images. This guide covers creating and configuring LVM-backed virtual block devices (VBDs) for Xen DomU instances. Creating the logical volume Start with…
LVM snapshots provide an efficient way to duplicate virtual machines in seconds rather than minutes. Instead of copying an entire filesystem, snapshots leverage copy-on-write semantics—physical blocks are only duplicated when the source or snapshot is modified. This approach works well for any LVM-backed virtualization platform, though Xen is used here as an example. Note: Xen…
Xen remains a production hypervisor used by AWS EC2, Citrix Hypervisor, and other cloud providers, though most general-purpose Linux distributions have shifted toward KVM as their default. If you’re working with Xen in production or developing drivers, understanding its source code layout is essential. Top-Level Directory Structure The Xen source repository (hosted on xenbits.xen.org) is…
LVM snapshots provide a fast, efficient way to duplicate virtual machines across servers. This technique applies to any LVM-backed hypervisor including Xen, KVM, and Proxmox. The process uses LVM snapshots on the source server, then transfers the snapshot image to the destination using standard Unix tools. Scenario Source server: 10.0.0.10 with VM stored in /dev/vg_xen/vm-10.0.0.123…
Building and maintaining Linux clusters requires coordinated management of user accounts, storage, networking, and services across multiple machines. This guide covers practical approaches to common clustering challenges, from unified authentication to network isolation. Account and Storage Management Unified Authentication and Home Directories Centralizing user management across cluster nodes eliminates the overhead of maintaining individual user…
The firmware (BIOS/UEFI) on your system contains critical hardware settings and boot information. Knowing your firmware version is essential for updates, compatibility checks, and troubleshooting. Here’s how to find it. Using dmidecode dmidecode is the standard tool for reading the Desktop Management Interface (DMI) table, which stores hardware and firmware metadata. Most distributions include it,…
Xen remains a production-grade hypervisor used in enterprise environments (AWS EC2, Citrix Hypervisor), though KVM has become the default for most Linux distributions. This guide covers building a stable Xen Dom0 on current Fedora releases using modern kernel sources. Hardware Considerations This guide assumes server-class hardware with: Intel or AMD processor with virtualization extensions (VT-x…
GNOME has hidden a few playful easter eggs in its desktop environment over the years. Two of the most well-known are “Free the Fish” and “Wanda the Fish” — small animated features that surprise unsuspecting users. Free the Fish (GNOME 2) In GNOME 2, pressing Alt+F2 and running this command: free the fish releases a…
A Fedora Live USB lets you boot directly into a Fedora environment without modifying your hard drive. You can use it to test Fedora, troubleshoot your system, or perform a fresh installation. This guide covers modern tools and workflows for creating bootable USB media. Back up any data on your USB stick first — the…
This post covers Xen virtualization benchmarks from 2013. While Xen remains in production use (AWS EC2, Citrix Hypervisor), KVM has become the default hypervisor for most Linux distributions. For current production environments, evaluate KVM with libvirt, direct container solutions (Docker, Kubernetes), or cloud-native platforms. This post is preserved for historical reference and understanding legacy Xen…
Xen remains relevant in production environments (AWS EC2, Citrix Hypervisor), though KVM has become the default for most Linux distributions. This guide covers frequent installation and configuration issues specific to Fedora Dom0 setups, with many tips applicable to other Linux platforms. BIOS Configuration If Xen fails with “I/O virtualization disabled,” you need to enable virtualization…