Sparse files are common in Linux/Unix and are also supported by Windows (e.g. NTFS) and macOSes (e.g. HFS+). Sparse files uses storage efficiently when the files have a lot of holes (contiguous ranges of bytes having the value of zero) by storing only metadata for the holes instead of using real disk blocks. They are […]
Posts on Software
Posts related to software on Linux, Unix, iPhone, Windows and more.
68 posts in total.
Where Does Evolution Save Its Data and Configuration Files on Linux?
Evolution is a great personal information management tool that provides Email, address book and calendar tools. Evolution provides many enterprise friendly feature such as native support to Microsoft Exchange connectivity for Emails, address books and calendars. Evolution uses various ways including plain files and dconf configuration systems. This post will give an introduction to the […]
A List of Common Software on Windows
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. […]
How to Compile and Install Linux Kernel from the Source Code in an Existing Linux OS
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 […]
Make Better Decisions for Your Businesses with Data Visualization
In today’s time, data visualization has become a significant part of the success story of an organization. With the help of right techniques, visualizing data can reveal insights which the management staff can use in their decision-making in order to make sound data-driven decisions. Mapping software is among the robust data visualization tools that you […]
Are You Wanting to Learn a Programming Language? Read Before Your Make a Choice
Making a career choice is difficult. And, if you have decided on becoming a programmer, the difficulty is just beginning. The most important thing is to first decide the language that you want to learn and this is often the most difficult decision. The good part is that you know you need to focus on […]
Vim Tutorial for Beginners: vimtutor
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 […]
How to convert Managed Solution into Unmanaged for On-Premise CRM organisation?
Solution is very important part of Dynamics CRM. In order to deploy your customization, solution is the only bridge which help you to achieve your goal. There are two types of solutions available in CRM: Managed and Unmanaged. Managed Solutions: This is the solutions that you can import and publish only. You neither export it nor you can […]
How to Install Wine 32-bit on CentOS 7
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 […]
How to Change Systemd Boot Target on Linux
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 […]
How to Automatically Move Junk Emails to The Junk Folder in Thunderbird
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 […]
How to Change the DPI of Images Exported from Slides in PowerPoint
PowerPoint uses 96 dots per inch (dpi) by default when you export a slide. The DPI of the images like .tif ones exported from PowerPoint are always 96. In the options of PowerPoint, there is a setting for choosing DPIs. However, it have no effect. For some needs like images for printing posters, larger DPIs […]
How to Configure the Latest Version of Flash on Firefox for Linux: by the Fresh Player Plugin
As you may know, Adobe stopped supporting the NPAPI version of Flash on Linux and the latest NPAPI version of Flash player at version 11.2 released back in 2012 will only receive security fixes. Even the security fixes to the 11.2 version of the Flash Plugin your Firefox is using will end on May 4, […]
How to Keep Linux SSH Session Alive from Disconnecting – Server and Client Side Fixes
SSH is a very common tool for Linux/Unix platforms. One annoying problem when using SSH is that the connection may get disconnected if the SSH connection is idle for some time under common configurations. Users may run an infinite loop like while true; do uptime; sleep 30; done when there is no work to be […]
Which Checksum Tool on Linux is Faster?
It is common practice to calculate the checksums for files to check its integrity. For large files, the checksum computation is slow. Now I am wondering why it is so slow and whether choosing another tool will be better. In this post, I try three common tools md5sum, sha1sum and crc32 to compute checksums on […]
Running a Command Upon Files or Directories Changes on Linux
Doing actions upon changes of files and directories is very useful. Examples like compiling a project after the source code files are changed, sending emails after important configuration files are modified, building the PDF after a TeX file is modified. On Linux, the inotify-tools provide good support for trigger actions after changes. In this post, […]
How to Configure Scanner in an HP All-In-One Printer on Linux?
The hplip packages contains all the tools you need to set up the HP scanner. For scanning, you may use the sane and xsane tools. The tricky part to enable the scanner is carefully choose which driver to use from the hplip package. If you choose a non-suitable driver, only the printer will work and […]
How to Regenerate Grub2 Config Files on Linux
Grub2 config file may need to be re-generated after changing Grub2 configurations such as configuration changes and setting default boot entries. The Grub2’s config file may be at different locations depending on your Linux distro and whether your Linux is booted in BIOS or UEFI mode. This makes regenerating Grub2 config file not easy for […]
Getting Rid of DTS/AC3 Audio using ffmpeg on Linux to Play MKV Files on iOS or Android
I encountered the problem on iPhone that MKV video files with AC3 are played with no sound. The OPlayer reports to me that “According to DTS patent, DTS is forbidden to play , None of the media player on iPhone/iPad can play DTS”. However, the video file can be played in MPlayer on Linux just […]
Profiling Vim to Find Out Which Plugin Makes Vim Slow
Vim is pretty fast and powerful. However, the core of Vim is (yet) single-threaded (some discussions and tries on porting Vim to be multi-threading, but not yet there). This means some functions that are slow will block Vim there and you have to wait for it. While Vim is fast, some plugins are not. When […]
