When gthumb hangs during startup after connecting an iPhone, external drive, or other USB device, the issue typically stems from gthumb attempting to enumerate mounted storage devices during initialization. Certain filesystem states, permissions misconfigurations, or slow I/O can cause the process to block indefinitely. Quick fix: unmount the device The most straightforward solution is to…
dd is a powerful utility for reading and writing raw data to block devices. While it’s a Linux standard, you have several options for using it on Windows systems. WSL2: The Modern Approach For Windows 10 (21H2+) and Windows 11, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) is the best choice. It provides a full Linux…
If you’re working with legacy BIOS systems and MBR partition tables, Fedora’s installer can sometimes misdetect your firmware mode and attempt UEFI/GPT setup on hardware that only supports legacy BIOS. This guide covers the proper approach for Fedora 39+ on MBR systems. Prerequisites Before starting, verify your system configuration: Boot the installer in legacy BIOS…
If you need to boot Windows from the GRUB2 command line—whether during troubleshooting, recovery, or when your boot configuration is broken—you can do it with a few commands. This guide covers both BIOS and UEFI systems. Quick boot for BIOS systems Assuming Windows is installed on the first partition of the first disk in NTFS…
If you want Emacs to run in the terminal without opening an X window, you have several practical options depending on your setup and workflow. Option 1: Install emacs-nox (Recommended for servers) The cleanest approach is installing the no-X variant of Emacs, which is built without X11 support. This reduces memory overhead and startup time…
For any current Windows system, netsh winhttp is the standard command-line tool for proxy configuration. WinHTTP handles system-level proxy settings used by Windows Update, built-in applications, and services that don’t rely on browser-specific configuration. Set a proxy with bypass list netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server=”proxy.example.com:8080″ bypass-list=”localhost;127.0.0.1;*.internal.local” Use semicolons to separate multiple proxy servers or bypass…
When network interfaces fail or behave unexpectedly, you need to inspect driver details, hardware state, and kernel messages. Here’s the practical toolkit for diagnosing network hardware and driver issues. Kernel Messages and Logs Start by checking kernel logs where driver initialization and errors are recorded: dmesg | grep -i network dmesg | grep -i driver…
When you need to identify which package installed a command on your Fedora system, you have several reliable methods depending on whether the package is already installed. Quick lookup for installed commands The fastest approach combines which to locate the command with rpm to query the owning package: $ rpm -qf $(which ping) iputils-8.40-4.fc40.x86_64 The…
Fedora upgrades are straightforward with dnf system-upgrade, the standard tool for network-based distribution upgrades. This replaces the older fedup tool and handles everything from downloading packages to managing the upgrade environment. Pre-Upgrade Checklist Before starting any upgrade: Update your current system: sudo dnf upgrade Back up critical data — especially /etc, home directories, and application…
The most reliable one-liner to count files in the current directory is: find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | wc -l This counts only regular files (not directories or symlinks) and handles edge cases that trip up simpler approaches. Why Not Use ls | wc -l? The common ls | wc -l command has several…
The @ symbol in Makefiles suppresses the echo of the command itself before execution. When you run a target, make normally prints each command to stdout before running it. Adding @ before a command hides that echo, showing only the command’s output. Basic example Without @: all: echo “For correctness test of basic get and…
If you need direct control over your firewall rules, you can disable firewalld and use iptables instead. This guide covers the setup process and best practices for maintaining persistent rules. Stop and disable firewalld If firewalld is currently running, stop it and prevent it from starting on boot: sudo systemctl stop firewalld sudo systemctl disable…
Fedora uses FirewallD as its default firewall management service. If you’re running servers in a trusted internal cluster or isolated environment where network-level filtering isn’t needed, you can disable it entirely. Stop and Disable FirewallD To completely disable the firewall: sudo systemctl stop firewalld sudo systemctl disable firewalld The stop command halts the service immediately….
When your HP printer runs out of paper mid-job on Linux, the print queue pauses and won’t resume automatically once you reload paper. You need to either clear the error state physically or use CUPS commands to resume printing. Physical Reset Method The quickest approach for most HP printers is to trigger the paper-detect sensor:…
Exit codes are how programs communicate success or failure to the shell and parent processes. Understanding them is essential for writing reliable scripts and debugging applications. Linux and Windows handle these differently, so knowing both conventions matters if you work across platforms. Linux Exit Codes On Linux, the convention is simple: 0 means success, 1–255…
When you need to download large files faster, parallelizing across multiple connections can significantly improve throughput. Standard tools like wget and curl use single connections by default, but several alternatives support multi-connection downloads that can achieve 3-5x speedups on capable networks. aria2c aria2 is the most powerful option. It handles HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent, and…
Parsing directory and filename components from an absolute path is a common task in systems programming. Linux provides dirname() and basename() functions for this purpose, but they have implementation-specific behaviors that can cause bugs if you’re not careful. Using dirname() and basename() The POSIX standard defines both functions, though the implementations vary. Here’s the safest…
When converting PostScript to PDF using ps2pdf with certain PDFSETTINGS options, you may hit this error: GPL Ghostscript 9.10: Set UseCIEColor for UseDeviceIndependentColor to work properly. Unrecoverable error: stackunderflow in .setdistillerparams This occurs when Ghostscript’s internal stack runs out of expected values during PDF distiller parameter processing. The root cause is usually conflicting color space…
The lp command is the standard tool for printing from the Linux command line. It interfaces with CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), the printing backbone on virtually all modern Linux distributions. Basic Printing Send a file to your default printer: lp text-file.txt Specify a particular printer: lp -d printer-name text-file.txt List available printers and identify…
The nl command is purpose-built for adding line numbers to text files: nl text-file By default, nl numbers all non-empty lines and skips blank lines. This behavior is controlled by the body section style, which defaults to t (text only). Common nl options Number all lines including blanks: nl -ba text-file Start numbering at a…