Restoring GNOME Session State GNOME can automatically restore your session—reopening all applications and windows that were running when you last logged out. This differs from autostart scripts, which launch specific programs on every login regardless of what was running before. Automatic Session Restoration To enable automatic session restoration in GNOME: Open Settings → General (or…
Using the OCaml Toplevel with Readline Support The default OCaml toplevel lacks basic readline features like history, line editing, and command completion. Here are the practical approaches to fix this. utop: Full-Featured Replacement The best option for daily interactive OCaml work is utop, a replacement toplevel that provides: Syntax highlighting with color output Command completion…
Restarting GNOME without closing running applications If you need to restart GNOME while keeping your applications open, you have several options depending on your GNOME version and setup. Quick restart with Alt+F2 The fastest method is to use GNOME’s run dialog: Press Alt + F2 Type r and press Enter This restarts the GNOME shell…
Converting and installing .deb packages on Fedora Fedora uses RPM packages managed by DNF, but you’ll occasionally encounter software distributed only as .deb files (Debian format). You have several options: convert the .deb to RPM, extract and repackage it, or use containerization. Here’s what works in practice. Using alien to convert .deb to RPM The…
Using Your iPhone as a Wireless Mouse on Linux Your iPhone’s touchscreen can serve as a remote input device for your Linux desktop or laptop. Here are the most practical approaches. WiFi Mouse Method The WiFi Mouse application lets you control your Linux system’s cursor and clicks from your iPhone over a local network. Setup:…
Finding Photo Timestamps on iPhone iPhone’s Photos app doesn’t display EXIF metadata by default, but the timestamp information is embedded in every photo. You need to access the EXIF data to see when a photo was actually taken. Using the Photos App (Built-in) Starting with iOS 15+, Apple added some native EXIF viewing directly in…
Adding an existing user to an existing group Use usermod to add a user to supplementary groups. The -a (append) flag is critical — without it, you’ll remove the user from all groups not explicitly listed. usermod -a -G group_name user_name To add a user to multiple groups at once: usermod -a -G group1,group2,group3 user_name…
Static Linking with GCC and Clang Static linking embeds all library code directly into your executable, eliminating runtime dependencies on shared libraries. This approach trades disk space for portability and eliminates “library not found” errors at runtime. Basic Static Compilation To statically link a simple C program, use the -static flag: gcc -static -o myprogram…
Locating and Modifying the Mingle Forum Canonical Link Class If you’re working with Mingle Forum and need to remove canonical links from forum pages while preserving them elsewhere, you’ll need to locate the specific code in your theme’s class file. Finding the Code Reference The line numbers (like -1260) in a diff refer to specific…
Adding Social Share Icons to Question2Answer The Question2Answer (Q2A) Share plugin enables social sharing functionality for questions and answers on your Q2A installation. This guide covers installation and configuration. Installation First, download the plugin from the official repository: cd /path/to/your/q2a/qa-plugins git clone https://github.com/NoahY/q2a-share.git q2a-share Alternatively, download the ZIP file from GitHub and extract it directly…
Remote GNOME Session Control via SSH Controlling a GNOME desktop remotely—locking the display, activating the screensaver, or blanking the screen—requires you to interact with the running GNOME session. The approach depends on your GNOME version and what you’re trying to accomplish. Using systemd User Sessions and D-Bus Modern GNOME (3.30+) uses systemd user sessions and…
Setting Up Social Login for Question2Answer Question2Answer doesn’t include built-in social authentication out of the box, but several community solutions make it straightforward to add OAuth integrations for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID providers. Modern Approach: Question2Answer Open Login The recommended path is using Question2Answer Open Login, a maintained plugin that handles multiple OAuth2 providers…
Changing audio tracks in MKV files MKV (Matroska) containers frequently contain multiple audio tracks. You can cycle through them during playback using keyboard shortcuts. Using mplayer Press # to cycle through available audio tracks while the video is playing. This works for MKV, AVI, MPEG, and other container formats that mplayer supports. mplayer video.mkv #…
Flash Support in Chrome on Linux — 2026 Reality Check If you’re still seeing Chrome warnings about Flash Player being out of date on Linux, understand that Adobe discontinued Flash Player entirely in December 2020. Chrome removed all Flash support in version 88 (early 2021) and has no mechanism to run Flash content anymore. If…
Cherry-picking specific commits between branches You have two branches with diverging histories and need to apply only certain commits from one branch to another. Git’s cherry-pick command lets you do exactly that. The scenario Say you have: dev branch: c0 → c1 → c2 → c3 → c4 master branch: c0 → c5 → c6…
Setting up an SSH Proxy on Windows SSH tunneling is one of the most reliable ways to create a secure proxy on Windows. You can route traffic through a remote SSH server, encrypting your connection and bypassing local network restrictions. Prerequisites You’ll need: An SSH server with valid credentials An SSH client (Windows 10/11 includes…
Native Completion vs Plugins Vim ships with built-in completion that many people don’t fully leverage. Before reaching for plugins, understand what’s already available: Ctrl+N / Ctrl+P: Basic keyword completion from open buffers and loaded files Ctrl+X Ctrl+F: Filename completion Ctrl+X Ctrl+]: Tag completion (requires ctags) Ctrl+X Ctrl+O: Omnicompletion (language-aware, when available) The omnicompletion (Ctrl+X Ctrl+O)…
Managing Vim Plugins The default Vim plugin directory structure under ~/.vim is inherently messy. Without a plugin manager, files from different plugins scatter across autoload/, plugin/, ftplugin/, colors/, and other directories, making it difficult to track which files belong to which plugin. Removing a plugin requires manually hunting down and deleting its files across multiple…
Reverting a merge in Git If you’ve merged a branch and want to undo it, Git provides several approaches depending on your situation. The key difference is whether you have uncommitted local changes and whether the merge has already been pushed. Using git reset for unpushed merges If the merge is only in your local…
Installing PHP with Apache on Fedora This guide covers setting up PHP with Apache’s httpd on Fedora systems. The setup provides standard PHP support suitable for most development and production environments. Install Apache httpd Start by installing the Apache web server package: sudo dnf install httpd On Fedora 22 and later, dnf is the default…