It is common that the root disk space is not enough when running a Virtual Machine in the cloud such as Amazon Web Service (AWS). The cloud storage usually provides tools or facilities to enlarge a virtual disk size. However, to make the Linux recognize and and use the enlarged disks without rebooting the OS,…
Google Drive is a nice cloud storage service. It provides a suite of nice online document spreadsheet and slide editors Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides. The collaborative editing and full history tracking features of Google Docs are excellent. Google Drive gives 16GB free storage which is pretty much larger compared to other free…
date command on Linux gets the date and time in the system timezone. But how to get date and time using date command from another timezone in Linux? You can make date print the time of another timezone by setting the TZ environment variable. For example, export TZ=Hongkong; date Sat Dec 1 09:39:13 HKT 2018…
In GNOME 3 “Settings” -> “Devices” -> “Mouse & Touchpad”, after setting “Natural scrolling” to On, the scrolling is still as the same before (non-natural). How to fix this? This is likely related to the X11 driver. Remove the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics driver if it is installed. And install the xorg-x11-drv-libinput driver if it is not installed….
How to install the GNOME 3 (gnome-shell) desktop environment in Ubuntu MATE 18.04? To install gnome3 to Ubuntu, install these packages sudo apt install gnome-session gdm3 ubuntu-desktop During installation, the installation tools will let you choose the default display manager. You may choose gdm3. Then reboot you Ubuntu Linux and gdm3 will be shown. Click…
Zlib is a popular open-source compression library used by many software applications to compress and decompress data. While it can be installed in Ubuntu using the apt package manager, you may need to install it from the source code if the version available in the Ubuntu repositories is outdated or if you need to customize…
How could I log system calls made by another process without using current built in functions like ptrace, strace, audit etc. I think two options are intercepting the system call table, and another is modifying the entry_64.s file. I want to output these system calls to a file. Can’t find any suggestions on this anywhere….
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…
How to open a port, say 3389, in iptables to allow incoming traffics to it? There are several cases for this question: ipv4 or ipv6 or both, TCP or UDP or both and which interface? For simplicity, I give commands to allow all (ipv4 and ipv6, TCP and UDP from all interfaces) using port 3389…
We may want to add some swap space for a Linux box while only find that all disk space is partitioned and mounted. Some partition has large available free space. For such cases, we may not want to change the partition allocation. The solution may be to add a file based swap for Linux as…
How to check and test whether a file of a given path is a block device in Python? This can be Linux specific. You can use the os.stat() function to get the stat of the path. Then use the stat.S_ISBLK() function against the stat’s .st_mode to test whether it is a block device. An example:…
How to test a path (a file or directory exists) in C++? In Bash, the [ -f ] and [ -d ] tests can test whether a file or a directory exist. What are the corresponding C++ ways for these tests? To test whether a file or dir (a path) exists, you may call stat()…
How to decode a quoted URL in Python? For example, an quoted URL as follows https://www.example.com/tag/%E9%93%B6%E8%A1%8C/ should be decoded to https://www.example.com/tag/银行/ In Python 3, we can use `urllib.parse_plus()` (for URL only). One example is as follows. $ python3 Python 3.6.8 (default, Oct 7 2019, 12:59:55) [GCC 8.3.0] on linux Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license”…
/dev/shm is a nice in memory disk on Linux. The default size seems half of the physical memory’s size. How to configure shm size of Linux? And what’s the consequence? To change the configuration for /dev/shm, add one line to /etc/fstab as follows. tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,size=8g 0 0 Here, the /dev/shm size is configured…
This post https://www.systutorials.com/1661/making-dnf-yum-not-update-certain-packages/ introduces how to exclude a package from yum. But is it possible to exclude a package from a specific repository only? For example, a repository R1 I am using contains an updated version of gdb while I don’t want to use the gdb from it as I trust the version (although older)…
I test it for qcow2 format. Other formats are TBA. qemu-img resize kvm1.qcow2 +20G cp kvm1.qcow2 kvm1-orig.qcow2 virt-resize –expand /dev/sda1 kvm1-orig.qcow2 kvm1.qcow2 Reference: https://fatmin.com/2016/12/20/how-to-resize-a-qcow2-image-and-filesystem-with-virt-resize/ I test it for qcow2 format. Other formats are TBA. qemu-img resize kvm1.qcow2 +20G cp kvm1.qcow2 kvm1-orig.qcow2 virt-resize –expand /dev/sda1 kvm1-orig.qcow2 kvm1.qcow2 Reference: https://fatmin.com/2016/12/20/how-to-resize-a-qcow2-image-and-filesystem-with-virt-resize/
Bash has a -b test to test whether a file exists and is a block special file. -b file True if file exists and is a block special file. How to do this in Python? Python’s stat module provides the similar functions for the C standard APIs and macros underlining such as stat() and S_ISBLK()….
The problem is with ssh that makes a quoted string to more than one if there are spaces. For example, ssh user@host cmd “my string” The cmd on host will be executed like cmd my string rather than cmd “my string” It will only work if the string is escaped like ssh user@host cmd my…
readlink -m can get canonical file name by resolving every symlinks in every component of the given path recursively. In Python, the os.readlink() function does not do so. Any equivalent function in Python to the readlink -m command line? Specifically, it does: canonicalize by following every symlink in every component of the given name recursively,…
How to split and iterate a string separated by a specific character in C++? For example, “a string separated by space” by ‘ ‘=> [“a”, “string”, “separated”, “by”, “space”] and “a,string,separated,by,comma” by ‘,’ => [“a”, “string”, “separated”, “by”, “comma”] C++ standard library’s getline() function can be used to build a function. getline() can accept a…