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:…
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…
Installing the caption LaTeX package on Fedora If you’re getting an error like Package subcaption Error: ‘caption’ package not loaded, you need to install the caption package from TeX Live. Quick install For Fedora 41 and later, install the package directly with DNF: dnf install texlive-caption If you’re using an older Fedora version that still…
EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) EPEL is a Fedora community project providing high-quality packages for RHEL-based systems. It’s the most widely used third-party repository for CentOS, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux. The repository includes development tools, databases, monitoring software, and multimedia packages not available in the base repositories. Enable EPEL on Rocky Linux 9 or…
Note: This post covers Linux fundamentals. Core concepts remain valid, but some commands and package names may differ on modern distributions. See your distro’s documentation for current details. 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…
Hadoop Cluster Setup Hadoop 2.x introduced YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator), a major architectural overhaul that decouples resource management from MapReduce job scheduling. This post covers setting up a basic Hadoop 2.x cluster with one NameNode/ResourceManager and multiple DataNodes/NodeManagers. Note: Hadoop 2.x reached end-of-life in 2016. For production use, deploy Hadoop 3.x or later, which…
Outdated Guide: This guide covers Fedora which reached end-of-life many years ago. For current Fedora docs, visit Fedora Docs. Core concepts remain applicable but package names and paths may differ. VMware Player and VirtualBox are two cool and free full virtualization solutions and both can run on top of a Linux host. In this post,…
ATI GPU Drivers on Fedora ATI/AMD GPUs on Fedora are best handled through AMDGPU, the modern open-source driver maintained by AMD. The proprietary fglrx driver reached end-of-life years ago and won’t work with current Fedora releases, GNOME versions, or modern X11/Wayland stacks. If you have an older Radeon GPU (pre-RDNA), you may still use the…
Using a DVD as a Package Repository with DNF Modern Red Hat-based systems use DNF (and DNF5 on recent Fedora releases) instead of Yum, though DNF maintains backward compatibility with yum syntax. This guide covers configuring a local DVD as your primary package repository. Mounting the DVD First, insert the installation media and mount it:…
RPM Fusion RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project doesn’t ship—primarily due to licensing restrictions, patent concerns, or proprietary redistributability requirements. The repository splits into two branches: free: Open Source Software that Fedora cannot distribute due to other legal or policy reasons nonfree: Non-open source software, including proprietary drivers and restricted-use applications Enable both…
Converting Video Files for Apple Devices Modern iOS devices handle a wider range of video formats natively, but if you’re working with legacy formats or need specific encoding for compatibility, conversion is straightforward with ffmpeg. This guide covers converting common video formats (.wmv, .mpg, .mkv, .webm, etc.) to .mp4 format suitable for Apple devices. Installing…
Flash Plugin Support in Modern Firefox Adobe discontinued Flash support in 2020, and Firefox removed NPAPI plugin support entirely. This post is maintained for historical reference only. If you need Flash content, consider: Ruffle — An open-source Flash emulator written in Rust that runs in the browser without plugins Standalone Flash player — For archived…
Installing 32-bit Firefox on 64-bit Linux 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…
Font Rendering on Fedora with FreeType Bytecode Interpreter 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…
Setting Up Xen Dom0 on Fedora Xen remains a production hypervisor for enterprise deployments (AWS EC2, Citrix Hypervisor), though KVM has become the default for most Linux distributions. If you’re deploying Xen in 2026, you’ll likely be working with recent stable releases rather than the legacy versions covered in older guides. This guide covers building…
Querying Files from Installed Packages The rpm and dnf commands let you inspect exactly which files a package installed and find the package that owns a specific file. These queries work on both the host system and inside containers like Toolbox or Distrobox. List Files from an Installed Package rpm -ql package-name This recursively lists…
Installing akmod NVIDIA Driver on Fedora Installing the NVIDIA driver on Fedora via akmod (automatic kernel module) is the cleanest approach when using RPM Fusion. The driver rebuilds automatically whenever the kernel updates, saving you manual reinstalls. Prerequisites First, verify your GPU is supported. Check the NVIDIA driver support matrix for your hardware. Most consumer…
Installing MPlayer and MEncoder on Fedora MPlayer and MEncoder are no longer actively maintained, but they’re still available through RPM Fusion if you need them for legacy content or specific workflows. Most users should consider modern alternatives like mpv (MPlayer’s successor) or ffmpeg for transcoding, but this guide covers the traditional setup. Enable RPM Fusion…
NVIDIA Driver Installation on Fedora Installing NVIDIA drivers on Fedora is straightforward when using RPM Fusion repositories. This guide covers modern Fedora releases (39+) using DNF package management. Prerequisites Before starting, determine which driver your GPU requires. Check the NVIDIA driver download page or use this command to identify your GPU: lspci | grep -i…