hints & tricks in no particular order
08/10/2026
Flameshot is my favorite Linux screenshot tool. It provides interactive region selection, annotations, and the ability to save screenshots or copy them to the clipboard. Unfortunately, getting it to work properly on Ubuntu 26.04 with GNOME Wayland wasn't straightforward. Depending on how I launched it, Flameshot either […]
17/09/2026
To make GRUB boot the last manually selected entry while still showing the countdown menu, edit /etc/default/grub: GRUB_DEFAULT=saved GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu GRUB_TIMEOUT=30 Then regenerate the config: sudo update-grub Before updating, it can be useful to back up the current generated config: sudo […]
11/07/2026
I recently started using an ATAboy, an open-source IDE/PATA-to-USB bridge designed for older hard drives, including early CHS-only drives that many modern USB adapters struggle with. The ATAboy presents two USB interfaces to the host: a USB mass-storage device for the attached IDE drive a USB serial console used to […]
25/05/2026
Getting an old DYMO LabelManager PnP working on Ubuntu 26.04 is possible, but the usual CUPS drivers and gLabels aren't ideal. After some experimentation, I found a working solution using Labelle, a native Linux application that communicates directly with the printer over USB. Here's how to set it up, including a […]
02/02/2015
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdc sudo hdparm user-master u security-set-pass Einstein /dev/sdc sudo time hdparm user-master u security-erase Einstein /dev/sdc Result /dev/sdc: Issuing SECURITY_ERASE command, password="Einstein", user=user 0.00user 0.00system 2:38:09elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 624maxresident)k […]
23/11/2014
21/01/2014
Expand a logical volume Source Make sure the host partition is big enough (using parted or gparted) (must be done offline if partition is mounted) The following commands can be done online (even if the logical volume is in use) Check disk usage (Allocated / Free) sudo lvm vgdisplay Check allocation of the lv sudo lvs […]
17/01/2014
13/04/2013
I got problems with a linux machine with a very small /boot partition. It wouldn't install any updates anymore and would complain about boot partition being full. I found out that many kernel versions were stored in this partition, and I did a bit of cleanup -- which turned out quite bad because I deleted the active […]
17/03/2013
I've got a JVC HD camcorder which uses a proprietary MTS container. It is however quite simple to re-mux those videos into MKV (without re-encoding, which is also possible but of course much slower): ffmpeg -i input.mt2s -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f matroska input.mkv An a bash script to automate that: […]
25/11/2012
Note that you will need flac and lame for this to work. Run the following line in the directory where the flac files are: for file in *.flac; do flac -cd “$file” | lame -h – “${file%.flac}.mp3″; done You can also make lame create the mp3 files somewhere else. Take the following line: for file in *.flac; do flac -cd […]
17/11/2012
I recently installed a PC running Ubuntu in an encrypted drive. The next step was to use a VPN provider to anonymize it a bit. I first used the Network Manager to configure and run the VPN, but I was a bit confused by the GUI, and wanted to customize the VPN a bit more. Moreover Network Manager stores its settings […]
17/11/2012
I recently reinstalled Ubuntu 12.10 from scratch on a PC with a nvidia GeForce 9300 embedded. The only particular thing is that it was connected to the monitor through VGA. Unfortunately, the display was stuck at 1366x768 instead of the native resolution 1680x1050 no matter if I used the nouveau or the nvidia drivers. […]
03/09/2012
Tried to use Nero to convert and burn an audio CD. It would always giving me a "incorrect parameter" error and refuse to do anything. It turned out I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 recently and didn't use Nero ever since... Fortunately I could a find an answer to this problem: sudo mkdir /usr/lib64 sudo ln -s /usr/lib/nero […]
30/07/2012
11/09/2011
I want to be able to start XBMC Live remotely. XBMC being based on Ubuntu, it was not so hard to achieve, once I understood I should follow the Ubuntu tutorial rather than the XBMC one. You may need to install the ethtool package sudo apt-get install ethtool You can then try to enable WOL manually sudo ethtool -s eth0 […]
13/07/2011
I dislike MP3 but less than I dislike WMA :-) Anyway, my car CD player wouldn't want to play WMA. So: 1. Install Medibuntu repository in 1 line sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && […]
17/04/2011
Extract audio tracks out of a video DVD appeared to be a one liner in Ubuntu. Command line power! for i in {01..11}; do mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast -ao pcm:file=output$i.wav -chapter $i-$i DVD://01; done The previous example extracts audio from chapters 1 to 11 and store them is wav files called outputXX.wav
02/04/2011
23/03/2011