Welcome to The Linux Page

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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

A C++ implementation of a UDP client/server

A Telephone post with many lines to the surrounding homes.

I have noticed that quite a few people were trying to create UDP communication and I thought that proposing my class could help them. This is very basic as it does not define anything such as the size of a packet or any protocol to ensure arrival of the packets. However, it can be useful if you want to send a signal from one process to another, which is exactly how I use this implementation (i.e. I send a PING message to wake up a background process whenever the front end adds data to the database.)

This code is part of the Snap! C++ implementation. The latest version can be found in the ...

Thunderbird Settings & Other Tricks

I use thunderbird as my main electronic mail system. It works and does the job really well for pretty much any number of accounts which is quite practical.

As things progress, though I run into problems and need to find solutions and here are some of these.

My signature is not working

Email systems have been around for about 50 years now. One of the features that was added along the way was a signature. Old mail system would try to read a file named ~/.signature (where ~ means your user home directory, generally defined in $HOME).

This has been working for ages and Thunderbird would ...

I had a really bad SSD drive that had many sectors go bust. Although overall the drive was still quite functional, the number of sectors going bad was growing pretty quickly (from like 100 it quickly jumped to 1,000).

So I decided to replace the drives and as I was doing so, I also wanted to have a full backup of my /var directory. That includes databases and some other really large files. So to do the copy, I wanted to use rsync for two reasons, it is capable of restarting a copy in case it fails in the middle (imagine a copy that takes 12 hours... what are the chances that something breaks ...

qemu to run VMs

Introduction

I've been a big fan of VirtualBox for years. But with the last two iterations, I have had more and more issues. So now I've been looking in using qemu directly.

Pros of VirtualBox

Simple to Use
Nearly all settings accessible from the interface
Network expensions that allow for setups not possible with qemu
Easy to open/close the UI of a VM

Cons of VirtualBox

The mouse gets stuck once in a while1

1. I've not worked with qemu for long enough to know whether it would also get stuck with that one... so that may change later.

Rescuing an SSD drive with ddrescue

Breaking Hard Drive — How to Rescue It!

Introduction

I thought I missed one directory tree from a drive that is breaking down. So I started working on rescuing the drive. This is the first time I do so. Before, I always have had backups as required. (Well except ones with an SGI Indy computer, my 4Gb hard drive went bust and I had no copies... luckily a colleague did so it took a couple days, but I was able to get back up and running. That was a long time ago.)

WARNING:

I strongly suggest that you read the entire page here and probably a lot of the ddrescue documentation BEFORE you start the ...

The prompt is generally the name of the user, the name of the computer, the path, and then a character such as $ or #.

What's missing to the default prompt, to my point of view, is time. It's quite often that I like to know when I ran a certain command. So I can do enter and then run the command. The first enter prints the current date (otherwise you have the date when you last ran a command...)

Bash

For bash I use the following:

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\] \D{%Y/%m/%d} \t \$ '

So I added ...

Synergy version 3.x

As I upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04, I wanted to reinstall Synergy and that did not work out of the box as it was setup.

Looking around, it seemed that I'd have to get Synergy 3.x and I did.

The experience was fabulous. I installed it on my Ubuntu and then replaced the old version on my Windows box with version 3.x (I had some version 1.x which worked, but had all sorts of bugs).

The new installer does not require you to specify anything other than location of your screens. For the rest, it works 100% automatically. It's like all the computers know about the others without you having to ...

I like to play Shisen Sho and even wrote a tool to search for a solution (because at times, the randomized games have no solution even if you ask the game to not create such boards).

However, under Ubuntu 24.04, the icon was missing and I could not pin the game to my favorites. So I search fora solution and it was actually rather simple. You have to edit the .desktop file and add the startup class info. I find it strange that just a missing field like that would prevent a lot of the functionality for an app. but well...

I found the solution on Ask Ubuntu (a stackoverflow website).

...

I just installed Ubuntu 24.04 (yeah... it's already 2025...) and started to setup my new system. Tons of software to re-install, etc.

I use Firefox as my default browser, but I also have Chrome and Opera for all sorts of reasons (Chrome plays more videos and Opera allows me to be logged in as a different user in a few systems).

Today I clicked on a link in Thunderbird, which I've been doing a lot. Only, it opened the Chrome browser instead of Firefox. I was really surprised since that usually works as expected.

I went to my System Preferences, Apps, Default Apps... and sure ...

I've always had to recreate my filters whenever I reinstalled Thunderbird on a new system. After a while, that's rather annoying to have to do that over and over again.

This time, my lost filters included hunders of rules (around 5 or 6 years of work). The only good thing about it: I can now decide to not reinstate some of the filters. After all, most of these good old filters were rather useless after so many years. Many of those emails, I really do not care about anymore. So it's going to be a big clean up.

That being said, it would be a lot easier to clean up by deleting ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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