The Linux Page

Help other users realize that everything is possible, especially avoiding Windows for their own personal use.

Welcome to The Linux Page


Fox Trot by Bill Amend. Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge

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:

I get a set of upgrades, about once a day these days (the Ubuntu and other Open Source developers are keeping way too busy!)

Because of that, I run the software updater. That takes time, generally. But why is that?

After various upgrades from one OS version to another, possibly from the start, I dunno exactly when it broke, but the autoremove feature stopped uninstalling the old kernels.

In itself, it is not so bad, you just get additional kernels under /boot. It can be come a problem if you have a small /boot partition, but otherwise, it is not a big problem in itself.

Until you upgrade!

Jump start Jira

Today we were forced to transfer all our services from one server to another.

One of those services is Jira.

From what I have seen, there is no good documentation on our to migrate an instance of Jira from one Ubuntu server to another. Yet it is actually not that complicated.

Step 1. Make sure your current instance is not running

In order to avoid changes that would not make it to the new instance, make sure to stop Jira in the existing system. If you can, just stop Apache2 or whatever front end you are using.

Step 2. Copy the Data

Jira saves data in two locations: your database ...

In cmake, you have a cool feature which allows you to create a file.

First you use a WRITE, then you use the APPEND to add more lines to the file.

That file may be a shell script, though. In that case, you run in a problem whenever you want to write a variable which uses the curly brackets (as in ${TEST}), because cmake sees those as its own variables.

There is an example of script that we use in our Snap! development.

file( WRITE  ${lint_script} "#!${BASH}\n"                                                            )
file( APPEND ${lint_script} "if test \${3##*.} = ...

The systemd environment and commands replacing the system V start scripts.

systemd has come as the default boot loader since Ubuntu 15.04. The old version, upstart, is now considered deprecated. Systemd has an interface pretty similar to the upstart service command line.

Command Description Support Persist
systemctl start SERVICE
Start SERVICE Always No
systemctl stop SERVICE
Stop SERVICE Always No
systemctl restart SERVICE
Restart SERVICE Always ...

I found the following in my logs, and thought it was very funny:

198.20.87.98 - - [22/Dec/2015:21:43:42 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 444 5666 "-" "-"
198.20.87.98 - - [22/Dec/2015:21:43:42 -0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 444 5666 "-" "-"
198.20.87.98 - - [22/Dec/2015:21:43:42 -0800] "GET /sitemap.xml HTTP/1.1" 444 5666 "-" "-"
198.20.87.98 - - [22/Dec/2015:21:43:58 -0800] "quit" 405 5461 "-" "-"

The person who wrote this robot is not sending me who he is (last ...

The mouse pad worked just fine for days and "all of a sudden" my Acer, an Aquire R 14 (Acer Touch R3-471T), but it looks like many if not most Acers have the same issue.

The fact is that I use the Fn + F8 key to mute the speaker all the time, whenever there is an ad in a video, I really have to do that!

The Fn + F7, which is right next to the Fn + F8, is actually a key one can use to turn the Mouse Pad ON and OFF. Do it once again, Fn + F7, and the Mouse Pad will work again.

Hopefully you had a USB mouse or like me, you installed Synergy and thus could use your Linux mouse anyway. ...

I installed a website on a brand install installation of Ubuntu 14.04 (opposed to an upgrade from earlier versions) and the same website would not start...

Apache2 would give me the following error:

client denied by server configuration

which did not seem to tell me anything... I search for the error and the first page that popped up was a page by Apache2 and they said to add the deny/allow trick. I tried that and it did not help.

    <Directory /my/special/directory>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

Search further, I found an answer on ...

When I installed Flash, it automatically installed McAfee, the anti-virus, and really, I have not seen an option to NOT install that wonderful free tool which annoys me (and probably many others) a lot...

Not knowing, I then searched for a little while, why is it that my Wifi connection says "Limited" instead of "Connected". This is because McAfee replaces the MS-Windows firewall with their own stuff. That stuff limits the connections and everything will not go through, hence the Limited information on my Wifi connection.

Since I removed McAfee, my connection remains and ...

When I downloaded FileZilla, somehow I also got Chromium and some TV something downloaded and installed under Win10. I removed the TV crap, really no need, but I was thinking to keep Chromium since I need to test my websites with it once in a while. Cool, but that stupid software installed itself to auto-start!!!

I don't think I had the option to NOT have such a feature turned on.

So... I had to search for it because apparently no one knows how to handle Auto-Start features under newer versions of MS-Windows. It is actually... take a deep breath... in the Task Manager. (At least in ...

Synergy Mouse Events Lifecycle
Click image to enlarge. Source: Synergy Project on Github.com

Multiple Computers One Mouse & Keyboard

As I like to have Synergy working on my Windows boxes (i.e. laptops), I am saving a copy of the installer 64 bit version which works fine with WinXP and Win7. I'm about to test it with Win10 which is likely to accept it as is too. Just in case you did not know, Synergy is a driver that takes one mouse device and makes it work on multiple computers. In other words, you can use any number of computers with one mouse and one keyboard. Move the mouse to the right computer and you ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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