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:

Gantt Charts on Linux/Mac/Windows

Example of Gantt Chart

If you've been trying to determine how long a project was going to take, maybe you've heard of the Gantt Charts. This is a way to setup a chart which gives you the ability to calculate how long the project is going to take (or at least it will give you a pretty good idea).

The charts themselves can be difficult to read especially if really large, but the point for me is the amount of time my engineers are going to take to finish up a project. There is such an editor in MS-Office. Unfortunately, that one isn't free, it is Microsoft centric (only works on ...

Upgrade your snap packages on the spot

Protected Tree in a field, like Snaps on Linux.

Refreshing (a.k.a. upgrading)

Usually your snap packages automatically get upgraded when newer versions are made available from the source.

One in a while, though, you may want to run a manual upgrade to make sure that you've got the latest of everything. This is done like this:

Logical Volume Manager: to ease the management of your hard drive partition

LVM today can create a mirror of your data (RAID 1) without having the need for mdraid/mdadm (or hardware raid).

I started writing this page in Nov 2012. Since then the LVM support has been improving quite a bit. making it easier and easier to group physical hard drive and setting them up in all sorts of ways (LVM now supports RAID 1, 4, 5, 6, 10. It also supports the special type called "Thin" which allows you to allocate more virtual disk space than is available physically. So you could pretend you have a hard drive of 1 Eb... and add physical space as you actually really need ...

Epson 1260 (and others) and Linux

Scanner Epson 1260 — a flat bed that has worked for over 10 years

Weird Colors

As I started using my Epson 1260 Photo scanner on my Linux box, I got some problems...

The first scan works perfectly, and then on the second and following weird colors start appearing. Usually it is red or green, some sort of a gradient. At times half the page is like that, at times more, at times it's like a gradient...

Driver Problems?

Searching, some people said that the iscan driver was bad. Not true. The driver works perfectly.

Not too sure where the problem really is, looks like the buffer used to read the data is not correctly cleared before we read the ...

How to run a virtual macintosh under Linux...

I just got my copy of Catalina and Majove. It comes really cheap these days. You can get a copy ready to install on a USB thunk drive.

The drive I've got is a 16Gb which is enough to fit the newer version (as of Dec 2019), Catalina which requires about 8Gb and the previous version, Majove, which is about 6.5Gb.

I can't just boot the USB, though, since I want to install the OS on a VM. Well... from the interface, it is clearly marked that it is possible to give a VM direct access to a USB port. I tried that and majored (again) in getting my X-Windows locked up. I had to reboot by ...

Just like a good old typewrite, you may want your computer keyboard not to repeat keys.

Keyboard Auto-Repeat

When I use virtualbox over the network (from a headless computer) and I connect using SSH, that virtualbox is going to be slow.

Somehow, I did not have that problem with older versions (Ubuntu 14.04 and older) but newer versions have required me to turn off keyboard repetition otherwise I get keys repeated (mainly the Enter key when something takes processing time at the time I hit the enter key) as in:

Heeeeeelllllooooo

The solution is to run the folloing command:

setterm -repeat off

It works in most terminals, for sure, the regular Linux console you get ...

A Bug in Chrome Ubuntu—how a feature becomes a bug

The Ubuntu version of Chrome has a way to auto-restart itself which does not hide the window or loses your existing browsing. However, it clearly quits the current instance and starts a new one (well, technically, it probably starts the new instance first, grab hold of the windows, then quit the old instance).

First bug, when that happens, the Gnome icon will now open a new instance and not know anything about the old instance. In other words, if you use the icons to navigate between your applications, Chrome fails whenever it gets updated that way.

If it were just that, I would say, ...

Virtualbox to create a Computer inside another Computer

Autostart Virtualbox VMs

So... certainly things evolve quickly and others lack behind. We've got systemd since 15.10 or so and it was the prominent change in 16.04. We actually made the switch for Snap! Websites and that help tremendously as it is very reliable since then (older versions were really bad in comparison.)

At first, I found a Stackoverflow answer describing the old way and it did not work which is why I decided to switch to systemd. I found this page about it and it's already pretty good! Just a couple of things I had to tweak on my system to make it all work ...

Setting up the gparted live CD in your controller in a virtualbox installation

Problem: Small Partition in your Virtualbox Drive

By defauilt Virtuabox often tells you to setup your partition size to 20Gb. This is actually really small if you are to do some serious work with your virtualbox especially since the OS is likely to use about half of it on install.

But if you don't pay attention, chances are you end up with a tiny partition which you may wish you could exstend later...

Note that in many cases, this operation is not possible. For example, VirtualBox does not give us the ability to change the size of a fixed disk. Unfortunate because non-fixed do not ...

Low Level Formatting an HDD or SSD

Dog that shread a bed to pieces by gomagoti.
By Gomagoti
(License CC: Some rights reserved)

WARNING

Do not apply the Secure Erase on a USB Drive or a drive connected through an SAS or RAID system as it may render your drive unusable. (See Brick (electronics) for an idea of what you could end up with in this case.)