Replacing ntpd with systemd-timesyncd (Mint 18.1)

Introduction It all began when I noted that my media center Linux machine (Linux Mint 18.1, Serena) finished a TV recording a bit earlier than expected. Logging in and typing “date” I was quite surprised to find out that the time was off by half a minute. The first question that comes to mind is [...]

Cinelerra 2019 notes

Cinelerra is alive and kicking. I’ve recently downloaded the “goodguy” revision of Cinelerra, Nov 29 2018 build (called “cin” for some reason), which is significantly smoother than the tool I’m used to. Notes: There are now two ways to set the effects’ attributes. With the good-old magnifying glass (“Controls”) in with the gear (“Presets”), which [...]

Solved: Missing ktorrent icon on Linux Mint / Cinnamon

Running ktorrent on Linux Mint 19 (Tara), the famous downwards-arrow icon was invisible on the system tray. Which made it appear like the program had quit when it was actually minimized. Clicking the empty box made ktorrent re-appear. Solution: Invoke the Qt5 configuration tool $ qt5ct and under the Appearance tab set “Style” to gtk2 [...]

Writing a panel applet for Cinnamon: The basics

Introduction What I wanted: A simple applet on Cinnamon, which allows me to turn a service on and off (hostapd, a Wifi hotspot). I first went for Argos catch-all extension, and learned that Cinnamon isn’t gnome-shell, and in particular that extensions for gnome-shell don’t (necessarily?) work with Cinnamon. Speaking of which, my system is Linux [...]

Failed: Install Argos Shell Extension on Cinnamon

You have been warned These are my pile of jots as I tried to install Argos “Gnome Shell Extension in seconds” on my Mint 19 Cinnamon machine. As the title implies, it didn’t work out, so I went for writing an applet from scratch, more or less. Not being strong on Gnome internals, I’m under [...]

Setting PS1 with color codes properly with gnome-terminal

There are plenty of web pages describing the different escape codes for changing color of an ANSI emulating terminal. This is in particular useful for giving the shell prompt different colors, to prevent confusion between different computers, for example. The trick is to set the PS1 bash variable. What is less told, is that \[ [...]

5 GHz Wifi access point on Linux Mint 19 / Atheros

+ how to just compile an Ubuntu distribution kernel without too much messing around. Introduction It’s not a real computer installation if the Wifi works out of the box. So these are my notes to self for setting up an access point on a 5 GHz channel. I’ll need it somehow, because each kernel upgrade [...]

Better than netstat: lsof tells us who is listening to what

Be sure to read the first comment below, where I’m told netstat can actually do the job. Even though I have to admit that I still find lsof’s output more readable. OK, so we have netstat to tell us which ports are opened for listening: $ netstat -n -a | grep “LISTEN ” Thanks, that [...]

Upgrading to Linux Mint 19, running the old system in a chroot

Background Archaeological findings have revealed that prehistoric humans buried their forefathers under the floor of their huts. Fast forward to 2018, yours truly decided to continue running the (ancient) Fedora 12 as a chroot when migrating to Linux Mint 19. That’s an eight years difference. While a lot of Linux users are happy to just [...]

fsck errors after shrinking an unmounted ext4 with resize2fs

Motivation I’m using resize2fs a lot to when backing up into a USB stick. The procedure is to create an image of an encrypted ext4 file system, and raw write it into the USB flash device. To save time writing to the USB stick the image is shrunk to its minimal size with resize2fs -M. [...]