The recent Steam client major update has brought predominant user interface changes as well as a regression in user experience: if the Steam client is not running, and the user launches a Steam game from its desktop or Start menu shortcut, then the Steam client window will show up before the game launches; prior to the update, Steam would start minimized in this case, thus the window would not show up on its own. …
-9999-only Gentoo Packages
Some Gentoo packages provide a special 9999 version; by convention, the ebuild that bears the 9999 version is a live ebuild, which builds the package from its “live” sources in the project’s version control system (VCS) repository – e.g. a Git repository – instead of “non-live” sources in a .zip or a .tar.* archive. The project’s sources in the VCS repository are usually subject to frequent changes due to development activities, hence they are “live”. …
As a DOS emulator, DOSBox is theoretically capable of running DOS-based versions of Windows, like Windows 3.1, 95, and 98. Certainly, the compatibility list on DOSBox official website classifies Windows 3.1 and 95 as supported; but for Windows 98, it is just rated runnable – even lower than the intermediate playable tier. Perhaps for this reason, most people would just resort to other DOSBox forks that offer better support for Windows 98, like DOSBox-X, when they want to run this version of Windows. …
This collection is a tutorial which provides instructions to set up LUKS2-based full disk encryption on a Gentoo system using GRUB as the bootloader and systemd as the init system. In particular, setting up LUKS2 for use with GRUB is especially tricky, and this tutorial addresses any intricacies there. This tutorial aims to support both new Gentoo installations and existing ones, so it can be used to encrypt an unencrypted system too. …
Gentoo offers its users a wide array of Linux kernel packages in the sys-kernel/* category, each of which may install the kernel in a different way. In particular, the sys-kernel/*-sources packages (such as sys-kernel/gentoo-sources, sys-kernel/vanilla-sources) install only the kernel’s source code and do nothing else. This is suitable for users who prefer to compile and install the kernel on their own but still would like to let the system package manager update the kernel sources automatically. …
This article covers some information that can help perfect a Gentoo installation on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to maximize its performance, improve its interoperability with Windows, and even unlock new system capabilities. Originally, I had been planning to write a full Gentoo on WSL installation tutorial during September of the last year, but that tutorial was only halfway done before I had to move on for something more important in my real life, which is why I have disappeared from my personal site for almost another half of year (though you could find my development activities on GitHub if you looked at my profile). …
As of now, the Gentoo Handbook, which is the official Gentoo installation guide, mainly focuses on steps to install a system based on OpenRC instead of systemd. After all, as a project mainly maintained by Gentoo developers, it would be a surprise if Gentoo did not introduce OpenRC as the distribution’s init system with primary support. For people who want to use systemd on Gentoo, the Handbook does include some instructions in itself, but it sometimes asks the users to refer to the standalone systemd article too. …
Getting a perfect GNOME configuration on Gentoo is not hard but is tricky. In other words, it would be a piece of cake once you have done it, but it is not easy to get it right with only one shot for the first time. The GNOME Guide on Gentoo Wiki is a good resource and is enough for a barely functional GNOME installation, but there are plenty of rooms for improvements, like removing the authentication dialog when modifying network settings, and enabling Wayland screen sharing in web browsers like Google Chrome. …
This post will show you a way to monitor CPU frequency and temperature on Linux-based systems without aid of any programs or packages that are not commonly preinstalled on major GNU/Linux distributions. No extra hardware drivers are required: the magic is done merely by a short Bash script in just a few lines that only relies on mechanisms provided by the Linux kernel itself and some most essential Unix commands. …
Fedora is moving to Btrfs for its default file system on its “desktop variants” in Fedora 33. This change is welcomed by some users because of some benefits Btrfs is offering. Other Fedora variants still default to ext4, although users may elect to use Btrfs during system installation with the Anaconda installer. But for non-desktop-variant raw image distributions like the Minimal aarch64 image, you do not have the chance to choose a file system other than ext4, because you are applying the image directly instead of using Anaconda. …
In the previous post we looked at a very simple solution to fix the USB ports on Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB/8GB RAM models running Fedora, which involves a trade-off between the USB ports' functionality and the amount of RAM available to the operating system. This post will give you another solution that takes more steps but no longer limits available memory to 3 GiB. As said in the previous post, no action is required for the 2GB model. …
When Fedora runs on Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB/8GB RAM models, the USB ports might not be working out-of-box as of Fedora 32 and Linux kernel 5.8. In this post, I will introduce a very simple solution to this problem that only requires you to add one line to a configuration file. Notes and Caveats If you are using the 2GB model, then rest assured - the USB ports should work out-of-box, and you do not need to do anything. …
Jekyll is a static website generator. It creates static HTML documents directly, making hosting a website as easy as setting up an HTTP server. Yet it is still very powerful: it can generate HTML documents from Markdown, which makes writing and formatting articles and posts easy and fun; it supports plugins that add more feature to itself, the generated site, or even both. Thanks to plugin developers, we have multilingual plugins for Jekyll which allow us to make our site useful to more people in different parts of the world by presenting translated and localized contents. …
dnf history undo
My choices of GNU/Linux distributions are Fedora for desktop computers and CentOS for servers. Both of them feature DNF - Red Hat’s package manager front-end for RPM, which is the primary reason I use these distributions. Although one might argue that it is slow, DNF is very clear on not only what it will do for an action but also what it has done: it maintains a history of package installation and removal operations, which are called “transactions”. …
vcgencmd on Fedora
This post is a continuation of my previous one about setting up a cluster of Raspberry Pis running Fedora. After I got the cluster to compute something, @ColsonXu, the cluster’s owner, asked me if I could monitor the CPU temperature of each Raspberry Pi by running this command: $ /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp The vcgencmd program is included in Raspberry Pi OS (formerly called Raspbian) as a utility for retrieving information about Raspberry Pi’s hardware. …
First and foremost, I would like to thank @ColsonXu for giving me this opportunity to play with some Raspberry Pis. He had got a few Raspberry Pi 4’s and built a cluster with them for computing purposes, but there was nothing to compute until the morning when @mrdarcychen found an article about running Rosetta@home on Raspberry Pi from Fedora Magazine, and Colson approved the plan. I was able to take the job of installing software required to run Rosetta@home on the Raspberry Pis. …
Recently, Microsoft has made the first stable release of Windows Terminal, a new terminal program for Windows 10. Windows Terminal allows you to add and use multiple shells, like Windows PowerShell, the old command prompt, and any shell in your Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) environments. It also provides way more features and customization options than the old Windows console host conhost.exe, which has been used for command prompt and WSL. …
After Epic Games announced that it would give away free copies of GTA V for a week, many people started to claim this gift on that game platform. Even some existing GTA V players who have already purchased the game on Steam had decided to get another free copy so they could have two or more GTA Online accounts. It appears that if you have already installed GTA V via Steam, you still need to download a full copy of the game files via Epic Games. …