If you’re a seasoned Linux user, you may have used source command once or twice before. You might also have used ., the exactly same command, instead. Both source and . are shell builtin commands. I have used this many times, but I only used for one purpose which is to read the environment variables from a file to the current shell environment. So, when I was asked during a job interview, “What does source do?”, the only answer I could tell them was - I personally only use source command to read the variables into the current shell environment. ...

I normally use dwm as the Windows manager on my laptop. However, I occationally need to switch to Plasma to test some applications out. This laptop is currently running Fedora 34 which has been upgraded from previous versions as old as 28, I believe. When I run Dolphin, there is an annoying error message “Could ont enter folder tags:/”. Though it doesn’t cause any problems, it’s very annoying. I found a solution from bug report #437176 suggesting to purge Baloo database. Here is the command to run: ...

I just setup a new server with a minimal installation of AlmaLinux 8. AlmaLinux is a variant of free Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. It’s like a CentOS 8, but will have a full support until the end of RHEL 8 life cycle. This server is to serve as a new proxy for all VMs inside my home lab. I want to use tinyproxy which is need to be compiled from source as the RPM package is not available as of the time writing. After downloading the source code, and try to decompress it, I was presented with the following error message: ...

Recently, I found out that the ZFS pool on a FreeBSD is running out of space. There is no option to clean up this storage, but there are spare disks. So the next logical thing to do is to add 2 extra disks to the existing (mirror) ZFS pool. This FreeBSD server is a virtual machine (VM), and after attaching 2 physical disks to this VM, I had difficulty identifying these disks. Well, I could guess it, but this is a production server, and I really don’t want to spend my whole weekend to setup this server from the backup. :) ...

I have a Void linux VM which only gets turned on once in every month. Today, when I booted up and updated the packages on this VM, I noticed that there are many old kernels installed. As a seasonal Void user, I had no clue on how to remove older kernels. Fortunately, a quick Google search pointed me to a video: VOID Linux: Removing old kernels with vkpurge. Basically, Void comes with a pre-installed utility program called vkpurge. (man vkpurge for more info.) ...