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What was your first text editor when you started using Linux/Unix? Mine was pico. It was very easy to get started with and quite similar to nano. Then I moved to emacs and sticked with it for a long while. Eventually, I’ve switched to vim (or neovim), and that’s what I have been using until now. Well, the thing about text editor or may be this also applies to many other things, you’re only familiar with features that you constantly use. This means I only know a small subsets of what vim can do. ...

Recently I need to install a package called Lmod on a Red Hat 8 server. Lmod is available from RHEL 8 EPEL8 repository, however it has a dependency called lua-filesystem which is only available from codeready-builder repository. On my RHEL 8 server, the codeready-builder repository is not enabled by default. Here is how I’ve got Lmod installed manually: # subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms # dnf install Lmod Looking at the above commands, I needed to enable the codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms first before installing Lmod. The thing is, I’m going to forget that Lmod requires lua-filesystem which is not available from the same repository as Lmod unless I write it down somewhere. Or better yet, let’s automate it with Ansible! ...

I wanted to install vim package on FreeBSD 13.0, and did so without realizing that there were over 86 additional dependency packages installed. This was done with pkg install -y vim command. Anyway, I wanted to clean up by removing vim and those dependencies after all this is a headless server. Removing vim package doesn’t remove the installed dependencies. Fortunately, I was able to copy and paste the names of dependency packages and save it to a file. My first thought was to just go through each line in that file and run pkg delete -y PACKAGE. In the past I needed to do similar thing in a bash script or command to loop through the content of a file per line. Guess what? I no longer remember how to do that. Hence I’m writing this post to remind my future self in case I need to do this similar thing again. ...

I just formatted an external drive with exFAT file system with the intention to share this drive between Windows/Linux/macOS. When the drive is mounted on my Fedora desktop, it shows as: /dev/sde1 on /run/media/kenno/E17F-B2B1 type exfat ()(rw,nosuid,nodev,relati...) I want to give it a name, so it’ll be mounted as: /run/media/kenno/DRIVE_NAME. On Linux system, we can use a tool called exfatlabel to get or set the exFAT file system. I already created a partition and format it (mkfs.exfat /dev/sde1) on /dev/sde1 partition. ...

I’ve been running Fedora 34 pre-release version even before it became beta. Everything has been working so far until recently when a package dracut was updated from 0.58 to 0.58-1. What is dracut? Good question. It’s an initramfs infrastructure used on Fedora system. Find out more from Dracut. The issue that introduced in version 0.58-1 on F34 is that it prevents any machines that use LUKS encryption for root partition to boot. The issue has been reported here. As of today, there is not yet a fixed version of dracut for F34 yet. ...