2025-03-14 See this more recent post. I have always liked Amarok, the (initially) default KDE media player. It’s very feature-rich, nothing compared to Elisa. Moreover, it has two crucial features that I haven’t found in any other players: it saves statistics (play count and stars) directly into the music file it synchronizes statistics with the […]
Gnome Boxes is meant to be an easy and quick-starting software for Qemu virtual machines. I have already blogged about Qemu with KVM Virtual Machine Manager. These tools are powerful but require time to get familiar with them and tweak them correctly (I tried to provide some hints in my previous posts about these tools). […]
Updated on 8 March 2024 (for Plasma 6) Updated on 30 May 2024 (for Dolphin’s “Open With” empty menu) This is another post of the Hyprland series. I am a big fan of KDE applications for many everyday tasks. Since Hyprland is not a full desktop environment, you can choose which applications to install for […]
This is probably the beginning of a series of articles about testing Maven plugins. I’ll start with the Maven Embedder, which allows you to run an embedded Maven from a Java program. Note that we’re not simply running a locally installed Maven binary from a Java program; we run Maven taken from a Java library. […]
This is another post on the Hyprland series. In a previous post, I showed how to create a custom button in the Waybar for wlogout: a wlogout is a logout menu for Wayland environments: Remember that in Arch, this is available as an AUR package, e.g., you have to install it through an AUR helper […]
In a previous post, I showed how to start with Java and Maven in Gitpod. This is the second post of this series, where I show a few interesting tools provided by the IDE. As I said in the previous post, this might be unrelated to Gitpod since we’re using the tools provided by Visual […]
I have already blogged about Gitpod, which allows you to spin up fresh development environments from your GitHub projects so that you can code with Visual Studio on the web (that’s just a very reductive definition, so you may want to look at its website for the complete set of features). I have already shown […]
Here’s another post on how to get started with Hyprland. This time, we’ll see how to configure notifications with mako, a lightweight notification daemon for Wayland, which also works with Hyprland. (you might also want to consider and experiment with an alternative: dunst). If you followed my previous tutorials, you have no notification daemon installed. […]
Up to now, I have shown how to get started with Hyprland with the initial configurations. Now, I’ll show how to install the mainstream status bar in Hyprland: Waybar. Again, I’m going to do that for Arch Linux. As in the previous posts, I will NOT focus on the look and feel configuration. Before continuing, […]
In this post, I’d like to document how to use ssh-agent in Hyprland to store SSH key passphrases. This is part of my blog series on Hyprland. Assuming you use SSH keys protected with a passphrase, each time you use an SSH connection with the SSH key, you are prompted for the passphrase. You can […]
This is the second blog post on getting started with Hyprland (see the first post here). In this article, we install and configure a few other tools. We will also look at the customization of keyboard shortcuts. Other tools As noted here https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/Must-have/, you need an Authentication Agent: Authentication agents are the things that pop […]
In the past few months, I’ve heard (i.e., read articles and seen videos) many good things about the Wayland compositor Hyprland. I decided to try it, and I’ve been using it for almost one month as my daily driver. I’m still not into “tiling” that much, but in Hyprland, you can also switch to classic […]
In a previous blog post (and another one), I showed how to install Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro. In this blog post, I’m showing how I customize KDE on that installation (thus, it is similar to this other one for GNOME). I’m not using Wayland because I still don’t find it usable in Plasma. […]
This is a follow-up to the article Installing Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro (external storage); differently from the previous post, this one is based on more automatic mechanisms, so it will be easier to copy and paste commands once a few variables have been correctly and carefully set. Moreover, in this post, I’ll install […]
Last year, I blogged about my first experiences with KVM and Virtual Machine Manager. Then, I stopped using KVM because I’ve always found VirtualBox easier for my experiments. In particular, with VirtualBox, it is trivial to store virtual machines on an external drive (I mean, a fast external SD, of course): you specify to use […]
In a previous blog post, I showed how to install Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro. In this blog post, I’m showing how I customize Gnome on that installation. First, Gnome 43 has “Gnome Console” as the default terminal application. I wouldn’t say I like it since it’s too basic. So I install the traditional […]
Dropbox does not provide a client for the Linux Arm architecture, so you don’t have a client for a PineBook Pro. However, you can use the open-source project Maestral: Maestral is a lightweight Dropbox client for macOS and Linux. It provides powerful command line tools, supports gitignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing and […]
In Arch Linux (and Arch-based distros like EndeavourOS), it’s easy to add a network printer if you already know its address. Still, network printer discovery does not work out of the box as it happens on other distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu. The procedure to enable network printer discovery is, of course, documented in the […]
UPDATES: 19 February 2023: exclude ansible-lint problems on tests/test.yml 27 April 2023: updated the molecule docker plugin Last year, I got familiar with Ansible, the automation platform I now use to install and configure my Linux installations. I must thank Jeff Geerling and his excellent book “Ansible for DevOps“, which I highly recommend! I have […]
2025-03-14 See also this more recent post. I have always liked Amarok, the (initially) default KDE media player. It’s very feature-rich, nothing compared to Elisa. Moreover, it has two crucial features that I haven’t found in any other players: it saves statistics (play count and stars) directly into the music file it synchronizes statistics with […]