Maven profiles that are really active by default

While working on my TDD book, I played with Maven profiles to write the chapter. If you use Maven profiles, you might want to use an activation strategy to enable the profile under certain circumstances automatically. There’s also a particular option, “<activeByDefault>”, which seems self-explanatory. This must mean that that profile will be constantly active […]

Developing Ansible roles on a PineBook Pro with Gitpod

In a previous post, I showed an example of an Ansible role tested with Molecule and Docker using the Gitpod development environment. With such an approach, you develop using Visual Studio code on your browser. Resources and computational power is provided by Gitpod, not by your computer. When your computer is a PineBook Pro, an […]

The Overview effect got better in KDE 5.26

I’ve updated KDE to version 5.26, which arrived in Linux Arch. In particular, I’m testing this new version in my XeroLinux installation. One of the improvements that caught me immediately was how this version’s Overview effect has improved! In the previous version (KDE 5.25), the Overview allowed to search both in applications and in currently […]

Timeshift and grub-btrfs in Ubuntu

UPDATED 22/Dec/2022, ChangeLog: 22/Dec/2022: added the flag “-czstd” for defragmentation and compression. 20/Nov/2022: documented the new version of grub-btrfs and its new grub-btrfsd daemon; the configuration for Timeshift is much simpler, but you have to install another package: inotify-tools. 17/Nov/2022: documented that I could also create additional subvolumes and move existing contents from the running […]

Taming KDE baloo

Quoting from https://community.kde.org/Baloo, Baloo is the file indexing and file search framework for KDE Plasma, with a focus on providing a very small memory footprint along with extremely fast searching. Unfortunately, it has a bad reputation for being a resource hog. However, it all boils down to configuring it appropriately (of course, according to your […]

Fixing Docker problems in Fedora

In this post, I’ll describe a few problems with Docker in Fedora and how to fix them. In particular, I’ll try to provide an analysis of the problems and the sources of the solutions. I’ve experienced a few problems with Docker in Fedora (35 and 36). I first installed docker-ce by following the official documentation: […]

VirtualBox in Fedora Linux

I have no problem installing VirtualBox and the related tools and extensions in Ubuntu and Arch. In Fedora, things are a little bit harder. First, I think it’s better NOT to download binaries distributed by VirtualBox: I’m using Fedora packages that are available from RPM Fusion Free. Thus, first of all, you have to enable […]

Again woes for KDE and Google Accounts

TL;DR If you want to access your Google Calendars from Korganizer or Kalendar, remember to enable “Enable the KDE wallet subsystem”. I had already written about the cumbersome procedure to access Google accounts in KDE, and I thought I had learned enough to “easily” set my Google calendars in KDE. I was wrong. Today I […]

SSH into a VirtualBox machine

I use VirtualBox a lot for testing purposes, mainly to experiment with a Linux distribution (to see whether it’s worthwhile to install it on bare metal) and to test procedures that might involve some complex (and maybe “dangerous”) operations. After you install VirtualBox Guest Additions, things like bidirectional copy-and-paste will work. Some distributions seem to […]

Some benchmarks for building an Eclipse project: Linux, Windows, macOS (M1)

I want to share some benchmarks for building an Eclipse project with Maven/Tycho. I built the project on Linux, Windows, and macOS (in particular, on my Mac Air M1 2020). I stressed that the macOS environment is an M1, the new Arm-based chip from Apple, which is said to be quite efficient and performant. However, […]

Finding a type in the classpath of an Eclipse Java project

Recently, I started to contribute and maintain Pitclipse, an Eclipse plugin for running mutation testing with PIT. We needed a mechanism to detect whether JUnit 5 is in the classpath of a Java project (so that we could run PIT with its JUnit 5 plugin). The first implementation of such a mechanism was rather cumbersome […]

My notes on the Grub incident in Linux Arch

In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts and the solution I adopted to circumvent the terrible incident that happened a few days ago with grub in Linux Arch. The bug affected all Arch-based distributions (not Manjaro, which is not really Arch-based, but for sure EndeavourOS and Arch itself). You can find the details […]

Ubuntu Jammy and Nvidia

I installed Ubuntu Jammy a few months ago, when it was released, on a desktop computer. It was a terrible experience: crashes now and then, and the Wayland session was not working well on some applications. After a week, I uninstalled it immediately and switched to Fedora on that computer. Then, a new point release […]

Locate and BTRFS

I’ve always been using the locate command (provided by the mlocate package or by the new plocate package), which quickly searches for files and directories by their names. The command relies on the database built by the command updatedb (which should be run periodically, e.g., by enabling the plocate-updatedb.timer service for plocate). Unfortunately, by default, […]