Using Rofi for Agnostic Lightweight Window/App Management

Posted on June 1, 2019 by

Rofi is a super lightweight window switching and application launcher written entirely in C.  It’s totally agnostic to your desktop environment or window manager making it ideal to quickly search for or toggle between open windows and applications and other tasks.  It’s become an integral part of my daily workflow. Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Using ProtonVPN for Privacy and Security

Posted on December 27, 2018 by

Being a long-time user of OpenVPN and generally liking the security approach of ProtonMail I decided to take ProtonVPN for a test drive.  These are my experiences using their Linux CLI and a persistent systemd connection, Mac OSX briefly and IOS.  This Swiss-based VPN service provides a free tier and reasonably priced paid plans for more benefits. Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Practical Ansible Solutions, a Video Course

Posted on December 23, 2018 by

Over the past year chipping away on the weekends I’ve just published an Ansible video course with Packt Publishing.  This is a 2.5hour course split across 6 chapters, focusing on getting up and running quickly with Ansible automation.  Check it out!

Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Using VDO on CentOS/RHEL7 for Storage Efficiency

Posted on September 13, 2018 by

Besides Btrfs, native Linux-based storage solutions have lagged behind the robustness and features of ZFS and the BSDs.  Recently Red Hat acquired Permabit which provides an Open Source device-mapper Linux kernel driver and layer that sits between block devices and filesystems providing deduplication, compression and thin provisioning.  Here’s my first experiences setting it up and initial returns using it. Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Run iTunes on Linux via Wine

Posted on June 20, 2018 by

Recent versions of Wine can run iTunes and Apple Music for Linux with no wizardry required.  Having been given a free Apple Music subscription as part of a family plan it’s useful to have additional streaming media options.  Below are the steps to use iTunes on Linux via Wine and have access to iTunes and Apple Music.

Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Fix for Intel i915 GPU Freeze on Recent Linux Kernels

Posted on May 18, 2018 by

Recently Intel started including their graphics drivers into the mainline Linux kernel.  This is great except when it stops working.  Having suffered intermittent, sporadic GPU freezes on my Lenovo x270 (Kabylake) work laptop since Kernel 4.12+ I came across a bug report that seemed related.  Here’s my temporary fix on Fedora 28 for getting things stable again until it’s fixed for good upstream.

Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 41 Comments

Using Signal Desktop on Fedora with Flatpak

Posted on March 16, 2018 by

In the 2018 race to re-invent AOL instant messenger Signal comes out on top of the competition for end-to-end encryption and a focus on privacy and security.  Signal desktop was recently released for Windows, Mac and only Debian-based Linux distributions with no official RPM available.  Here’s how to use app sandboxing with Flatpak to get it running nicely. Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments