GNOME is probably the most used desktop environment on Linux; its latest iteration (codename “Bengaluru”), ships with many performance improvements and some new features, as the ability to limit the battery charge straight from the “control center”, in order to preserve its health and increase its lifespan. By default, when this feature is active, a battery will start charging only when under 75% of its capacity, and will stop charging when it reaches 80%. In this tutorial, we learn how to replace those values with custom ones.
Egidio Docile
How to backup your data with Kopia on Linux
When talking about backup solutions, on Linux we are spoiled for choice: in the previous tutorials, for example, we talked about creating encrypted and efficient backups with Borg and Restic. Kopia is another free and open source alternative to those applications: it is written in Go, and it is able to create secure backups, both to local filesystems and to cloud-based storage services like Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Backblaze B2 and Google Cloud Storage. Unlike Borg and Restic, Kopia comes also with an officially supported GUI interface: KopiaUI.
Syncing Files with Docker-Compose Watch
When using Docker to create portable and easy reproducible development environments, we need to found a way to make changes to our codebase, immediately effective inside containers, without the need to re-build them each time. A possible solution consists into mounting host directories directly inside containers; this, however, requires breaking containers isolation and portability, since they become dependant on the host directory structure. To solve this problem, we can use docker-compose watch.
Simplify Restic Backups with Backrest: A Step-by-Step Tutorial
In a previous article, we learned how to create secure and efficient backups with Restic on Linux. Restic works on multiple platforms, but comes without a GUI. In this article, we learn how to install and use Backrest, a free and open source, user-friendly web-based interface for Restic.
Protecting Data Integrity on Ext4 and XFS with dm-integrity and LUKS
Unlike COW filesystems like BTRFS and ZFS, traditional Linux filesystems like ext4 and XFS have no way to detect slow data degradation (also known as bitrot), since they don’t perform data checksumming. When using those filesystems, however, we can store and verify integrity information at the block level, using dm-integrity. In this tutorial, we learn how to create dm-integrity devices with the integritysetup utility, and when creating luks containers, using cryptsetup.
Findmnt Command: Querying Filesystems in Linux Made Easy
Findmnt is a free and open source utility usually included in the core packages of all the major Linux distributions. It is able to list all mounted filesystems or retrieve data for only those we specify. In this tutorial, we learn how to use findmnt, and how to query filesystems by type, mount options and other parameters.
Fedora 41 released. Here is what’s new
The latest stable version of fedora linux, often regarded as the best Linux distro for polished and professional use, has been released a couple of hours ago, and is available for download. Sponsored by Red Hat, Fedora has a release cycle of approximately 6 months; it provides up-to-date versions of the most used free and open source software, and one of the best (if not the best), available “vanilla” GNOME desktop experience. In this article, we take a look at Fedora 41, and at some of the major changes it comes with.
Getting Started with Stratis Linux Storage: Managing Pools and Filesystems
Stratis is a free and open source storage management system developed by Red Hat. Available as a technology preview since RHEL 8, it gained full support starting from version 9.3 of the distribution, and can be used also on Fedora. Stratis relies on existing storage technologies such as LUKS, device mapper, and the XFS filesystem, to provide features similar to those integrated in the BTRFS and ZFS filesystems. In this tutorial, we learn Stratis basic concepts, we create a Stratis pool and a Stratis-managed filesystem.
How to add custom launchers directories on Linux
On Linux, we create application launchers as files with the “.desktop” extension: they contain metadata about the application they are related to, and instructions about how the latter should be executed. In order for a launcher to appear in the application menu of a desktop environment, it must be placed in certain dedicated directories. In this tutorial, we learn what are the default target directories for application launchers according to the Freedesktop.org specification, and how to add custom ones.
How to boot from system snapshots with boom
Boom is a system boot manager which supports BLS-compatible bootloaders, Grub2 included. We can use boom to easily create and manage bootloader entries on Linux. In this tutorial, we learn how to use boom to create entries to boot the system from LVM and BTRFS snapshots on the Red Hat family of distributions.
How to manage snapshots with Snapper on Linux
Snapper is a free and open source application we can use to manage snapshots on Linux. It was originally designed to work with BTRFS snapshots, but was extended to supports also LVM thin-provisioned logical volumes. In this tutorial, we learn how to install Snapper on the most used Linux distributions, and how to use it to manage snapshots on Linux.
How to create snapshots on Linux
A snapshot is an image of a filesystem state at a specific point in time. Snapshots are really useful to “turn back time” and bring the system to a known good state if something goes wrong. At the time of writing, there are two main native ways we can create atomic snapshots on Linux: by using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) or by creating a BTRFS filesystem, which has snapshots as a built-in feature. Working with lvm snapshots is one of the most reliable ways to protect your data.