If you’re using i3 window manager and you want the Picture in Picture (PiP) window of Firefox and Chromium to be seen in all workspaces, just add this to your i3 config file : for_window [title="Picture-in-Picture"] sticky enable This will work for both Firefox and Chromium/Chrome PiP. If it doesn’t work, open a video in Picture in Picture mode and run the command wmctrl -l in terminal which will produce a similar output :... [READ MORE]

Today, I’m introducing Varnam Editor, an easy software for you to write Malayalam and other Indian languages. It is easily installable for GNU/Linux distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Archlinux etc. Technically, it’s an editor for transliterating Indian languages. Varnam Editor uses an existing library called Varnam and makes it easy to install & use. Transliteration From Wikipedia : Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways (such as α → a, д → d, χ → ch, ն → n or æ → ae).... [READ MORE]

I’ve been doing a lot of Linux Mint installations lately and one very annoying thing that I found in 2 laptops was the non availability of WiFi driver. Apparently, it’s a new hardware and is not in the Linux kernel. The hardware is Realtek device d723. This new WiFi hardware is being shipped in new PCs and laptops now. Without having the internet, one can’t do almost anything. So it’s important to have this fixed up.... [READ MORE]

I got into Debian packaging and one of the most brutal part was to type in the GPG secret key’s password every time I sign a package. I wasted a lot of time typing my long password. I searched a lot to cache my password for some time after I type it once. All of them said to edit gpg-agent.conf, but none of them worked for my fresh installation of Xubuntu 16.... [READ MORE]

It’s Christmas again and you’ll be receiving all kinds of greetings. How about greeting them back with a fancy way ? Show off your nerdiness with this super cool Christmas Tree in Bash. All you need is a bash shell. Most systems have bash shell by default, so you don’t have to install anything for this ! All thanks goes to the Argentian programmer Sergio Lepore for this cool script.... [READ MORE]

Take PHPUnit as an example. You can install it using Composer doing this : composer require phpunit/phpunit This will install a phpunit shortcut in vendor/bin directory. This obviously means you can run it. But, you would have to point to the exact location of the phpunit file to run : /home/username/mysite/vendor/bin/phpunit phpunit.xml But, that’s long and uncomfortable. And you would have to install PHPUnit separately for each projects. I’m gonna tell you how to install binaries globally as well as running it simply.... [READ MORE]

We all download stuffs and we want it to be perfect. No lagging, just download the fastest way, right ? I don’t download via browsers these days, because it is too slow (< 5 KB/s). Google Chrome downloads are the worst. So, I download via command line now. Not all downloading is easy. Sometimes it will break up. So, we must resume it. Only some servers allow to resume downloads. But, we need client softwares that is able to resume downloads.... [READ MORE]

It’s really easy to create a file in Bash with cat and > : cat "/home/simsu/file.txt" > "/home/simsu/file.txt" But, what if you want to add contents to file too ? In this case, we can use cat and echo. Here’s how we do it in echo : echo "My File, My Choice" > "/home/simsu/file.txt" But, there’s a problem with doing like this. Since there is an option to limit the characters of a Terminal command, adding large contents is not possible.... [READ MORE]

Root users have the privilege to do administrative stuff in Linux and if you’re creating a Bash script to install something or change something in the system, you need root. So, checking whether the script was ran by root is very important. if [ "$EUID" -ne 0 ] then echo "Please run as root" exit fi There is no else condition. You can add the code which will does stuff in root after the above.... [READ MORE]

If you have tried to access a log file in /var/log using PHP in Linux, you will see the “Permission denied” error. This is because, Apache doesn’t have read permission on the log file. Let’s look at the user groups that have permission to access the log files : it’s root and the program which created the file. Suppose, let’s say the log file is “/var/log/squid/access.log”. That file’s group and owner will be “proxy” and others won’t even have the read permission on it except **root **ofcourse.... [READ MORE]