MaximumHoyt

 For over a decade, I have been interested in disabling the damn CAPS LOCK key. I frequently press it accidentally and it is a continuing aggravation. Trying several methods, I found one that works and thought I would update the post and try to get the formatting correct. CAPS LOCK KILLED SUCCESS!! I stumbled upon the file /etc/default/keyboard . It reads: # KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE # Consult the keyboard(5) manual page. XKBMODEL=pc105 XKBLAYOUT=us XKBVARIANT= XKBOPTIONS= BACKSPACE=guess Consulting the man page for keyboard reveals the following interesting information: KEYBOARD(5)              Console-setup User's Manual     NAME keyboard - keyboard configuration file DESCRIPTION        The  keyboard file describes the properties of the keyboard. It is read by setupcon(1) in order to configure the keyboard on the  console.   In Debian  systems  the  default  keyboard la...

  " TigerVNC is a high-performance, platform-neutral implementation of VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a client/server application that allows users to launch and interact with graphical applications on remote machines. TigerVNC provides the levels of performance necessary to run 3D and video applications, and it attempts to maintain a common look and feel and re-use components, where possible, across the various platforms that it supports. TigerVNC also provides extensions for advanced authentication methods and TLS encryption." Begin by installing both the server and the viewer. # urpmi tigervnc tigervnc-server Then read the document at /usr/share/doc/tigervnc/HOWTO.md for specifics on the Mageia installation. That's important because things have changed and the TigerVNC installation recipies foud on the web have not caught up. The text is shown below: # What has changed The previous Tigervnc versions had a wrapper script called `vncserver` which  could be run as a us...

   There have been several Linux distro releases in the past that claim to offer a MS Windows-like experience to woo new users to Linux, such as Corel Linux ,  Xandros Desktop , and Linspire/Lindows . These failed mostly because the commercial companies attempted to modify Linux enough to lock the users into their own walled garden. Interestingly, all these distros were based on Debian. A successful Debian-based distro is Canonical's Ubuntu . It doesn't attempt to strong-arm users into its walled garden, but does offer a few special things and a rich user and support environment. It's popularity is well-earned and spurred by its marketing. Zorin OS 18 is the latest entry into the fray and is a Ubuntu-based distribution , many calls it a "fork" since the UI is customized to mimic MS Windows. They do offer a free download ISO , so I attempted to install that in a VirtualBox VM. It hung up on my first attempt; problems with some LibreOffice packages, so I opted to N...

  I've been curious, so I thought I'd install Arch Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine and see  what was up. I followed the well-written HOWTO by  Ankush Das , but was not very successful, not for his instructions, but from some glitch in the installer. It seems that none of the extra apps would download to install, so what I got was the minimal, non-GUI default installation. I was able to  manually install enough things to display the LXDE desktop (my favorite). CONCLUSION Maybe there's a problem with the USA repositories? This may be what's happening. I might try again selecting some other country. I found the text-based install very reminiscent of the RedHat 5.1 install that was my introduction to Linux back in the day. I'll wait until the repo bug is fixed before I try it again. RESOURCES Arch Linux homepage The EXCELLENT Arch Linux Wiki

  Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays . Why the Electronic Frontier Foundation   established the project  is explained at the site.  Is this useful for the average person? Not really, but it was fun for me. The device used initially is the Orbic Speed (RC400L), a small Internet hotspot. I found one on eBay for just $15 including shipping. Other devices have been added to the supported device list .  Installation is pretty straightforward. Download the installer that matches your computer, connect the device to your computer with a USB cable and launch the installer per the instructions. A successful installation will show a green bar across the top of the screen and the presence of "stingrays" when you drive around will display yellow dots, orange dashes, or a solid red line . The device will log the data which you may share with the EFF. How do you manage the device? There is a web UI at...

 This program is part of the net-tools RPM package. # netstat -lntup -l = only services which are listening on some port -n = show port number, don't try to resolve the service name -t = tcp ports -u = udp ports -p = name of the program Since net-tools is deprecated, you can use the ss command instead of netstat if netstat is not present on your machine: # ss -lntup This should work similarly and is already installed on Mageia. RESOURCES https://superuser.com/questions/529830/get-a-list-of-open-ports-in-linux

DNSCrypt is a network protocol that authenticates and encrypts Domain Name System ( DNS ) traffic between the user's computer and recursive name servers, with support for modern encrypted DNS protocols such as DNSCrypt v2 , DNS-over-HTTPS , Anonymized DNSCrypt and ODoH (Oblivious DoH) . (SOURCE: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy ) Prebuilt and up-to-date binaries are available for Linux, Mac, Windows and other operating systems. Download the Linux x86_64 version here . Follow installation instructions here . Alternatively -- and the best choice for Mageiam, IMHO -- you can download the x86_64 version of dnscrypt-proxy from OpenMandriva here . The OpenMandriva-sourced package will install, but show an error that can be safely ignored. This package is superior to that provided with Mageia and is the most current version of the application, but you will need to block the update of the package to the Mageia version by adding its name to /etc/urpmi/skip.list . Follow the ex...

  X2X  allows the keyboard, mouse, and clipboard on one X display to be used to control another X display. Mageia does not provide an RPM package for X2X , but openSUSE does for both x86_64 and i586 . The RPM packages install on Mageia with no issues. Ubuntu also provides packages for their distro. To install from the OpenSUSE ftp site: # urpmi f tp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/vol/rzm6/pbone/ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/openSUSE:/Backports:/SLE-15-SP1/standard/x86_64/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm You will get the following warning that can be ignored: warning: /var/cache/urpmi/partial/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID 65176565: NOKEY The following package has bad signature: /var/cache/urpmi/partial/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm: Invalid signature (NOT OK (no key): /var/cache/urpmi/partial/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID 65176565: NOKEY) Do you want to continue installation ? (y/N) n ...

 This handy HOWTO for the dd command is usually found at  http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_Multimedia/How_To_Do_Eveything_With_DD , but is currently unavailable.  It's very hand, so here's a link from the Internet Archive . A great use of dd is to rescue an old floppy disk or a CD. Normally, writing null to the first two sectors of a floppy renders the floppy totally unusable. It cannot even be formatted after that. Thanks to the image of the new, unused floppy, floppy.image, you can write the first two sectors back properly. Rescue an unreadable floppy. ddrescue if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/sam/rescue.image bs=1440k conv=notrunc,noerror with a new floppy in the drive dd if=/home/sam/rescue.image of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 skip=2 seek=2 conv=notrunc,noerror Now the new floppy should be readable This method works similarly well with damaged CD's and DVD's. However, you must mount the resulting .iso image as a loop device and copy all the data that way. RESOUR...

 The most common scenario is to recursively change the website file’s permissions to 644 and directory permissions to 755 . Using the numeric method: find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \; find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \; Using the symbolic method: find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod u=rwx,go=rx {} \; find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod u=rw,go=r {} \; The find command searches for files or directories under /var/www/html and passes each found file or directory to the chmod command to set the permissions. When using find with the -exec option, the chmod command is run for each found entry. Use the xargs command to speed up the operation by passing multiple entries at once: find /var/www/html -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755  find /var/www/html -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644 SOURCE :  https://linuxize.com/post/chmod-recursive/

  Distros change and evolve over time and Mageia is no exception with the transition from urpmi to DNF for package management. We install many packages from the tainted and nonfree repositories, but DNF does not install these repositories by default, so they must be installed manually. Fortunately, the Mageia Wiki tells us how to do that. As root : # dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-x86_64-nonfree updates-x86_64-nonfree # dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-x86_64-tainted updates-x86_64-tainted # dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-i586 updates-i586 # dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-i586-nonfree updates-i586-nonfree # dnf config-manager --set-enabled mageia-i586-tainted updates-i586-tainted The Mageia Wiki page lists some useful DNF commands if you are unfamiliar with DNF .

  Recently doing fresh installs of Mageia 9 on a few machines, I noticed that they would frequently go into sleep mode. This is annoying. While sleep/suspend is useful, if not necessary, for laptops, it is most unwelcome behavior for desktops and servers. Some of the best Linux documentation is found at ArchWiki, and this instance was no exception. It seems that each sleep state can be disabled via an entry in  /etc/systemd/sleep.conf.d/disable-sleep.conf . That directory and file did not exist on any of my machines, so I created them and entered the following in  disable-sleep.conf : ##  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate #Disable_sleep_Completely [Sleep] AllowSuspend=no AllowHibernation=no AllowHybridSleep=no AllowSuspendThenHibernate=no Problem solved! I also remove  xscreensaver with # rpm -evh --nodeps xscreensaver xscreensaver-common xscreensave-base RESOURCES man page for systemd.sleep.conf(5)