So, you’ve just finished installing a bunch of updates in your system and let it restart as you go to get a cup of coffee. You take your time and get back with a cup in hand and ready to start your work for the day. As you sit down, a blank screen stares right back at you! You try typing something, but it doesn’t work. You hard reset the system and see that the boot screen shows up just fine, but then it just freezes and goes blank again. In a state of panic, you go into the safe mode and try to drop into a root shell. No dice. In a last ditch effort, you try connecting from a remote host. And voila! ssh works. Just barely. You are able to access all your files and enter commands normally.
Continue reading “Generic Fix For Broken Packages In Debian Based Systems”Category: Linux Distribution
ElementaryOS: An evaluation
I recently had to install Linux on my parents’ computer. They’ve been running Ubuntu with LXDE and were NOT happy with it. The desktop configuration kept breaking and sometimes, it wasn’t usable at all. I laid down some basic criteria for the operating system I was going to install:
- It must be intuitive and easy to use even for non-technical folks.
- No terminal. If I have to use the terminal to set things up, the distribution loses points.
- The distro must work out of the box without a problem. Basic applications included should be useful.
- Good hardware support.
- No trying to optimize performance for hardware. I decided to buy more hardware for better performance.
The fight was between Manjaro, Elementary OS, and Debian(For some Reason). Ubuntu desktop broke far too often for me to even consider it. I eventually settled on ElementaryOS because I’ve been hearing really rave reviews about it and I was unsure about Manjaro because I wasn’t confident enough that my parents could troubleshoot any problems that might crop up.
Installing and configuring Ansible on Debian Jessie
Ansible is shipped with Debian through the official repository. The Ansible version available through Debian repository is 1.7.
In this article let’s assume the following details for the machines
Server – Hostname: server, IP : 172.16.0.10
Node1 – Hostname: node1, IP : 172.16.0.11
Node2 – Hostname: node2, IP : 172.16.0.12
Continue reading “Installing and configuring Ansible on Debian Jessie”
OpenMandriva LX3
OpenMandriva LX is a Linux Distibution developed by a Non Profit community known as Open Mandriva. It is a derivative of Mandrake Linux which used to be a popular Linux distribution in the past.
In this article lets see the procedure to install OpenMandriva LX3.
OpenMandriva LX can be downloaded from this Link.
Resetting Sudo User password on Ubuntu 16.04
Sometimes we set a complex password and forget it. If we have done that on Ubuntu 16.04, we have a procedure to reset the password. In this article we will have a look at the procedure.
Continue reading “Resetting Sudo User password on Ubuntu 16.04”
Resetting Sudo User password on Linux Mint 18
Sometimes we set a complex password and forget it. If we have done that on Mint 18 we have a procedure to reset the password. In this article we will have a look at the procedure.
Continue reading “Resetting Sudo User password on Linux Mint 18”
Installing Raspbian Jessie on Raspberry Pi
Raspbian is a free Operating system for Raspberry Pi based on Debian. The latest version is codenamed Jessie. There are 2 flavours of Raspbian – Raspbian Jessie Pixel and Raspbian Jessie lite.
Raspbian is available as prebuilt image from the official repository . The 2 different flavours of Raspbian can be downloaded from the following links
Continue reading “Installing Raspbian Jessie on Raspberry Pi”
WordPress 4 on Ubuntu 16.04
WordPress needs a working LAMP stack. Let start off the installation by setting up a LAMP stack first. It can be done using the following command.
Continue reading “WordPress 4 on Ubuntu 16.04”
Building a Raspberry pi kiosk
One thing many people want to achieve with a Raspberry Pi is a functioning simple web kiosk. Combined with a touchscreen, it could potentially replace ATM machines. Yes, it’s high time we switched to low cost, secure ATM kiosks based on easily available commodity hardware. ATM machines and Kiosks mostly run a Windows XP (!?) on a machine that’s configured to launch only one application and in the event the application crashes, the system shuts down and sends an alert to the bank staff. This can easily be done with a Raspberry Pi. The system should have no problem delivering the complete set of functionality, should be fairly easy to deploy, maintain and secure on a large scale and hey, Raspberry Pi is so tiny, we’ll be spoilt for space inside the ATM machine. (More cash, Yay!). I’m not even going to elaborate on the savings on electricity (go figure!).
The idea of this exercise is simple. You start the system and you get dumped onto a web browser with a specific site loaded. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. If the web browser crashes, the system attempts to restart the browser or dies trying 
We also need this kiosk thing to be gentle on system resources. So we’ll use lightweight (albeit effective and powerful) applications. The ingredient list is as follows:
- Auto Log-in: nodm
- Auto X start: we use a simple .xsession file
- Window Manager: We’ll be using the full awesomeness of matchbox
- Browser: uzbl. Haven’t heard of it? You should totally check it out.
- Splash screen: fbi. Yea I know how that sounds. 😛
Let’s see how to set each one of these babies up
Installing Magento 1.9 on Ubuntu 14.04
Magento needs a working LAMP stack. Let start off the installation by setting up a LAMP stack first. It can be done using the following command.
Continue reading “Installing Magento 1.9 on Ubuntu 14.04”
