Linux Tips

This section contains some tips and guides to solving problems I have encountered while running linux. Sometimes they are solutions to problems I found difficult to deal with other times they are things that I only do very infrequently (such as when setting up a new system). Putting them here will help me avoid spending hours searching around blogs and guides. Perhaps they'll be of some use to other people too.

I run the musl version of Void Linux on most of my machines which means that some of the guides may not be fully applicable to other distributions. However a lot will and even the ones that aren't totally compatible will hopefully provide some clues. I use wayland so things to do with my graphical setup will often not be applicable if you have an X11-based systems. I have some machines which have limited defined uses (such as an ad-blocker). These are often set up with a different OS to simplify the setup and administration.

My interactive shell is yash but I use dash to run all the scripts here. (I symlink /bin/sh to /bin/dash.) dash is completely POSIX compliant with no extras baked in which means that sometimes the scripts are bit more complex than if they'd been written in yash or bash or zsh. However using dash means my scripts will still run without editing if (when?) I change my interactive shell. Other benefits of using dash are that it starts up more quickly and runs with a smaller memory footprint.

-- 2025-10-24 --

-- 2025-10-16 --

-- 2025-04-12 --