The command-line fuzzy finder by Junegunn Choi is a new interesting time saver and power user utility I find myself using all the time nowadays. Search the command history with fzf A very common thing for command-line power users is to use Ctrl+R to search the command history, and thus avoid typing the same command […]
Happy Free Software Day and thank you KeePassXC for your awesome work! <3 One of the cornerstones on how to keep yourself secure in the modern world is to use strong passwords + 2FA and encrypted communication methods when living your life on the net. To manage all the complex passwords needed for the services […]
Nextcloud is a quality opensource alternative for commercial and “free” file-sharing and cloud platforms. It is originally based on ownCloud (initially released in 2010) and was forked to Nextcloud by the original developer Frank Karlitschek. The software is developed with security in mind, and the basic idea is to keep all the data under the […]
Real workplace test of Logitech Ergo devices, with goals to avoid repetitive stress injury (RSI) and muscle strain in general.
Scrcpy is a free and open source tool that allows you to simply hook your android device to your computer via usb, allowing you to cast the mobile device’s display to your computer screen. It’s available for Windows, mac & Linux, including as a flatpak, snap or deb. Using Scrcpy Scrcpy requires USB debugging to […]
Everybody knows these basic keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting: Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. But there’s much more to them! With these handy tips, you can copy-paste more efficiently than ever before. The tips are convenient for all Linux and Gnome users in particular, as most of the shortcuts work out-of-the-box. There is no need to […]
MariaDB 10.5 is the latest major stable release of MariaDB, released in the spring of 2020. It was imported into Debian.org in late summer 2020 by the author of this blog post. Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions and the “mother” of many other distributions, most notably Ubuntu. Thus when MariaDB 10.5 […]
Looking to create tutorial videos easily? We are starting a series of guides for OBS Studio. In the first part you’ll learn how to record your screen and webcam simultaneously.
In search of a modern browser to optimise your workflows? Search no more, use Vivaldi! Read more to learn why.
Very often, using keyboard shortcuts in terminal is much faster than using the arrow keys on the keyboard. Master these keyboard shortcuts to become a terminal ninja!
Looking for a simple way to create encrypted backups? Rclone is a command-line tool to encrypt and transfer files to cloud storage platforms or via SFTP.
Are you looking for a workstation that is easy-to-use, virtually maintenance free and incredibly cheap to run? Perhaps your Grandparents require want to connect with the rest of their family? Maybe you require a simple Internet kiosk for a public space? Whatever your needs, a modern Linux distribution, combined with inexpensive hardware, can provide viable […]
ubiquitous /juːˈbɪkwɪtəs/: present, appearing, or found everywhere Vim is one of the grand old text editors, and while it’s history begins long before many current computer scientists were born, it still has it’s place in the toolbox of 2020’s technology workers. It’s default settings might however be too simplified, and make the tool hard to use […]
Linux users, software developers and power users alike spend a lot of time in the command-line prompt. The default Bash shell that ships in most Linux distributions have stayed pretty much unchanged for years and years. We wanted to explore how to improve the every day command-line experience, and eventually came very fond of the […]
Step-by-step instructions on how to clean your keyboard.
Two-factor authentication (or simply 2FA) is a way of authentication where a user must provide additional verification after username and password login. The form of verification can be a string of characters delivered via text message or generated with TOTP client. Two-factor authentication improves security because compromised username and password are not enough to get […]
Transferring files between two computers on the Internet is as old of a problem as the Internet itself, and surprisingly hard. Sending an attachment over e-mail involves all kind of hassles and does not work for big files. Having both the sending and receiving part sign up for Dropbox or a similar service, or setting […]
While Docker is quite handy in many ways, one inconvenient aspect is that if one mounts some host machine directory inside Docker, and the Docker image does something to those files as a non-root user, one will run into problems if the UID of the host machine user and the Docker image user do not […]
Most Linux distributions ship the hard drive partition tool fdisk by default. Knowing how to use it is a good skill for every Linux system administrator since having to rescue a system that has disk issues is a very common task. If the admin is faced with a prompt in a rescue mode boot, often […]
A couple years back we wrote a guide on how to create good OpenPGP/GnuPG keys and now it is time to write a guide on SSH keys for much of the same reasons: SSH key algorithms have evolved in past years and the keys generated by the default OpenSSH settings a few years ago are […]
Back in 2012 we blogged about Meego/Mer/Nemo, Android for x86 and other Linux operating systems for touchscreens and tablets. Back in the day we also compared Ubuntu Unity vs. Gnome 3 and which would work better as a touch operated system, and Gnome 3 was clearly the more mature system. Since then Ubuntu has dropped Unity […]
In our previous article we described an idea setup for a modern server with btrfs for flexibility and redundancy. In this article we describe another kind of setup that is ideal only for a backup server. For a backup server redundancy and high availability are not important, but instead maximal disk space capacity and the […]
Btrfs is probably the most modern filesystem of all widely used filesystems on Linux. In this article we explain how to use Btrfs as the only filesystem on a server machine, and how that enables some sweet capabilities, like very resilient RAID-1, flexible adding or replacing of disk drives, using snapshots for quick backups and […]
Today, 6th of June we celebrate World IPv6 day. Ipv6 is the new standard for IP protocols. IPv6 is important because, as everyone by now should know, the public IPv4 address space is running out. In fact all IPv4 address blocks have already been mostly consumed by registrars and the resource problem is being avoided […]
Why POWER8? With the enormous amount of data being generated every day, POWER8 was designed specifically to keep up with today’s data processing requirements on high end servers. POWER8 is a symmetric multiprocessor based on the power architecture by IBM. It’s designed specifically for server environments to have faster execution times and to really concentrate performing well on […]
Another new year has started, and we think it is time to look a bit back and review what became the most popular content in Seravo Blog in 2015. Alltogether, in 2015, Seravo’s web page gained 233 681 visits and 196 401 users – these are pretty cool numbers for a modest sized company that we […]
Btrfs (pronounced Better FS) is a relatively new filesystem that operates on the copy-on-write principle (abbreviated COW, which stems a more friendly pronunciation for btrfs: Butter FS). Btrfs includes a lot of interesting functionality and replaces traditional Linux disk and filesystem tools like LVM (volume manager, disk snapshots) and mdadm (software RAID). In RAID usage btrfs is much more flexible […]
OnePlus is a mobile phone manufacturer famous for selling the OnePlus One with pre-installed CyanogenMod, instead of a bloated custom Android as most manufacturers do. Their newest model OnePlus X was released on November 5th 2015 and after a few days of use, it seems to live up to its promises.
How to fix black screen after login in Ubuntu 14.04? (Ohje suomeksi lopussa.) A lot of Linux-support customers have contacted us recently asking to fix their Ubuntu laptops and workstations that suddently stopped working. The symptom is that after entering the username and password in the login screen, they are unable to get in. Instead […]
A great deal of our work as Linux system administrators is related to security. Each server we maintain is bombarded on daily basis in a never ending cyberwar. Some of our customers (e.g. the website of the former Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs, government websites, high profile political organisations and media sites) are obvious targets but […]
