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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The first ever WordCamp was held in Finland on May 8th and 9th in Tampere. Many from our staff participated in the event and Seravo was also one of the sponsors. On Friday Otto Kekäläinen had a talk with the title “Contributing to WordPress.org – Why you (and your company) should publish plugins at WordPress.org”. […]
The OpenPGP standard and the most popular open source program that implements it, GnuPG, have been well tested and widely deployed over the last decades. At least for the time being they are considered to be cryptographically unbroken tools for encrypting and verifying messages and other data. Due to the lack of easy-to-use tools and […]
Everybody knows what hand hygiene is: hands are disinfected every time we enter a hospital. In the same way as germ-free hands stops diseases from spreading, password hygiene helps to prevent the misuse of credentials. Password hygiene may feel useless when the effect is not immediately visible, but it is never the less very important […]
Recently we published part one in this series on our brand new WordPress deployment platform in which we covered some of the server side technologies that constitute our next-gen WordPress platform. In part 2 we’ll be briefly covering the toolkit we put together to easily manage the Linux containers that hold individual installations of WordPress. […]
As a Linux and open source specialist company, Seravo provides services to many companies that run Linux in a web server. Not surprisingly, in many of these cases, the top-level software running on the server is of course, the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress. We love it!
Do you want to make a computer function as a WLAN base station, so that other computers can use as it as their wifi access point? This can easily be done using the open source software Hostapd and compatible wifi hardware. This is a useful thing to do if computer acting as a firewall or […]
Sailfish is the Linux based operating system used in Jolla phones. Those who develop apps for Jolla use the Sailfish SDK (software development kit), which is basically a customized version of Qt Creator. Sailfish OS apps are written using the Qt libraries and typically in the C++ programming language. The user interfaces of Sailfish apps […]
Open source software is great and it’s not only great for developers who can code and use the source directly. Open source is a philosophy. Open source is for technology like what democracy is for society: it isn’t magically superior right away, but it enables a process which over time leads to best results – […]
The officially supported collection of software in SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 11 Service Pack 3 does not contain all conceivable Linux software, but in the Open Build System there are tons of software that is build for SLES 11SP3. Installing these software packages and repositories is of course on your own risk, as they are […]
Seravo salad is a monthly event where we discuss relevant subjects related to open source and the Internet, while the attendees enjoy a healthy salad lunch. The event is organized in cooperation with Hub Tampere. This tradition started during the autum of 2013 and the presentations so far have been about our customer cases, social […]
There are plenty of free tools available for HTML5 quality validation and testing that can and should be used by anybody who produces or buys software products. Unlike traditional native binary-only apps, with HTML5 apps the user has the ability to access the source code due the technical structure of how HTML5 apps are composed. […]
For a multitude of reasons ranging from user conversion rate to search engine ranking, it is important for web sites to load fast. The first rule of thumb to having fast loading pages is to keep the amount of data the users need to transfer small. The smaller the web page file and its dependencies […]
Who would not want to have a fast service? No matter how good your web service is, if it takes 5 seconds to load a page, people will dislike using it. Even search engines dislike slow servers and decrease their ranking. Faster is always better. In our article a few months ago we asked what […]
Most Android phone manufacturers provide operating system upgrades, so you can run the latest version of Android even with an older smart phone. With closed software phones like iPhone this is not possible, since Apple wants to force its customers into always buying a new phone. However not all Android phone manufacturers provide upgrades, or […]
The official Android project only releases versions for the ARM platform, but there is an unofficial porting project for the Intel x86 platform called Android-x86. Using this version you can in theory install Android on any home computer lying around. In practice however you need to consider what kind of components your device has and […]
On November 28th Otto Kekäläinen of Seravo ran a Git training session on request by the Tampere-based developer community Devaamo ry. Git is great revision management system authored by Linus Torvalds, and in last two years its popularity has exploded because it is so great, but certainly not because it would be easy to use, so there […]
