Linux

Miscellaneous tips and articles for mortal Linux users and system administrators.

Updating the BIOS on Lenovo laptops from Linux using a USB flash stick

Aren’t hardware manufacturers funny? They either require an old-fashioned operating system (Windows) or museum hardware (floppy drives) to update a BIOS. Apparently they never learn and are instead busy adding features like DRM and UEFI to make our lives even more miserable. However updating the BIOS on my Lenovo X230 laptop was surprisingly easy once

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Docking and undocking Linux laptops with nVidia GPUs using disper

Do you have trouble switching the display when docking and undocking your Linux laptop? In this article I will show you how to use disper and keyboard shortcuts to do that reliably if you are using nVidia’s annoyingly broken RandR-incompatible graphics driver. Many companies nowadays give their employees laptops instead of classical PCs under their desks. And

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Why you should not use Python’s easy_install carelessly on Debian

(Hint: This article talks about the Pylons web framework which is essentially dead. But the warning about easy_install and pip is still valid.) This article tries to make clear why blindly running setuptools/ez_setup on Debian/Ubuntu is dangerous and will happily break your operating system. I loved the Pylons web framework. A significatnt number of developers was using it.

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