Linux

Size of the root partition / on my system is 25 GB. I recently had a situation where I received notification from the system that there’s too little free space on that partition, which was around 1 GB. My first attempt was to clean pacman cache with sudo pacman -Sc. It helped for a moment, but I kept receiving this notification. I searched for the solutions regarding extending the root partition and noticed that it wouldn’t be that easy and probably require making backup and reinstalling the system. Although installing Arch is not scary for me anymore, I didn’t want to do that again, because it takes some time and after that I will have to configure all my stuff, install apps, etc. which is a lot of work. Due to this fact I started search for the solutions about cleaning root partition. I found nice program called ncdu, which is abbreviation for NCurses Disk Usage according to the man page. You can install it with pacman: sudo pacman -S ncdu. This program shows usage of the directories and shows directories, which take the biggest amount of space on the disk. Once you have that program, you can go to the root partition and run it: ...

Sometimes we may want to format external USB drive. I recently encountered a situation, where I had bootable USB drive with operating system ready to install, but I wanted to remove all this stuff and use disk for storing data. I couldn’t format this disk with GUI tools for some reason and I kept getting errors or information that it’s not possible. In case you don’t know, on Linux everything is always possible, so I quit that GUI tool, opened terminal and start playing with good old and simple programs. ...

Introduction In my previous article I roughly described Arch Linux installation process. After going through whole process, we will end up with clean terminal without any graphical environment etc. In most cases, we will need it on the desktop. Desktop Environment (DE) / Windows Manager (WM) There are two main types of the Linux graphical environments for desktop: Window Managers Desktop Environments Window Managers are much simpler, require a lot of configuration, learning how to use them and you see all windows at once. Moreover, usually you can use them without a mouse and mouse is useless most of the time because you cannot drag and drop windows. Once you master it, working with Window Manager can be very efficient. Example of popular Window Manager is i3. This environments are also lightweight. On the other hand, we have Desktop Environments. They’re full of features, windows can be stacked one on another and you can drag and drop them. Several Desktop Environments are extensible through plugins. These kind of graphical interfaces are known to majority of computer users. You can see them on Windows or macOS. Examples of the popular Linux Desktop Environments are Gnome, Xfce and KDE. Of course, mentioned Window Managers and Desktop Environments are not the only avaiable. There are more. I just mentioned these because I’ve heard about them or tried them. ...

Introduction For a long time, I was considering switching from Ubuntu do Arch Linux distribution, but I didn’t have enough knowledge, time and energy to do this. I definitely knew it requires some specific knowledge and manual steps to perform. I also didn’t wat to spend too much time on reading the documentation. Moreover, I know that sometimes I could have specific issues related to my hardware, which are not listed in documentation and I have to deal with them on my own. Due to these facts I was discouraged to install Arch. Recently, I found awesome video about Full Arch Linux Install by Luke Smith where everything is explained very clearly in each step. I watched it one time without doing anything and then, watched it next time performing all the steps described there. I had a few issues related to my hardware and BIOS, but I managed to install Arch on my ThinkPad T470s thanks to this video. During the installation, I made a few notes for myself for the future possible installations. Maybe you’ll find them useful too. The whole process is actually simpler than I thought. It just requires some practical knowledge about Linux, patience and “can do” attitude. I divided this article into steps and sub-steps, which are required to perform the installation. Please, keep in mind the fact that in the end of the installation, we will have an empty command prompt with plain OS without any GUI and we will have to install the graphical environment from the terminal. It will not be covered in this article, but I think, I’ll cover it in another one. Of course, this article contains just my notes, which help me understand everything well because and I like documenting this kind of things for the future. If you searching for Arch installation guide, I recommend you to see linked video or an official Arch installation guide in Arch Wiki. This article can be additional resource to this stuff. ...

I installed Android SDK and Android Studio on my new ThinkPad T470s with Ubuntu Linux 18.04.1 LTS. As usual, I wanted to create a new Android phone emulator called AVD (Android Virtual Device). I was able to create a new device, but unfortunately I encoutered problems. After opening AVD window, I saw the error message… /dev/kvm is not found KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). In order to enable KVM, I needed to restart the computer and enter the BIOS by pressing F1 key before the system boot. Next, I entered Security tab and enabled Intel Virtualization Technology and Intel VT-d Feature. Now, I could press F10 to save, exit nad restart the computer. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. I saw another error message… ...