GNOME, creating Dynamic Wallpapers

This is a quick entry, there are two kind of Dynamic wallpapers for gnome:

• Dynamic wallpaper changed by choosen theme (light/dark)
• Dynamic wallpaper changed by defined time transition

It can easily identify each one, the first have a preview with the both backgrouns (light and dark), the second have a clock icon at the bottom left corner:

• 

• 

They can be created using the next tools, installed from flathub.

Dynamic Wallpaper

https://flathub.org/apps/me.dusansimic.DynamicWallpaper

Dynamic Wallpaper Editor

https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.maoschanz.DynamicWallpaperEditor

Or if you prefer, you could create and edit the files manually from the next locations:

# Only for the actual user

## path to user xml definition of the background
~/.local/share/gnome-background-properties

## path to user backgrounds directory with xml definition for transitions
~/.local/share/backgrounds

# For all users

## path to system xml definition of the background
/usr/share/gnome-background-properties/

## path to system backgrounds directory with xml definition for transitions
/usr/share/backgrounds/Dynamic_Wallpapers/

Thats all, enjoy =D!

Fedora 38, install broadcom wireless driver in an Macbook Pro early 2011

I’ve upgraded my system from fedora 36 to 38, and all works great except for the wifi driver, so in this entry I’m goig to show how to fix it.

May be you want to read my previous post to get some useful tips.

Ok, let’s get started:

Fedora, add Microsoft Exchange account for Evolution (email client)

1. Open Evolution and go to File > New > Mail account and click on next to skip the welcome screen, then add the Identity, fill the name of the account and the email address, uncheck the box for «Look up mail server details based on the entered e-mail address«, click on next.

Quod Libet another music player for linux

I have been testing some alternative music players in linux, in my recent entry I talked about g4music and their clean and responsive user interface, but I miss a playlist feature on it. Well in this entry I’m going to share another player with some additional features that I have use frecuently like, id tag and playlist editor, and its very flexible to organize my music library. BUT the UI is more like the old school applications, but I consider that it has a good set of features.

«Quod Libet is a GTK+-based audio player written in Python, using the Mutagen tagging library. It’s designed around the idea that you know how to organize your music better than we do. It lets you make playlists based on regular expressions (don’t worry, regular searches work too). It lets you display and edit any tags you want in the file, for all the file formats it supports.

Unlike some, Quod Libet will scale to libraries with tens of thousands of songs. It also supports most of the features you’d expect from a modern media player.«

Fedora, move user home directory to another partition

This is a quick entry, after mount a new encrypted partition, I have to move my default home directory to this new partition. The easy way to do that is using the next command (as super user).

$ usermod -m -d /path/to/new/home/dir userNameHere

Where:

-m, --move-home, Move the content of the user's home directory to the new location.

-d, --home HOME_DIR, The user's new login directory.

It could takes some minutes to complete but it depends of the size of your data, in my case took 5 mins to move arround of 90 GB.

g4music an open source music player for gnome

Since six years ago, I have been using youtube music (previously named Google Play Music), and each time I have felt the influence of the algorithm more and more when it shows me some recommendations, sometimes it was fine, but I really miss the simplicity to listen to my music without depend from the streaming service.

So then I have decided to use an offline music player and I choosed g4music, it is «a beautiful, fast, fluent, light weight music player written in GTK4» and I really like it.

I have been using it a lot the last few days and I remembered how I felt to manage and play my music library with no internet connection and it is really enjoyable.

It can be installed from flathub:

# Install

flatpak install flathub com.github.neithern.g4music

# Run

flatpak run com.github.neithern.g4music

Here are some features that I’ve noticed.

Fedora, connect to wifi using the console (nmcli)

This is a quick tip for my notes, Network Management Command-Line Interface (nmcli) is a tool for managing the NetworkManager application and reporting on the status of the network.

A complete list of commands can be readed here. These are some them:

# List available access points(AP) to connect to

nmcli device wifi list

# Create a new connection to an open AP

nmcli device wifi connect <SSID|BSSID>

# Create a new connection to a password protected AP

nmcli device wifi connect <SSID|BSSID> password <password>

# List available devices and their status

nmcli device status

References

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Networking/CLI
• https://www.golinuxcloud.com/nmcli-command-examples-cheatsheet-centos-rhel/#2_List_all_the_available_device

Fedora, device encryption using dm-crypt/LUKS

According to the fedora documentation:

«Block device encryption encrypts/decrypts the data transparently as it is written/read from block devices, the underlying block device sees only encrypted data.

To mount encrypted block devices the sysadmin (or user, depending on context) must provide a passphrase to activate the decryption key.

Encryption provides additional security beyond existing OS security mechanisms in that it protects the device’s contents even if it has been physically removed from the system. Some systems require the encryption key to be the same as for decryption, and other systems require a specific key for encryption and specific second key for enabling decryption.«

What LUKS means?

LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is a specification for block device encryption. It establishes an on-disk format for the data, as well as a passphrase/key management policy.

So, In this entry I’m going to show how I enabled for one partition my disk.

Onedrive client for Linux (an alternative)

One of the applications that I’ve used the most in the recent years is the Onedrive to sync my files to the cloud, and recently I found an excellent alternative for linux named onedriver.

This is an open source software that allows the access to your files directly from Nautilus as local file, according to the project:

«This is not a sync client. Instead of syncing files, onedriver performs an on-demand download of files when your computer attempts to use them. onedriver allows you to use files on OneDrive as if they were files on your local computer.«

This are the main features:

• Files are only downloaded when you use them
• Bidirectional sync.
• Can be used offline
• Fast
• Has a user interface
• Multi account support

And that is exactly what I need.

Fedora, application aquired an inhibitor lock

I want to share the blog of Milosz Galazka, he explains really good the inhibitor locking, this is a copy/paste entry from the original post, that I really recommend to give a visit to his web page here:

https://sleeplessbeastie.eu/2022/01/31/how-to-identify-a-gnome-application-that-acquired-an-inhibitor-lock/

Well, I’m going to leave here a copy of their work, enjoy it.

The issue

Try to power-off or reboot the machine.

$ sudo reboot

Operation inhibited by "milosz" (PID 165825 "gnome-session-b", user milosz), reason is "user session inhibited".
Please retry operation after closing inhibitors and logging out other users.
Alternatively, ignore inhibitors and users with 'systemctl reboot -i'.

There is an inhibition lock that is blocking the operation. It can be anything as the lock can be acquired by an application to perform an upgrade, ask user a question or simply play multimedia.