Table of Contents

Linux

Fixes

Copying

The progress bar when copying files from, for example, your hard disk to a USB drive, will usually fill up, then be stuck at 100% for a while. This isn't really a bug, per se: the bar fills when the data has been completely copied to the cache, then goes away when the data has finished moving to the disk. It's annoying!

You can work round this by using rsync for larger files—

rsync -av --progress [source] [destination]

—or be more adventurous and mess with some system setup:

Default Programs

You can set the default programs used to open files by:

  1. Finding the name of the program's desktop file
    • It should be in /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications
  2. Use xdg-mime to set the default, eg: xdg-mime default pcmanfm.desktop inode/directory

You can confirm with xdg-mime query default inode/directory

There are also GUI tools to do this, and if you use a desktop environment you probably have one already installed.

Memory

Not having a great time with the kernal's OOM1) Killer at the moment; it's not doing the job I expected it to, and I'm getting freezes when I get down to about 1GB of RAM.

There are three userspace solutions I've read about:

The main memory hog is me having a lot of tabs open in Firefox, which in combination with electron garbage and other hoggy things like a second web browser and Thunderbird 'causes most of the problems. Sometimes I even forget I have all those things up and start playing a game :/

See Also

Printing

See CUPS

Reminders

I forget how to do shit a lot.

Pausing Terminal

You can pause activity in the terminal with Ctrl+s, and resume again with Ctrl+q, which I find handy sometimes when I'm doing updates.

If you think of it beforehand you can pipe output to less or more or send it to a file, but I never remember.

Renaming Multiple Files

For me, mmv has the easiest syntax to remember. You'll probably have to install it. There's a version of rename that uses Perl and allows regular expressions.

Otherwise, GPRename is a graphical tool for batch renaming, and most file managers should have some kind of batch file renaming built-in (Thunar does, PCManFM doesn't).

See Also

1)
Out-Of-Memory
2)
Memory Management