Virtual Machines in Linux

This is a brief introduction to setting up and running Virtual Machines in Linux. While there are several different options to accomplish this, my preferred method is using KVM + QEMU + LibVirt. Here’s what each of these does: QEMU is a full-fledged stand-alone emulator that can emulate all kinds of hardware for virtual machines…

A Running List of useful Linux utilities

This will be a place where I’ll track a running list of useful Linux utilities. convert <input_image> <output_image> ps2pdf <input_pdf> <output_pdf> cat <input_file> | tr ‘,’ ‘\n’ | tr -d ‘\[\”\] ‘

Printing from your iOS devices through CUPS

I finally followed through in setting up and sharing my Canon MP620 through my Linux homeserver with CUPS. This part is straightforward – install cups, cups-backend-bjnp (for the network communication with the MP620), gutenprint (for printer drivers) and then going to <host>:631 and adding the network printer using the printer’s static IP address (CUPS network…

Mounting SMB shares reliably on a Linux WiFi Laptop with AutoFS

As I mentioned here, I have been running Manjaro Linux on my home laptop for almost a year now and for the most part it has worked well. My setup is that most of the useful storage is on my home server and I was mounting these as SMB shares on the laptop. Initially, I…

Fixing slow shutdown in Linux from CIFS/SMB mounts over WiFi

After a pleasant year of using Manjaro Linux on my laptop at home, I started seeing problems with SMB mounts. My setup is that I have all of the main storage on my home server which is shared through SMB shares and these shares are mounted on the laptop through SMB4k. SMB4k started doing strange…

Using ffmpeg to convert WMA to MP3

As part of the reorganization of my home server, I am consolidating all my music files into the home server. I quickly realized that in a misguided fit of irrationality, I had gone through a phase in the past where most of my library was in the WMA format. The problem with WMA format is…

Samba 4.1.4 memory corruption bug

I was looking at my logs and noticed that smbd had crashed a few times since install. Searched the samba bug database and found this bug which was reporting the same issue. I have applied the patch supplied and updated the package – here’s how I patched and updated: In your samba source folder, run…