Category Archives: GNU/Linux

GNU/Linux, the free/open-source operation system.

Automatically Conceal Sender’s IP Address in Email Clients via SSH Tunneling

Last updated on May 5, 2021

Desktop email clients, such as Thunderbird and Claws Mail, are preferred over their web counterparts by many professionals and power users due to their additional convenience and security. However, one big downside is that they often expose the sender's IP address to the receivers, since many SMTP servers record the sender's IP address and put it in the header, something similar to Received: from [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] (my.example.com. [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]). This, unfortunately, puts the sender's privacy in great jeopardy, as an IP address can reveal so much information including location, ISP, and institution names.

To address this issue, one simple solution is to let the email client connect via a proxy. While a system-widely available proxy works for many users, some of us just want our email clients, but not other programs, to go through a specific proxy. In this post, I'll demonstrate how to use an email client automatically via SSH tunneling. The instructions are specifically tailored for GNU/Linux and MacOS users, as it involves some uses of UNIX commands and bash scripts; if you are on Windows, you can still follow the instructions with the help of Cygwin.

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Use HTTP Clients with SOCKS Proxies (or SSH Tunnels) on GNU/Linux

Last updated on July 30, 2020

On GNU/Linux, it is easy to create SOCKS proxies using programs such as ssh or tor. However, many applications on GNU/Linux, such as LibreOffice and genymotion (up to the date on which this post is written), can be configured to directly use HTTP proxies (or web proxies), but not SOCKS proxies. In this post, we will use privoxy, a non-cache web proxy, to enable these applications to use SOCKS proxies.

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Enable Auto Completion for pip in Zsh

Last updated on August 8, 2017

Pip is a package management system for installing and managing Python software packages. To enable auto completion for pip in zsh, the documentation of pip suggests adding the following line to ~/.zshrc:

eval "`pip completion --zsh`"

However, merely having this line would not enable auto completion for pip3. To enable auto completion for pip3 as well, add the following line after the line above:

compctl -K _pip_completion pip3

A ~/.inputrc for Humans

Last updated on February 25, 2024

~/.inputrc is the user configuration file of GNU readline, which provides customizable command line user interfaces for many important interactive programs, such as Bash and Python interactive shell. However, many of its useful features are disabled by default. In this post, we will walk through a decent ~/.inputrc file to release the power of readline.

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Enable Natural Scrolling for Trackpads Using libinput

Last updated on October 28, 2018

Libinput is a library to handle input devices in Wayland and X.Org. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for evdev and synaptics in X.Org, and it is supported by a wide range of desktop environments, including GNOME and Xfce. In this post, we will see how to enable natural scrolling for trackpads using libinput. We will also leave mouses alone, i.e., no natural scrolling for mouses.

First, we need to know the name of the trackpad to enable natural scrolling for. This can be easily known by executing xinput --list. My output includes the following:

⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ bcm5974                                   id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]

It is easy to see that my trackpad is bcm5974.

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Parallelize make by Default

Last updated on December 13, 2016

The make utility is an standard utility on POSIX systems (GNU/Linux, macOS, etc.) that update files derived from other files, such as compiling source files to their binary forms. It is widely supported and used across different fields such as organizing and building C/C++/Fortran projects, building Sphinx documentation, etc.

The most popular implementation of the make utility is probably GNU make, which is usually the default make program on various GNU/Linux distributions. (On macOS, the version of the default GNU make is pretty old. Please consult Install and Use GNU Command Line Tools on macOS/OS X for a newer version.) It adds one very important feature besides the standard make specification: parallelization. The command line option -j can be used to specify the maximum number of jobs that it is allowed to run simultaneously. However, it is quite annoying to type up this option every time when using it—we want a setting such that the CPU can be fully utilized by default. To achieve this goal, add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc if you use bash or ~/.zshrc if you use zsh:

# set MAKEFLAGS
if type nproc &>/dev/null; then   # GNU/Linux
  export MAKEFLAGS="$MAKEFLAGS -j$(($(nproc)-1))"
elif type sysctl -n hw.ncpu &>/dev/null; then   # macOS, FreeBSD
  export MAKEFLAGS="$MAKEFLAGS -j$(($(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)-1))"
fi

The code above sets the envrionmental variable MAKEFLAGS, which specifies the command line arguments of any invoked make subprocesses. It is set such that the maximum number of jobs that is allowed to be run simultaneously is equal to the number of available CPU cores minus 1. In this way, the hardware is more or less fully utilized when using make, with one CPU core left for other potential tasks on the system.

Set up Synapse (Matrix Homeserver) on Ubuntu 20.04/16.04

Last updated on May 5, 2021

Matrix is an open standard for decentralized persistent communication, shares somewhat similar goals to Jabber/XMPP. It attracts people from using centralized communicating software such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. In the Matrix protocol, a piece of software called "homeserver" plays a key role to connect users. To use Matrix, one such server must be set up. In this post, we will set up Synapse, an implementation of the Matrix homeserver maintained by the Matrix team, using a minimal configuration on Ubuntu 16.04/20.04.

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A Better ls Command

Last updated on September 18, 2017

The ls command is a command to list files on a UNIX-like system. It is probably one of the most used command. However, a plain ls command without any polishing may look really “plain”. Here, we will slightly configure this command to make it more usable:

  • More colorful output
  • Automatic pagination for long file lists
  • File type indication
  • Human readable sizes
  • Natural ordering of files

Screenshots:

Output of ls before configuration

Output of ls before configuration

Output of ls after configuration

Output of ls after configuration

ls pagination

Pagination for ls

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Prevent Browser Processes Started by Emacs from Being Killed When Emacs Exits on GNU/Linux

Last updated on November 16, 2016

The function browse-url in Emacs can be used to start a browser process to visit a given URL. It is used by many packages such as org-mode, mu4e, etc. However, on GNU/Linux, by default a new browser process started by browse-url will be killed if the Emacs process exits. To prevent the browser process from being killed, add the following code to your Emacs init file:

(when (and (executable-find "setsid") (executable-find "gnome-open"))
  (setq browse-url-browser-function
        (lambda (url &optional ignored)
          (start-process "" nil "setsid" "gnome-open" url))))

You will need both the setsid and gnome-open commands available. Note that replacing gnome-open with xdg-open is not guaranteed to work.

Speed Test: Check the Existence of a Command in Bash and Zsh

Last updated on December 10, 2016

In both bash and zsh, there are multiple methods to check whether a command exists. In this post, a set of speed tests will be performed on them to find the fastest way in each of the two shells (NOT to compare the two shells). We will test 5 different methods (foobar is the command to test for existence in the list):

  • type foobar &> /dev/null
  • hash foobar &> /dev/null
  • command -v foobar &> /dev/null
  • which foobar &> /dev/null
  • (( $+commands[foobar] )) (zsh only)

All the methods listed above will have a return status of zero if the command foobar exists, otherwise non-zero. That is, after replacing testing-command by any of the commands listed above, you can test the existence of the command foobar by executing testing-command && echo exist || echo non-exist.

Throughout this post, ls will be the command that is used for testing existence, which does exist on the system which runs the tests. The test environment is Debian Jessie with bash 4.3.30 and zsh 5.0.7 on Intel Xeon processor E3-1240 v3 (8 MB Cache, 3.4 GHz). The test scripts are also available at the end of the post.

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