James'Techblog

FSCK, otherwise known as Filesystem check for linux, is a program built into Linux operating systems that essentially takes the place of CHKDSK in Windows. While Linux rarely needs to run FSCK, it has become more or less standard at boot time on most SystemD powered Linux distributions. FSCK not only checks the bootability of your drive, it also tries to repair problems that prevent the said drive from booting. This can be orphaned inodes, bad journal files, issues with sectors and bad blocks. While many of these could prevent a drive or file system from booting anyway, FSCK is a good first step to ensure drive health and maintain a file system when problems may arise. Linux has great damage control and security already built in that users can easily access to gain more control of their distribution. Running the command man fsck: will return a lot of information on the command. It will return possible exit codes(more on that in a minute) and a short description...

In Linux, both Debian-based and Arch-based, there are more than a couple of browsers to choose from. Most browsers can be found easily in the repositories, but the better ones(Opera and Vivaldi), still have to be downloaded from the net. Firefox also has other editions which are not in the Ubuntu repositories. To install these browsers, you have to go to the website and manually download the browser first. Of course, Vivaldi and Opera have deb packaging that helps with their installation in Ubuntu-based systems, but this is not the case in Arch. In Arch you have tarballs. Tarballs are archives that many packages are placed in as a way to compress large files into smaller ones as to make downloading hundreds of said packages at any given time more efficient. The way in which a tarball is extracted depends greatly on what extension the maintainer used when compressing. Some typical extensions include; tar.gz, tar.bz2, etc. For this tutorial, I’m going to use a package fro...

Bitcoin mining is a popular term around the interwebs these days. Bitcoin mining can be a really good thing for people collecting Bitcoins. Mining helps people to become collectors, it helps promote a healthy economy based around Bitcoins. It can cost a bit to get started, but for those wanting to work from home to earn a potentially descent income, it’s a great thing. Bitcoin mining has changed since its inception, with differing computer hardware models hitting the market every couple of years or so, bitcoin mining has adapted its standards. Bitcoin makes intense and good use of system resources, for this reason, it is recommended that miners first buy a new and powerful machine that will last a few years. These machines can cost money, but some miners make the difference in a couple of years. There is good and bad bitcoin mining, but we’ll talk more about that later. Bitcoin “mining” was called that due to the resemblance of exertion in mines under ground. Bitcoins...

Opera 51, the new stable release from Opera, is a descent improvement over the 50 release. In this release, the team fixed the usual bugs of course, but also added features. One such feature was the new scroll to top of page when clicking tab feature. This easily helps access the top portion of the page without wasting time scrolling on the scroll wheel of the mouse or clicking the arrow or trackpad on a laptop. The team have also added a Reset Opera button which now takes all the work of backing up preferences out of the equation. With this button, you can keep your history and bookmarks while refreshing the home profile of the browser, this feature is already seen in Firefox and Chrome, however, it was never before introduced in Opera or Vivaldi. There was also a redesign of the private browsing mode. Now Mac and Windows versions look similar and you also have new animations on all versions. To skip the animation, you can click the “Don’t show this anymore” button on the page...

Opera browser, a product of Opera Software, a subsidiary of Otella based in Norway, is the chromium-based browser that has built in features such as ad blocking, free VPN, memory improvements over Chrome itself and wallpapers and a light and dark theme pre-configured. Opera browser has been around for a long time. It started its life around 1994. Opera was co-founded by Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, an Icelandic born programmer living in Norway at the time. Under the direction of Jon and his colleagues, Opera built some amazing features into their software such as; Tabbed browsing, fraud and phishing protection, bookmarks bar and many other features that the competition at the time simply didn’t have. Opera was very fast and it accomplished much of this thanks to the founding company’s own in-house Presto engine. Opera used Presto up to version 12 then dropped the engine in favor of a pre-built Web kit engine which was of similar fashion to what Google Chrome was using. Later on Web ...

A couple of weeks ago, my new Western Digital Blue 250 GB SSD came in the mail. It’s fast. My computer automatically recognized the new hardware when I plugged it in. After installing Manjaro 17.1.1 on the device(As I had no Manjaro 17.1.2), it booted quickly and cleanly. The system ran as if I had a regular Hard disk drive in the machine. It shutdown 2 times as fast as the hard disk drives I’ve been using have done. It also loaded applications in a flash. Everything seemed stable on the system. A couple of issues I’ve been having with Manjaro lately, the themes aren’t working as they are supposed to, this doesn’t seem to matter here. All my scripts worked beautifully on it, everything finished in half the normal amount of time. I’ve had absolutely zero problems with it. Installing the device, however, might prove to be a challenge. The only available slots are where the floppy drive would go and it isn’t open, and an SD card reader spot. I also didn’t originally have a cable that wou...

For those who are running older systems, and I’m talking systems with ancient AMD chips and Nvidia graphics. You might have updated kernels in Linux lately and got the following message; Spectre mitigation V2 LFENCE not serializing. What this most likely means is that AMD is pretty hardy and it turns out that most AMD processors were not as vulnerable as the Intel processors were. Thus, your processor is probably not vulnerable to certain variants. I’m speaking of variants 1 & 2. Variant 3, however… Any who, if this message shows itself at boot, it appears that it is so far, just words. I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless you later notice that something about your hardware configuration is acting strange. What it is doing is going back to a generic retpoline. If you didn’t catch anything at boot and are worried about the potential incompatibility, you can usually just revert back in Linux by hitting the shift key before the kernel loads itself. In most distributions you...