Restoring Google Search To Chromium When Installed In Linux Mint

Well, that’s a long headline, but it’s not easy to compress the idea of restoring Google Search to Chromium when installed in Linux Mint! However, this is another article that is just me scratching my own itch. You’ll understand what I mean soon enough, I hope. I mean, I think I can describe it well enough.

Also, I’m using a new keyboard. I wore the last one out. That always slows me down for a little while. Ah well… I digress, and needlessly so…

So, let’s say you’ve done a fresh install of Linux Mint. Let’s also say that you decided you want to use Chromium. Fortunately, Chromium is in the default Linux Mint repositories. Given the ease of this operation, you go ahead and install Chromium in Linux Mint with the following command:

Everything appears well and good – until such a time as you decide you want to search from the search bar. At that point, you’ll notice that Chromium in Linux Mint uses a different search engine. This should be easy to change (and it is) but when you look in the settings you’ll see that Google Search is nowhere to be found.

There’s a resolution for this! We won’t even need the terminal.

I’ll presuppose that you’ve already installed Chromium, so we’ll skip that part. You can figure that out if you haven’t already figured that out and are now curious about adding Google Search.

Restoring Google Search To Chromium:

First, you will want to open Chromium, click the three vertical dots in the upper right, and select ‘Settings’.

From there, you look to the left to find the ‘Search engine’ option and click on that. Chances are good that you already tried this, assuming you’ve wanted to restore Google Search to Chromium.

You next click on ‘Manage search engines and site search’, which is where we want to be to edit search engines in Chromium.

Scroll down to ‘Site Search’ and click on ‘Add’, like so:

adding google search to chromium in linux mint
See? It’s a pretty basic concept. The rest is also easy. We can restore Google Search!

That’s going to pop up a new window that looks like this:

adding a new search engine in chromium
There aren’t many fields to be filled out – and Google isn’t your only option.

Under ‘Search engine’, add: Google 
Under ‘Shortcut’, add: google 
Under ‘URL’ add: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s 

Note, that the %s is where your search terms would go in the website’s URL. If you wanted to add Ecosia, for example, you’d use this in the last section:

Be sure to click the ‘Add’ button when you’re done.

By the way, the ‘Shortcut’ is the text you’d type to manually pick that search engine. You start your address bar query with the shortcut text, add a space, and then add your search terms. That will let you pick among the various search engines manually. In the above example, you’d first type ‘google’ and that’d give you results from Google Search.

Of course, you can just make Google Search the default…

Make The New Search The Default Search:

If you want, you can make the newly added search engine the default search engine. That’s what I did, but it’s entirely up to you. You could always just preface the search with the word/letter you put in the 2nd second and manually select your search engine.

To make the newly added search the default search, simply click the three vifffffrticle dots next to the new entry and set it as the default. Like so:

Make the newly added search engine the default search engine.
  Tada! It’s default!

That’s all there is to it. You’ve now made the newly added search the default search. When you search from the address bar, it will use your default search engine. If you highlight and right-click to search, it will now use your new default search engine.

Notes:

I mentioned Ecosia and gave an example. It’s pretty easy to find the right URL. Go to the search engine (or site search engine) and enter ‘example’ into the search bar.

If you did that here on Linux-Tips, you’d get this:

To add this site as a search engine, you’d replace ‘example’ with %s. Like so:

If you wanted to add Bing, you’d do the same thing:

Verify that you can remove the gibberish:

(And you can…)

So, the result needed to add Bing as a search engine would be:

 You can generally do this with any sites you want – so long as they’re reasonably accessed and have the search term included in the address bar. If you wanted to search Linux.org from the search bar, you’d use:

Yes, that will work and it will still properly filter the results according to date. It’s pretty easy. As I mentioned, I’m mostly scratching my own itch with this article. This was a change I needed to make and I thought it’d make a good article. I’ve decided to make it more thorough, showing you that you can do more than just restore Google Search to Chromium.

This will also work with browsers based on Chromium. If you are using Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, Chrome, etc., then you can almost certainly manage your search engines just like this. I tend to have a few search engines configured but I mostly rely on Google Search as it seems to consistently work best for me. You do you, however.

Closure:

Well, there you go. It’s pretty easy to learn about restoring Google Search to Chromium when installed in Linux Mint! (That’s such a long headline…) The concept is easier than trying to make a concise headline out of it. I dare say this is the longest headline I’ve ever had. Search engines are not going to like it. Hopefully, the content makes up for that!

If you’re still reading this far, you might as well know that Google uses a different address in their search settings. It’s a convoluted thing and I hope I get this right…

However, you don’t need all that. You’re fine (as far as I can tell) with the basic option I gave above. But, I figured I’d include this just for the sake of completeness. Good luck restoring Google Search in Chromium when installed in Linux Mint! It’s not that challenging and I’m sure you can figure it out.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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Reboot From The Terminal

The weather has had a bit of an impact on my internet connection, so this is just going to be a quick article about how you reboot from the terminal. I want to schedule this as soon as possible, so it’ll be a fairly low-effort article. This should not take long!

There are times when you may want to know how to reboot from the terminal. Then, there are times when you can’t access a GUI, and using the terminal is the cleanest method of rebooting your computer. Knowing how to reboot from the terminal might be a skill worth having. I’ll show you a couple of quick and easy ways to do this.

As the title says, this is going to take place in the terminal. You can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T to open your default terminal. You could otherwise reboot with REISUB.

So, with your terminal open…

Reboot With systemd:

The first command we’ll use to reboot your computer. We’ll be using systemd. This will only work if you’re using a distro with systemd.

Reboot With shutdown:

It should be fairly obvious that the shutdown command can be used to reboot your computer. This is one of the generic utilities, so you won’t need to install anything.

(Check the man page because there are a lot of options available.)

Reboot With reboot:

Finally, we’ll use the reboot command to reboot your computer. This might be the easiest to remember and you shouldn’t need to install anything new. You need the following command:

In some distros, you can drop the ‘now’ and the command will still reboot your computer immediately. 

Closure:

So, there you have it. You have a new article and it should even be published on time. It’s not a long article. The subject is easy enough. You’ll never know when you need to reboot from the terminal, and now you do.

Ah well…

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

 

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Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #21

It seems like now is a good time to write another article about the site itself, because I’ve not done a meta article in over two months. Yeah, it has been that long since I last did a check-in to let folks know how things are going. Every time I’ve thought about writing a meta article, I’ve decided to write something else.

The thing is, there’s not much to write about. Things are going very, very well. At least I think things are going well. It’s quite amazing how far this site has come and I have you, the regular readers, to thank for that. I have you, those who have contributed, to thank for that.

When you point out a problem in an article, you make the site better. If you choose to comment, it provides motivation. Those who voice their appreciation give me the confidence to continue. Without you, I’d have long since run out of any shred of desire to write.

Thank you! Really, thank you!

So, what do I mean when I say that things are going well?

Some Numbers:

In November, more than 17,500 unique visitors visited the site and did so more than 26,000 times.

I remember when I was stoked to see 20 visits in a day.

Once upon a time, I didn’t have to pay extra for bandwidth. In November, this site went through nearly 70 GB of traffic. LOL If you want to donate, that’s where your donations go – into paying the CDN. Fortunately, the bills aren’t that high.

Advanced Web Statistics claimed that I showed about 1,300,000 pages – but that seems unrealistic. I’m pretty sure that’s counting bots. Bots account for a bunch of my bandwidth, but the stats I share with you do their best to only include real human visitors.

This will be article #482.

I’ve not missed a day yet, though I remain convinced that I will – and I’m okay with that. So far, I’ve just been lucky. Eventually, Mother Nature and my infrastructure will cause me to miss an article. So far, there has been at least one article every other day. That was the schedule I decided upon when I started the site. That is the schedule I’ve followed.

Sponsorship:

I get so many requests to link to this or that. People constantly request that I allow them to write a ‘guest’ article. They do this because they want a link on my site and that helps with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goals.

If you look at the top of the page, you’ll see a new link up there. Those are the rules and fees for me sharing an article or a link. I have intentionally priced them high. I mostly formalized this so that I can just respond to those emails with a link.

Man… So many SEO link requests… Most of them don’t even seem to know what the site is about. It’s like they just shotgun requests and hope for desperate blog authors. I am not desperate.

If you want to legitimately write an article that’s not to promote your site, feel free to do so. I’ll happily accept those. If you’re not doing it for SEO reasons, that’s fine by me.

Speaking of SEO, I’ve paid some attention to it lately. I’ve been learning more about SEO and trying new things. The site ranks pretty well for some keywords and phrases.

Search Engines:

I’m finally listed in Bing.

Bing sends me maybe 1% of my traffic…

I get traffic from all the major search engines – and some of the not-so-major search engines. Like, I get a few people from Ecosia. Weirdly, Duck Duck Go sends me the second-most amount of search engine traffic. The first is Google, of course. Bing and Yandex are respectively next, after “Unknown Search Engine”. That’s followed mostly by the regional Google instances, such as google.uk or google.de.

As mentioned above, I’ve done some on-site SEO work. They care about things like links, readability, load time, and stuff like that. This site ranks well in all those categories, as a general rule.

If you search for “ask a good support question”, you’ll likely find this site at the top of the list. Sadly, the people who most need that information will never search for that information. I’d call it irony, but it really isn’t ironic. It’s just a statement of the human condition, I suppose.

The site also ranks well for terms like ‘screenfetch vs neofetch‘, ‘Prevent SSH Root Login‘, ‘ls -l format‘, ‘restart teamviewer‘, and ‘sudo apt purge‘.

It’s a weird assortment. I have a hard time knowing what articles will be the most appreciated by Google. They tell me that I should know that before I even start writing an article, but I don’t worry about it.

Also, writing these meta articles takes more time and effort than writing regular articles. Search engines don’t even like these articles!

What Can You Do?

You can keep reading and keep commenting – even if nobody ever comments here. 99% of the comments here have got to be spam. I’m not kidding. I’ll get a dozen spam attempts a day – and that’s AFTER automatic filtering.

Bots can’t easily spam the site, so these are real humans wasting their time. I can’t imagine being so poor that I’d undergo a task with so little chance of success. I sort of feel sorry for these people, but not enough to let them spam the site.

You can donate of course. As I said, all the donations go straight to paying for bandwidth. You don’t have to. I’ve long since concluded that I’ll pay the bills regardless of how high they go. The site is not currently at risk of going under. Still, it’s an option.

You can unblock ads. I appreciate it if you do, but I understand if you do not. If you do unblock the ads, please only click on ads that you’re legitimately interested in. Clicking a bunch of ads is a nice gesture, but that makes Google angry. I do not like it when Google is angry! Google has been angry before. 

Closure:

Like I said, these meta articles take me longer to write than it takes me to write the average article. They’re kind of a pain in the butt and I almost regret doing the first few as that now makes me feel obligated to keep doing them. They may disappear entirely, but I’ll keep going for now.

The first few were easy, as I didn’t have much to say. Now, I have hundreds of facts and figures that I could share, but I’m not going to invest the time and effort to do so. If you have any questions about this sort of stuff, feel free to ask me. I just don’t want to invest that much time and effort into some article that’s going to be read by maybe 50 interested parties.

As always…

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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Repair Your Filesystem With FSCK

Over the years, we’ve covered the fsck command fairly extensively but I’ve never really written an article about how you repair your filesystem with fsck. This may very well be the last time we have an fsck article on this site. It seems like I’ve covered everything you need to know.

This article is about using fsck when you’re booted into your operating system. You can’t run fsck against a mounted drive. So, if you want to check and repair your root filesystem, the following article may be of assistance:

Repair Your Linux Filesystem With a Live USB or DVD

That’s a fairly popular article, as it ranks well in search engines. I’ve also recently authored this article:

Enable fsck On System Start

This article will be fairly simple and reasonably short. We’ll see if that turns out to be true, ’cause I wrote this before I finished the article! We shall see!

The Tools:

You’ll only need a couple of tools to repair your filesystem with fsck. First and foremost, you’ll need a terminal. I’ll assume you have a terminal. All the tools in this article will require an open terminal. You can usually press CTRL + ALT + T to open your default terminal.

You will also need…

lsblk:

The lsblk application is the first tool we’ll be using. Using lsblk is how we’ll identify your partitions. You almost certainly won’t need to install anything as this is one of those tools installed by default. You can verify that lsblk is installed by running:

If you check the man page, you’ll see that this is indeed the tool for the job.

lsblk – list block devices

See? We want to list block devices – that will show us the partitions and various filesystems.

umount:

The next tool we’ll use is the umount command. You can’t run fsck against a mounted filesystem, so we’ll need first to unmount the devices before we can repair them with fsck. You can verify that umount is installed with this command:

Again, we’ll check the man page to ensure that this is the correct tool for the job.

umount – unmount filesystems

See? I wouldn’t steer you wrong. This is the tool we need to unmount filesystems before we use fsck, the next tool, to repair filesystem errors.

fsck:

This is the tool we’ll be using. We’re going to repair your filesystem with fsck, assuming your filesystem needs to be repaired. This must be a Linux filesystem, meaning Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, etc… You’ll need other tools for filesystems otherwise formatted. Once again, you can verify that fsck is installed with the following command:

Again, if we check the man page, you’ll see that this is the right tool for the job.

fsck – check and repair a Linux filesystem

I’d say that these are the best tools we can use for today’s task.

Repair Your Filesystem With FSCK:

I gave instructions above that told you how you can usually open your terminal. That keyboard combination is not true with every distro and I don’t know why. It seems to me that it should be a standard. If you’re using such a distro, you can open your terminal from the application menu.

With your terminal open, we first need to identify your filesystems. You can do that with the following command:

You’ll get an output similar to this one:

You can also run:

That has the added benefit of showing limited information and which filesystems are identified as Linux filesystems. I use lsblk above because I use that often and want a consistent set of directions across the site. However, an example output from the above command would contain information like this:

You can run that command if you prefer. You may have to scroll up to see all of the information. In the output I shared above, you’ll notice that it didn’t include any information about /dev/sda* filesystems. As those are mounted and need to be mounted (in my case) it doesn’t matter.

At this point, you need to identify the filesystem you want to check. If you use the first command, you’ll need to remember to add /dev to the front. So, it’s not sdb2, it’s /dev/sdb2. If you use the second command, it gives you that information.

Now, we’re just going to automatically check for problems and repair them with fsck, but first you need to unmount the filesystem. To do that, you just run the following command:

Then, you can just run fsck against the filesystem’s device ID, like so:

For example, I could run:

With the -p flag enabled, it will automatically check the filesystem for errors and repair them – unless they’re really serious. If they’re serious errors, it will ask you what to do.

NOTES:

Unfortunately, I don’t have any filesystems that need to be repaired. Linux is rather robust and our filesystems are usually fairly healthy. If you suffer from random reboots without properly shutting down, you might have a different experience.

When you’re done with this, you can remount the filesystems you checked for errors. Frankly, that’s a whole other article. If you open your file manager, the GUI one, you can often mount filesystems right from there. You can also unmount them, but we did that right there in the terminal.

Again, you can’t unmount your root partition or any other important partitions. If you use separate partitions like /home or /dev, you’ll need to use a live USB to repair those mounted filesystems. This command will only work with Linux filesystems. It is not going to work with FAT, EXFAT, NTFS, etc., it will only work with Linux filesystems.

That might be a good reason to run the 2nd command ( sudo fsck -l) where you’ll get an output like this:

Look at /dev/sda1, where it properly identifies the type as an “EFI System”. That means that it’s not a supported filesystem and fsck will do you no good when you target it. I figure you’re smart enough to know the differences and what you have used, so lsblk is easier – and more consistent as we use that command frequently here on Linux-Tips.us.

Closure:

Well, it turns out that I was mistaken. I thought this was going to be a quick and easy article. I think it’s easy enough, but it wasn’t very quick. It has been a mixed bag lately as I play around with the formatting of various articles. This often makes them longer, but I’m okay with that. Plus, I type quickly!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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Automatically Enable Num Lock In Linux Mint

Sometimes I write articles that scratch my own and this time around it’s how to automatically enable Num Lock in Linux Mint. If you’re using a full-size keyboard and want to automatically enable Num Lock, this just might be the article for you. This article shouldn’t be all that long – and it won’t be very complicated. 

I should explain…

So, I misfired a dd command and hosed my root partition. I then decided to do something I’ve not done in a long time. For a change of pace and a fresh start, I decided not to restore (much of my) data from backups. Sure, I imported passwords, Thunderbird, ~/bash_aliases, and remained logged into browsers, but I didn’t import all my settings, my million browser tabs, or anything like that.

It has been fun! I haven’t done this in a long time. If I hose an OS, I just install and copy my /home directory into the freshly installed OS and I’m good to go.

As an aside, I’m quite grateful that I’ve written these articles. They’ve come in handy while rebuilding my system. I find myself referring to this site quite often. After all, I tend to write about what I know. These are often articles of things I do. This time around, it’s simply how you can automatically enable Num Lock in Linux Mint. This shouldn’t take long.

If you’re interested in this article, you might be interested in this other article:

Disable The Caps Lock Key In Linux Mint

Automatically Enable Num Lock In Linux Mint:

You don’t need an open terminal for this, but we’ll use the terminal because it’s easier for me to do this in the terminal. You can start by pressing CTRL + ALT + T to open your terminal.

With your terminal now open, we’re going to install an application called numlockx.  This is required if you want to use this method of enabling Num Lock automatically. 

If you check the man page, you’ll see that this is the tool we want for this task.

numlockx – Control the state of NumLock

Sure enough, that’s what we want to do! The rest is all in the GUI.

Open your menu and search for “login”. You’ll see an application called Login Window. Open that and then click on the Settings tab. With that Settings tab open, tick the slider to automatically enable Num Lock when you log into the system. It looks like this:

it's easy to automatically enable num lock in Linux Mint
That’s really all there is to it, so long as you first install numlockx. See? I told you it was easy!

That is what your screen should look like to enable Num Lock. This is it at the login window portion of the boot. This means you’ll have the Num Lock enabled and won’t have to remember to press the button when you use it.

Closure:

See? I told you this one would be quick and easy. Like I said, I’m just scratching my own itch. I prefer the Num Lock key to be enabled all the time. It’s just a habit for me and I do use the number pad fairly often. I figured I’d share it, seeing as it was something that was on my mind.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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