Category: Tips

Disable The Caps Lock Key In Linux Mint

Sometimes, like software, an article is about scratching my own itch – and I really wanted to disable the caps lock key in Linux Mint. While I can type at a fairly decent clip, my keyboard is often at an angle and this results in me hitting the caps lock key unintentionally.

It also gets pressed fairly often when I’m inebriated! That can be pretty frustrating and, frankly, I have pretty much no use for the caps lock key to begin with. I suppose I could square up the keyboard and not type while inebriated, but ain’t nobody gonna believe it if I said I’d do those things.

Hmm… This is the point in my introduction where I’d explain the subject matter. This time, the subject is the caps lock key. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain that. If I have to explain the caps lock key, this is probably not the site for you. That’ll save a lot of time!

Normally, I’d go about this task by using xmodmap or maybe setxkbmap to accomplish this, but instead I figured I’d look for a nice and easy solution. I figured that I’d look for a handy GUI method. The method I learned may be old-hat to you folks, but I’ve always done this in the terminal and that means it’s new to me.

So then, as there’s nothing more to add to the intro, let’s learn how to disable the caps lock key (and more – and the easy way)!

Disable The Caps Lock Key:

For once, you don’t need to start with an open terminal! Instead, open your application menu and type “keyboard”. Click on the icon that is labeled exactly that.

Next, click on the “Layouts” tab and click on “Options”. It should look a little something like this:

setting your keyboard up to disable the caps lock key
This one should be pretty self-explanatory. Just click where the arrow points!

That will open a new screen, where you’ll click on “Caps Lock Behavior”. Once again, it’s going to look a bit like this:

the screen where you disable the caps lock key
You can disable the caps lock key – or you can pick other options.

As you can see, there are a variety of options – including setting the caps lock key to disabled. There are a number of other options that you can pick for the behavior of your caps lock key, but I simply disabled it and called it good. That is what I was after, after all. You do you and decide how you want your caps lock to behave, but this is how you disable caps lock if you really want to.

Closure:

There you have it, another way to disable caps lock key in Linux Mint. I suppose I could probably go ahead and write an article about how to do it in the terminal – which is actually on my list of potential articles to write about. Before delving into the terminal, I decided to see if it could be accomplished graphically and, sure enough, it can.

As you can see, there are all sorts of other options in there. You can change the behavior for quite a few of your keyboard’s keys. This is yet another way you can easily personalize Linux Mint to meet your needs. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Worst case scenario? Just hit the ‘Reset to Defaults’ in the Layout tab as indicated in the first graphic on this page.

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Determine If You’re Using UEFI

Today’s article is going to tell you how to determine if you’re using UEFI or legacy mode. This is particularly useful if you’ve either forgotten. It’s also useful if you’re using a system you don’t know anything about. It’s handy for troubleshooting things like boot issues.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is not really a ‘thing’. It’s a set of specifications that determine how the OS interfaces with the operating system. While it does have its advantages, OEMs have been pretty sporadic with the quality of their implementation. UEFI was predated by EFI, which came from a vendor known as IBM. UEFI was predated by BIOS (legacy) and, for now, vendors seem inclined to more or less support both.

Why should you care? Well, it’ll tell you a lot about how you’re booting your system and it says a lot about how your system interacts with the hardware. While tools like boot-repair are able to work with either, you will need to know what type of system you’re working with if you’re doing it manually.

The good news is that it’s easy to figure this out. Even a beginner can figure it out! So, let’s find out if you’re using UEFI.

Are You Using UEFI:

Yup… You need a terminal open. So, let’s do that. All you need to do is press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Now, the tool we’ll be using is called ‘efibootmgr’. That tool defines itself as:

efibootmgr – manipulate the UEFI Boot Manager

I did some testing and it was installed by default on most of the operating systems I tried it on. If it’s not installed, it’s pretty easy to install. The only time I had to install it manually was with openSUSE Tumbleweed. So, the command for that is:

If it’s not installed on your system, just go ahead and install it. You may need to use apt, dnf, or whatever – but it should be available for your distro. Just install it like you’d install other software from the terminal, suited to your distro’s package manager.

Once it is installed, it’s really, really simple. Just run:

Then, check the output. If you’re not using UEFI, it will say:

If it says anything else, you’re using UEFI. 

See? I told you that it was easy. That’s all you need to know.

Closure:

Yup. Another article said and done. This one is about determining if you’re using UEFI or if you’re not. It’s so simple that even a rank beginner can figure it out. Don’t forget that you can use the comment section to ask questions that’d be suitable for new articles. Sometimes, even with my notes, it’s harder to decide the subject than it is to write the article.

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Install Brave Browser In Fedora

I keep hearing people talk about the Brave browser, so I decided to spin up a virtual machine and learn how to install Brave browser in Fedora. It’s actually one of the more complicated installs, but it’s not dreadfully difficult. If you’re looking to install Brave browser in Fedora, this article is for you.

If you’re unfamiliar with Fedora, it’s a distro that’s mostly sponsored by Red Hat and it is usually on the front edge of software. So, if you’re looking for a reasonably stable platform that also offers the latest and greatest software, Fedora is probably a good distribution for you.

Read: What is The Best Linux Distro?

So, if you’re a Fedora user, or are considering using Fedora, you might be pleased to know that you can install Brave browser. It’s not even all that difficult. While it’s generally advised that new users stick to the software choices in their default repositories, I’ve generally/mentally always made an exception for the browser. After all, which browser you prefer is such a personal choice. As such, you may need to reach outside the defaults to find the browser that best suits your needs.

Anyhow, today’s article is going to tell you how to install the Brave browser in Fedora. I’m not really a huge fan of Brave, but the growing popularity can’t be denied. So, you might as well know how to install it.

Install Brave Browser In Fedora:

Like so many articles, this one requires an open browser. That’s easily accomplished with the GUI application menu, or you can just go ahead and press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, let’s prep Fedora to install Brave browser. You’ll need to install dnf-plugins-core if you’ve not already done so. That’s done with this command:

We’ll then want to add the Brave repository, like so:

Note: That may change with newer Brave versions.

Next, you’ll want to make sure the software you get is genuine, using an .asc file – an ASCII version of a .pgp key file, and this requires this command:

That’s pretty much it, actually. All that’s left is to install Brave browser in Fedora – which is done with just this command:

Follow any on-screen prompts and you’re good to go. If you want proof that it works, see this:

freshly installed brave browser in Fedora
That may look a little funny, but it’s Fedora with LXDE – and the Brave browser!

See? It works! It wasn’t even all that hard to install the Brave browser. If that’s the browser you want to use, you can now jump to Fedora and know that the browser works just fine. You’re welcome!

Closure:

There you have it. There’s another article, this one telling you how to install Brave browser. I figured it’d be something folks are interested in, as Brave has increased in popularity and more folks are considering using Brave as their default browser.

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Did You Know You Have A Calendar In The Terminal?

You might not know it, but you actually have a calendar in the terminal. It’s surprisingly handy. Though, to be clear, I pretty much only use it when I’m already in the terminal – such as when I’ve used SSH to connect to a remote server.

So, it’s useful (to me) while I’m already in the terminal. The rest of the time, I’m in a GUI desktop environment and there’s a calendar to be had just by mousing over the time. There’s also Thunderbird’s calendar and I use that a great deal. It cal command is of limited value, which is just fine. 

The tool we’ll be using is called ‘cal‘. The cal command is in wide use today and has been with us for, at the time of this writing, more than fifty years. It’s a pretty straightforward command and its longevity speaks towards its usefulness for a subset of Unix/Linux users. It describes itself like:

cal, ncal — displays a calendar and the date of Easter

And it does (sorta) tell you when Easter is – for both western churches and the Orthodox churches. See? It’s already doing what it says on the tin! It only gets better from here!

We won’t really be covering ncal, which is useful if you’re trying to find things like the number for the day of the year. While that might be useful to some, it’s not useful to most and those folks can easily read the man page to learn more about it.

Anyhow, on to the article about the calendar in the terminal!

Calendar In The Terminal:

As you can see, this has to do with the calendar in the terminal, so you’re going to need an open terminal. If you want, you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open right up. 

With your terminal now open, you can start with the absolute basic command, which will show you a calendar with today’s date highlighted. It’s really easy, it’s just:

If you want to show the last month, this month, and next month, you can do that too. The command to do that is:

If you want to see a month from time past, or in the future, you can do that. The format for that is <mm> <yyyy> and it’s useful for both months past and months future. It looks something like this:

The previous commands (sans cal -3) will give an output similar to this:

cal in action
Well, you don’t need to be a police detective to tell what day it was when I wrote this.

But wait! There’s more! You can show the entire year in the calendar by just using the -y flag. It looks like this:

That command can be modified. To show a different year, it’d look a little something like:

By default, the calendar in your terminal uses the Gregorian calendar. If you want the calendar in your terminal to use the Julian format then you just use the -J flag.

On top of that, it really will tell you when it’s time to celebrate (assuming you do) Easter. For some reason, I can’t get ‘cal’ to show Easter – but you can still make it work. To show it in Gregorian (western churches) format, it’s just ncal -o or for Julian dates you’ll just use ncal -j.

Closure:

See? I told you that you had a calendar in the terminal! It’s not entirely useless and can be useful when you’re full-screening your SSH sessions, or something of that nature. If you regularly work in the terminal, this is a handy tool to add to your toolbox. Most of the time, you’ll probably only need three letters to have a useful calendar appear in your terminal.

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How To: Create Custom Welcome Message In Your Terminal

In today’s article, we’ll teach you how to create a custom welcome message in your terminal. This could be useful or playful. What you do with this power is entirely up to you. After all, that’s the whole point of ‘custom’!

It’s not terribly difficult and there’s some fun to be had with this exercise. Basically, we’ll be making it so that you get a custom message (including action) that is output whenever you open up a new terminal.

You can make the terminal do all sorts of things by editing your ~/.bashrc file. That’s how we’ll create a custom welcome message in your terminal. It’s not dreadfully difficult but it will help make your system feel like your own and, to some people, that’s one of the greatest things about Linux.

So, how about I show you how I customized my welcome message in the terminal? You can use my example as a brief template to use yourself, when you create your own custom welcome message. It’s something even a new Linux user can do!

Create Custom Welcome Message

The file we’re going to be using for this is .bashrc, located in your home directory. So, the path to that file will be ~/.bashrc. If you don’t know, dot files (those starting with a period) are considered hidden. Unless you’ve opted to do so, these files will not show up in your file manager. We can still access ’em just fine in the terminal, when we use their path.

The tool we’re going to use is ‘nano‘. It’s an acceptable tool for this, and many other things, but you could just as easily substitute a GUI text editor. In this case (so long as you can see the hidden files) you don’t need to edit in the terminal – and you don’t even need to use ‘sudo’ for anything, because the files you’re editing belong to you in the first place!

Let’s get to editing – as it’s easy and I need to show only a couple of commands in order to demonstrate the feature. We’ll do it in nano, of course. That requires an open terminal, so just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, enter the following command:

Once that’s open, add the following lines:

Then you’ll save that with nano – which is done by pressing CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER. That’ll save the file – but you still need to tell the system how to use it. You need to tell bash to look for the new source and that’s done with:

That reloads the changed file. Close your terminal and open it again to see the new custom welcome message. In this case, it’d look a bit like this:

custom welcome message
See? You now have a custom welcome message in the terminal! Tada!

Obviously, you can customize those two commands, add more commands, and generally craft the custom welcome message you want to see when you open the terminal.

Just remember… You have to save the changes and then you need to reload the changes with source ~/.bashrc in order to make sure they work. You have to save the changes and reload the source with every change. You’ll see the changes when you next open the terminal. The two commands I chose should be self-explanatory, you can use them as an example for the commands you want to use to make your custom welcome message.

Closure:

There you have it, another article said and done! This one shows you how to make a custom welcome message in your terminal. Is this a useful skill? Well, not necessarily – but it is a way to make Linux a little more your own. It’s an easy way to customize Linux. Enjoy!

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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