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Web scraping is the process of analyzing the structure of HTML pages, and programmatically extract data from them. In the past we saw how to scrape the web using the Python programming language and the “Beautilful Soup” library; in this tutorial, instead, we see how to perform the same operation using a command line tool written in Rust: htmlq.

Fonts are a really important part of the user experience. On the most commonly used Linux-based distributions, there are many packaged fonts which can be installed using the native package manager. Sometimes, however, we may want to install some fonts manually. In this tutorial we see how to perform such operation, and, more generally, how fonts are managed on Linux.

It’s well known that videos are not nearly as easy to save from a website as things like images or text. Although web browsers do not feature a default way to save videos directly to our hard drive, open source projects like yt-dlp and youtube-dl fill this gap quite nicely.

BASH (Bourne Again SHell) is the default shell in practically all Linux-based operating systems. All the commands we write in the terminal are interpreted by the shell, and become part of its history. In this tutorial we see where the shell history is saved, and how to manage it using the “history” built-in command and some environment variables.

We already talked about using flatpak packages in a previous tutorial: with this technology we universally distribute applications, which are packaged together with their dependencies and run inside a sandbox, isolated from the rest of the system. In this tutorial we see how to build and distribute an application inside a flatpak.

Tagging music files is a way of keeping a music library well organized and let us search for songs on the base of Artists, albums, genre and other parameters. Many graphical and command line applications exist on Linux to manage tags for audio files, like Picard or Quodlibet. Most of those applications are written in Python and use the “mutagen” module at their core. In this tutorial we learn how to use it directly.

MySQL is probably the most famous Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). Developed as a free and open source software, it was originally backed by the MYSQL AB company, but is now owned by Oracle. In MySQL the “storage engine” used for a table determines how data is handled. There are several storage engines available, but the most used are InnoDB and MyISAM. In this article we see what are their distinctive features and the main differences between them.

There are a number of dangerous commands that can be executed to crash a Linux system. You may find a nefarious user executing these commands on a system you manage, or someone may send you a seemingly harmless command, hoping that you will run it and crash your computer.

Dracut is a tool used to build initramfs cpio archives. It originated, and is mainly used on Fedora and the other distributions that are part of the Red Hat family, but can be used also on community distributions like Gentoo, and Archlinux. The application functionalities are organized in modules.

Suppose we have our Linux system setup with an almost-full disk encryption, with only the /boot partition unencrypted. Assuming we achieved encryption by using a LUKS container, we need the appropriate software to unlock it at boot. This software, however, is part of the encrypted system. Since the Linux 2.6 series, the solution to this, and other similar problems, is called initramfs (Initial ramfs). In this article we see how an initramfs is composed and how to extract or list its content.

Passwords should never be stored as plain text. Whether we are talking about a web application or an operating system, they should always be in hash form (on Linux, for example, hashed passwords are stored in the /etc/shadow file). Hashing is the process through which, by the use of some complex algorithms, a password is turned into a different string.

Although the cpio archiving utility is nowadays used less than other archiving tools like tar, it is still good to know how it works, since it is still used, for example, to create initramfs images on Linux and for rpm packages, which are used mainly in the Red Hat family of distributions. In this tutorial we see how to create and extract cpio archives using the GNU cpio utility, and how to obtain a list of the files they contain.

In this article you will learn about some Ubuntu 22.04 features of the upcoming Ubuntu stable release. Canonical’s latest iteration to the Ubuntu operating system is Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, scheduled for release on April 21, 2022. This is an LTS (long term support) release – the type of release that Canonical only publishes every two years, and continues to support for the next five.

Wake-on-lan (also known with the “W.O.L” acronym) is a standard ethernet feature which allows a machine to be woken up on the reception of a specific type of network packet (the so called MagicPacket). The main advantage of this feature is that it allows us to keep a machine in a low power consumption state, and be accessed only when needed. In this tutorial we see how to enable the WOL feature on our ethernet card under Linux, and how to send the network packet needed to wake up a machine.

As a response to the recent changes in CentOS strategy, CloudLinux announced a 1:1 binary compatible, community-driven fork of RHEL called Project Lenix. Can you tell us more about the motivation behind this project?

Kodi's support for DRM in version 18 and beyond opened the doors to streaming services like Sling TV. It's simple enough to get it running within Kodi and start watching live TV legally.

Using a combination of the youtube-dl script and FFMPEG, you can easily rip audio from YouTube videos and instantly convert it to MP3, OGG, or any other audio format that you prefer for your music library.

As time passes, it appears that corporations are primarily considering one distribution when considering installing Linux, and that distro is clearly RedHat. That probably does not come as any major surprise, but it appears RedHat's dominance continues to get stronger. What use to be a landscape littered with a multitude of choices has nearly been rendered down to one. Wow! That didn't take long. The open source software dynamic seemed to be formed on the premise that users were never again going to be pigeon-holed into using one piece of software. Or, perhaps better stated, that was a byproduct of making the source code readily available. And, that is still true to this day. However, as a corporate citizen in today's business climate, one finds themselves with limited possibilities.

In the past, multimedia was a sore point for Linux users. Now, though, it's a strength. There are plenty of fantastic DVD and video players for Linux systems, including Ubuntu. As an added bonus, they all should be readily available in the default Ubuntu repositories.

Rsync is a very useful tool which allows Linux system administrators synchronize data locally or with a remote filesystem via the ssh protocol or by using the rsync daemon. Using rsync is more convenient than simply copying data, because it is able to spot and synchronize only the differences between a source and a destination. The program has options to preserve standard and extended filesystem permissions, compress the data during transfers and more. We will see the most used ones in this guide.