Linux

Choosing beautiful fonts in Gnome

12 April 2018 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

What I did:

(1) Install a lot of beautiful fonts

(2) Gnome tweak tools => Change fonts (font changes in apps)

(3) Change font used by the Gnome Shell (mainly for the top bar) by following this comment:

Activate the “User Themes” gnome-shell extension in Gnome Tweak Tools.

Create the ~/.themes/CustomFontTheme/gnome-shell directory and, in it, create gnome-shell.css containing:

stage {
    font-family: "ITC Franklin Gothic Std", sans-serif;
}

Now open Gnome Tweak Tool and select your CustomFontTheme:

(4) Change fonts in Chrome (which is basically the software which I use the most)

Enjoy!

How to reduce the amount of disk space used by the systemd journal

6 October 2017 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

We, Linux people, generally use systemd now and one of its components is the journal controlled by the journalctl command line tool.

As explained on the Arch wiki,

systemd has its own logging system called the journal. The /var/log/journal/directory is a part of the systemd package and the journal will write to /var/log/journal/

The journal is always appended and therefore grows in size. On my laptop, the journal was taking 1.8Gb of space and was full of details which, I believe, I’ll never need. So I decided to clear all old contents (which the systemd people call a vacuum). I issued:

journalctl --disk-usage
journalctl --vacuum-size=64M
journalctl --disk-usage

And the journal immediately became smaller. I then issued a

journalctl --verify

which made me realise that some of the remaining journal files were corrupted (for some reason). There is no journal repair tool in systemd so I simply removed the offending files (with rm).

Now, I can easily check my journal entries for today and I know everything will be all fine:

journalctl --since today

Open and not extract .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files in the latest Gnome 3

15 March 2017 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

In the latest version of Gnome 3, a subtle change was brought to Nautilus, the file manager, to automatically extract the content of a ZIP file in a new folder when it is double-clicked on instead of open an application to do so. The problem is that Microsoft Office files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) are ZIP files. This means that double-clicking on a .pptx file extracts its content instead of opening the file in, say, LibreOffice Impress!

This makes life miserable for all those who need to open Microsoft Office files on a regular basis and, of course, this is a bug (as acknowledged by the Gnome people and the Red Hat / Fedora people).

Fortunately, it is quite easy to make Nautilus become sane again. Open Preferences and in the Behavior tab, unselect “Extract the files on open” in the Compressed Files section.

Phew!