Linux Archives

Over 80% is running on some form of Linux – so does your Mac and you iPhone. Sometimes we have to get our hands dirty on the command line – it makes you feel like a proper hacker.

Here are some pointers I picked up on my journey.

How to install Blender on CentOS 7

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I’ve been trying to build Blender from source on CentOS for many years, but never had any luck making it work. There was always one package missing, or something else that needed to be configured. Depressed and resentful, I gave up and never got a chance to try Blender on CentOS.

Recently, the Blender Devs have started releasing a pre-compiled version of Blender for CentOS for download. This should work on RHEL and Fedora just as well. Huzzah!

With a fresh installation of CentOS looking at me from my old Samsung Q330 laptop, I thought I’d try it out. It works great! Here’s what I had to do to make it work, step by step.

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How to revert a yum update on CentOS

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Every so often, a yum update brings unexpected results with it, like services no longer working due to spurious error messages that don’t tell you what’s actually wrong. This only very rarely happens though, and we may need to revert to the state of our system before such an update took place. Thankfully, yum has … Read more

How to split a ZIP file into multiple parts on macOS and Linux

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ZIP files can get quite large, depending on the amount of data we’re ZIPping up there. Having one huge file may not always be desirable, for example when making hard copies onto disk or tape media, or when upload limitations force the use of smaller files. Thankfully, the clever little ZIP utility has a handy … Read more

How to remove files from ZIP Archives in macOS and Linux

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When ZIP up directories, particularly on macOS, some files may find their way into our ZIP archives that were never meant to be there. I’m thinking of those pesky .DS_Store and __MACOSX files, maybe even .htaccess files. For *nix based systems, * really means “everything”. The ZIP command line tool let us remove such unwanted … Read more

How to unTAR a .bz2 file in Linux

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I always forget how to unTAR a .bz2 file – perhaps this little memory aid will help me remember for the future. tar -xjvf filename.bz2 This will do the trick 🙂 The key to the magic is to provide the j switch, which tells the TAR command to use bzip2 compression.

How to transfer files from your GoPro to your computer via WiFi

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There is an iOS and Android App available to transfer files directly from a GoPro camera to a mobile device. Those apps transcode files and compress them for easier viewing, and to save storage space.

While that approach gets footage onto my iPhone, I still need to transfer the files to my Mac for editing. Plus, there’s an additional compression step involved which can’t be good for picture quality. Besides, it takes forever to do its job.

A much more useful approach would be to hook directly into the GoPro and transfer files that way. This leaves the SD card place and doesn’t disturb the (sometimes hard to reach or difficult to recreate) position of the camera.

Here’s how to do it.

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