Running xrandr wakes up the dGPU

TLDR; Running the configuration utility xrandr wakes up the dedicated GPU on your machine. This is not a problem on a desktop but running it periodically on a laptop will drain your battery and might have other unintended consequences.

The rest of the blog describes the issue I faced due to running xrandr repeatedly, how I identified and circumvented the problem. Let’s begin.

Continue reading “Running xrandr wakes up the dGPU”

i3 window manager setup on Debian Bullseye

In this blog, we will look at setting up i3 tiling window manager, and a status bar for i3 named i3status-rust. All of this is tested on Debian Bullseye. Some basic understanding of configuring i3 is expected.

This is part 2 in a series of 3 blogs regarding setup of Debian Bullseye on a Laptop with i3 window manager. Read part 1 here.

Continue reading “i3 window manager setup on Debian Bullseye”

Debian Bullseye setup with NVIDIA hybrid graphics

I had been using PopOS on my laptop for a couple of years, but wanted to shift back to using the i3 window manager. My laptop has the NVIDIA MX150 graphics chipset along with the inbuilt Intel GPU and the primary reason to use PopOS was to get switchable NVIDIA graphics working properly. I had trouble getting this to work back in June, 2018 but I expect it to work now with recent versions of the X.Org Server and the NVIDIA graphics driver.

To get recent versions of the Linux kernel and various packages I will be install the testing version of Debian code-named Bullseye. This may vary based on the time when you are reading this post.

Continue reading “Debian Bullseye setup with NVIDIA hybrid graphics”

Git hooks: Permission denied on a new HDD

I recently got a new Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD to add to my existing 128GB SSD that was filling up fast. After setting up the SSD on my machine using fstab, I started moving all my vagrant boxes and projects to a new partition dedicated to development. I mounted all the partitions under my home folder, and gave myself ownership of the respective folders.

I was ready to submit a patch to Wikimedia’s Gerrit platform. When you commit code, Gerrit runs a git commit-msg hook to add a Change-Id to every patch that is submitted for review. Committing code locally gave me the following error,

hint: The ‘hooks/commit-msg’ hook was ignored because it’s not set as executable.
hint: You can disable this warning with git config advice.ignoredHook false.
Continue reading “Git hooks: Permission denied on a new HDD”

Configuring Intel WIFI on an Asus Vivobook running Debian

I recently bought an Asus Laptop. I will be using this laptop while traveling and to work from coffee shops whenever the opportunity to do so arises.  My desktop is running Debian Stretch (Stable) but since the hardware on this laptop is fairly recent, I decided to install Debian Buster (Testing) on it. In this blog, I’ll talk about how I set up the WIFI during the OS installation and post installation.

Continue reading “Configuring Intel WIFI on an Asus Vivobook running Debian”

Updating ghost-cli process name

Imagine you’ve created your new Ghost install but have set it up with the incorrect process name. The official documentation does not tell us how to update it, it just tells us that it can be set using the --pname flag during initial installation. Let’s look at how we can update the process name after we’ve installed our site.

Continue reading “Updating ghost-cli process name”