Year: 2019

Fedora Linux : Change user icon in GDM login

In general, I’m pretty happy with my desktop setup. I use MATE with i3 on my Fedora Linux laptop for quite some time now, and it works well.

However, there was one annoying tidbit that I decided to fix today – my user icon on the login screen. I remember that I used to have it at some point, but it disappeared during some upgrade a few month ago.

The login screen is managed by Gnome Display Manager (GDM). In previous versions, you could easily customize the user icon via either some GUI tools for users and groups, or by simply dropping your icon into ~/.face file, in, preferably, PNG format, and GDM would pick it up just fine. Turns out, not anymore.

It took me a few Google searches to find the solution, so I’m sharing it here (just replace ‘leonid’ everywhere with your own username):

# Copy the user icon file
sudo cp /home/leonid/.face /usr/share/pixaps/faces/leonid.png
# Edit user settings file and add the following line:
# Icon=/usr/share/pixaps/faces/leonid.png
sudo vim /var/lib/AccountsService/users/leonid
# Logging out is not enough, so just ...
reboot

Once your system restarts, you should see the proper user icon on the login screen.

Kraken – p2p Docker registry

Kraken by Uber:

Kraken is a P2P-powered Docker registry that focuses on scalability and availability. It is designed for Docker image management, replication and distribution in a hybrid cloud environment. With pluggable backend support, Kraken can easily integrate into existing Docker registry setups as the distribution layer.
Kraken has been in production at Uber since early 2018. In our busiest cluster, Kraken distributes more than 1 million blobs per day, including 100k 1G+ blobs. At its peak production load, Kraken distributes 20K 100MB-1G blobs in under 30 sec.

htrace.sh – HTTP/HTTPS troubleshooting and profiling tool

htrace.sh is a handy command-line tool for HTTP/HTTPS troubleshooting and profiling. It also integrates with a number of other security tools, like nmap, SSL Labs, subfinder, etc.

The JavaScript Developer’s Reading List

“The JavaScript Developer’s Reading List” is yet another hand-picked collection of books and resources for web developers in general and JavaScript programmers in particular. The selection is mostly focused around React and GraphQL, but there are plenty of more generic resources about JavaScript, software development, and Computer Science.

Building serverless apps with components from the AWS Serverless Application Repository

Last year, after attending the AWSome Day in Athens, I had a strong feeling that I’ll hear more and more about serverless applications and Lambda functions in the coming months. Turns out I wasn’t wrong.

As infrastructure moves from large dedicated servers through virtual machines to containers, so does the software, from large applications through libraries and components, all the way to individual functions and microservices.

“Building serverless apps with components from the AWS Serverless Application Repository” is just one recent blog post, illustrating how to utilize small components to build a serverless application. While the whole article is well worth a read, I found the link to AWS Serverless Application Repository particularly useful.

Scrolling through all the applications, I have to admit that they aren’t too many yet – a total of 435 at the time of this writing, and most haven’t been deployed widely (the most deployed one having only 28.9K deploys). But as with many other app stores and directories, this is a good start with many examples and some handy microservices already.

The most challenging thing for me, when it comes to microservices, is changing the way I think about applications. While I always try to build the smallest and simplest version first and then iterate it over and over, thinking of a collection of smaller functions and services doesn’t happen easy. I guess, like with everything, this approach needs time and practice to settle in.