Tag: Desktop

Google Chrome Tab Groups

Thanks to this great tip I’ve discovered the recently added Tab Groups functionality in Google Chrome browser. All you need to do is navigate to chrome://flags/ , search for “Tab Groups” feature, enable it, and restart your browser. Once that is done, right-click on any tab and you’ll see the option to “Add to new group”. Any tab that is already a part of the group, can be removed from there and added to any other existing group.

It is possible to rename groups and assign each one a color. In the screenshot above you can see how my groups look right now. Yellow ALT, red LM, blue PP, purple TTM, and green BLOG are tab groups. A color running under tabs to the right of each group indicates which tabs are part of the group to the left.

Grouped tabs are also a lot easier to move around and separate into a new browser window.

Install Postman on Fedora 31

Postman is a great tool for building and testing APIs. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t come packaged as an RPM, so there’s some trickery involved in installing it on Fedora.

This blog post was very useful, with some minor corrections. Here’s what I had to do:

  • Download Postman from the site.
  • Move the archive to somewhere global: mv Postman-linux-x64-7.16.1.tar.gz /opt/
  • Extract the archive: tar xzvf Postman-linux-x64-7.16.1.tar.gz
  • Remove the archive: rm Postman-linux-x64-7.16.1.tar.gz
  • Check which directories are in the path: echo $PATH
  • Create a symbolic link in one of path directories: sudo ln -s /opt/Postman/Postman /usr/local/bin/postman
  • Create the desktop file: touch ~/.local/share/applications/postman.desktop
  • Edit the file with the content below.
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Postman
GenericName=API Client
X-GNOME-FullName=Postman API Client
Comment=Make and view REST API calls and responses
Keywords=api;
Exec=/usr/local/bin/postman
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/opt/Postman/app/resources/app/assets/icon.png
Categories=Development;Utilities;

Now you can run Postman both via the command line (postman) and from the Gnome/Mate menu. You’ll find it under Applications->Programming.

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.

Managing dotfiles with rcm

These days it is a common practices to manage, version, and share configuration files for command line tools (bash, vim, etc) via a GitHub repository. There are plenty of open repositories to study and borrow things from, as well as the tools and scripts to help one with setting things up. Have a look at the awesome-dotfiles – a curated list of dotfiles resources.

Fedora Magazine runs an article about rcm – one of the many tools that are handy for managing dotfiles.

Personally, I haven’t heard of rcm until now. My own setup went through several iterations, varying from custom scripts, to Puppet, and now to Ansible. Have a look here. By the way, my dotfiles aren’t only about the command line tools. I also keep my desktop environment configuration in there (MATE + i3).