Configuration

For a few months I couldn’t find the time (or the energy) to keep working on my plan to migrate to NixOS as my primary OS for personal use but, because there’s always a “but”, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this, over the last two months I finally made the jump. And it turned out to be far less painful than I expected, both on the operating system side and on the desktop stack (display manager / window manager). If you’ve never tried it, I strongly recommend giving a tiling window manager a fair shot: the learning curve is lower than it looks, and the day-to-day productivity gains are immediate once the muscle memory kicks in. ...

Two months later, I’ve managed to update my NixOS configuration files to incorporate the Disko “tool.” For anyone who missed my previous post: I recently came back to NixOS and spent some time studying and developing my personal configuration files, using the official manual, YouTube videos, and GitHub repos from other users as references. Seeing how useful those examples were inspired me to publish my own. I’ve structured these files to fit my needs, intentionally without using Flakes or Home Manager, to keep everything as simple as possible. Then I shared them as a “template” in my repo Another NixOS Configurations Template. ...

Returning to Linux as my daily operating system, I wanted something stable, secure, and easily replicable – allowing me to get a workstation up & running in the shortest time possible from a fresh HDD. I also needed an OS that could handle client machines in a business context, replicating the same environment except for user-specific details. If NixOS came to mind while reading, keep going. I first tried NixOS a couple of years ago, then left it for Fedora due to time constraints. Since late December, I’ve come back to it, focusing on dotfiles and configuration. I consulted the official manual, watched some YouTube videos, and examined various GitHub repos from other users – their examples inspired me to publish my own approach. ...

Hello. After installing Squid, SquidGuard might be useful, a “plugin” for Squid to control and redirect URLs processed by Squid, useful for blocking malicious and unwanted sites. Let’s proceed with the installation sudo apt-get install squidGuard and of course immediately after with the configuration sudo vi /etc/squidguard/squidGuard.conf where you need to add/modify these lines dbhome folders_path logdir /var/log/squid3 # DESTINATION CLASSES: dest ads { #location of blacklists, domains, urls, expressions. domainlist folder_name/ads/domains urllist folder_name/ads/urls expressionlist folder_name/ads/expressions } ...

Hello. Let’s share a folder on Raspbian with a Samba server. Let’s install sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin and let’s configure it by changing the parameters in its configuration file sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf Uncomment workgroup = WORKGROUP wins support = yes where “WORKGROUP” should be replaced with your network’s workgroup and “wins support” is for Windows systems support (if you’re not interested, you can leave it unchanged), ...

Hello. Have you configured Squid ( how to do it) and now want to add a blacklist? Very simple. Create a text file containing the addresses of the sites you want to block and add in the Squid configuration file (/etc/squid/squid.conf) acl urlblock dstdom_regex “full_path_to_file” http_access deny urlblock where “full_path_to_file” means the path+name of the file you just created. Warning: http_access deny urlblock must be inserted before the “allow” statements. ...

Hello. Let’s see how to install a proxy server like Squid with web cache. Installation apt-get install squid Simple, right? All the configuration is missing, the file of which we can find in /etc/squid/squid.conf sudo vi /etc/squid/squid.conf First of all, we need to enable our network, so under the string acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16 # RFC1918 possible internal network we insert the acl called “mynetwork” with the static IP address of the computer from which we want to use the server: ...

Hello. If you’re looking for a guide on Hamachi, you already know what it is. Before installing it, update the system sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade install “ lsb-core”: sudo apt-get install lsb-core In the meantime, download the client from the official website, ARM HF version naturally .deb. Once all this is done, from the terminal go to the folder where you downloaded the package and install it: ...

Hello. As you’ve surely noticed, when connecting the Raspberry to a FullHD monitor, the resolution isn’t 1920x1080, and it’s not possible to select it. To force this resolution, go to: sudo nano /boot/config.txt look for all disable_overscan=0 and change the value to 1 (from 0 to 1). Finally, at the end of the file, comment out the following lines (comment with #): overscan_left=24 overscan_right=24 overscan_top=16 overscan_bottom=16 Restart the Raspberry. ...

Hello. After installing Raspbian (on the Raspberry website there are all the necessary guides), the first things to do are: enable ssh: sudo raspi-config navigate to the “SSH” option under “Advanced options” and enable it (it’s not necessary but it might be useful for remote access). Change the default username and password (respectively “pi” and “raspberry”): enable the root user with: sudo passwd root log out from the pi user, log in as root and give these commands (new_user = your new username): ...