Orca is a Linux screen reader. Since it is part of the GNOME project it should come preinstalled with Ubuntu installations.
To turn on the screen reader you can either go to Settings > Accessibility and then activate Screen Reader in the "Seeing" section or you can simply type orca in your terminal.

Note

It may feel quite strange in the beginning to use a screen reader. It is constantly commenting on everything you do and every application you visit will be read aloud.

Once you started your screen reader you can simply navigate to w...

Here is a bash script that I use to auto-configure displays on Ubuntu 24.04 with Xorg.

Background

• Ubuntu always sets the primary display to the 1st (i.e. internal) display whenever I connect to a new Dock/Hub.
  • I want my primary display to be the large display.
  • My notebook is always placed left of external displays, so the 2nd display will be the center (or only) external display and should be primary.
• I also want all my displays to be placed horizontally, but bottom-aligned (the default would be aligned at their top edges)....

YJIT is Ruby's default just-in-time compiler. It is considered production-ready since Ruby 3.2 (source).

To activate YJIT you need two steps:

• Your ruby binary needs to be compiled with YJIT support.
• You need to enable YJIT.

Getting a Ruby with YJIT support

We usually install Ruby with tools like rbenv or asdf. This compiles the ruby binary from the source code. Support for YJIT will be automatically added during this compilation...

Some rubygems come in platform-specific versions (i.e. "x86_64-linux") in addition to the usual "ruby" platform. This is often is done for gems with native extensions that want to deliver precompiled binaries for ease of installation. However, there is an issue on some versions of Bundler (at least 2.3.x) that makes it inconsistent which versions of a gem will be installed.

Why this happens

On (very) old versions of Bundler, the Gemfile.lock could never indicate which version of a gem was installed, i.e. the Gemfile read `nokogiri (1....

What is makandra cards?

We are makandra, a team of 60 web developers, DevOps and UI/UX experts from Augsburg, Germany. We have firmly anchored the sharing of knowledge and continuous learning in our company culture. Our makandra cards are our internal best practices and tips for our daily work. They are read worldwide by developers looking for help and tips on web development with Ruby on Rails and DevOps.

15 years ago – in 2009 – we wrote our first card. Since then, over 6000 cards have been created, not o...

Newest versions of Chromedriver breaks the user agent for device emulation via device name. In previous versions the user agent of the emulated device was set. In the newest versions the user agent differs from the emulated device.

• Version Chrome: 116.0.5845.110
• Version Chromedriver: 116.0.5845.96
• Bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromedriver/issues/detail?id=4550&q=userAgent&can=2
• Setting: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/capabilities

In Capybara an affected config looks like following:

Capybara.register_driver :mobi...

In CI test runs I noticed that string sorting order changed after switching from a debian-based PostgreSQL docker image to one that is based on Alpine Linux.

Debian image sorting: bar Bar foo Foo
Alpine image sorting: Bar Foo bar foo

Explanation

Alpine Linux is a very slim linux distribution that results in small docker image sizes (roughly 100MB instead of 150MB), so it's a popular choice. However, it does not have all comman locales installed and does not use all locales that a user installs by default.
Postgres orders string co...

I recently noticed that better_errors allows you to to open files from within your favorite editor. However it was not so easy to get rubymine:// links to work on Gnome/Linux. Here is how it finally worked for me:

Step 1: Add a Desktop launcher

Add this file to ~/.local/share/applications/rubymine.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
T...

tl;dr

asdf allows you to manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool and is backwards compatible by supporting existing config files, like e.g. .nvmrc or .ruby-version.

Getting Started

1. Disable rbenv
   1.1 Delete or comment out source /home/$user/.rbenvrc in ~/.profile
   1.2 Delete or comment our eval "$(rbenv init -)" in ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc
   1.3 To take effect you may have to restart your shell or log out and log in again from your current linux session
2. Install asdf by following the official ...

If you need to convert an SVG source to PS or EPS, the most common suggestion on the interwebs is to use Inkscape from the commandline.
Inkscape is a fairly resource-heavy tool with lots of dependencies. A great alternative for converting is CairoSVG.

CairoSVG is available on most Linux distros through their package management systems, e.g. apt install cairosvg on Ubuntu.
It has few dependencies (most importantly Python 3 and some related packages, but really not much)...

Sometimes the need arises for SSL in local development. We have guides for different webservers, this one is for puma.

0. make sure mkcert is installed

1. create an SSL certificate for localhost with mkcert:

$ mkcert-v1.4.4-linux-amd64 localhost
Created a new local CA 💥
...

2. use the certificate in the Puma config config/puma.rb:

localhost_key = "#{File.join('localhos...

This should be fixed in the latest LTS-branches of our mysql2 fork, 0.2.x-lts and 0.3.x-lts.

Use

gem 'mysql2', git: 'https://github.com/makandra/mysql2', branch: '0.2.x-lts' # for Rails 2.x
gem 'mysql2', git: 'https://github.com/makandra/mysql2', branch: '0.3.x-lts' # for Rails 3.x

in your Gemfile, and do a

bundle update mysql2

Background

mysql2 used to check that the client library used at runtime actually matches the one it was compiled against. However, at least on Ubunt...

Bookmarks for directories will be most helpful if you are forced to work in deeply nested projects. Then it's really helpful!

This makes use of the CDPATH variable. Similar to the PATH variable, which holds the list of directories which are searched for executables, CDPATH contains the list of directories that are available for cd. Besides the current directory (.), you can add others to that.

The trick is to add a directory for bookmarks to CDPATH.

First, create the directory with: mkdir ~/.bookmarks.

Then add the followin...

With cd .. you can navigate one directory up from the one you are at now. If you use that a lot, consider some handy aliases.

Add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

alias ..="cd .."
alias ...="cd ../.."
alias ....="cd ../../.."
alias .....="cd ../../../.."
alias ......="cd ../../../../.."

you can add even more aliases, but I usually loose track after too many levels and just jump to the directly directly, e.g. using its absolute path or its bookmark (see [this card](https://makandracards.com/makandra/504947-working-on-the-li...

The tree command will show you the contents of a directory and all its sub directories as a tree:

>tree
.
├── a
│   ├── file_1.txt
│   └── file_2.txt
└── b
    ├── c
    │   └── even_more.txt
    └── more.txt

3 directories, 4 files

If you have deeply nested directories, the output will be quite long though. To avoid that, you can limit the depth, e.g. tree -L 2 will only go 2 directories deep.

If you use that regularly, consider adding aliases for that to your ~/.bashrc:

alias tree2='tree -L 2'
alias tree3='tree -L 3'
...

There is an option you can set so that when using the cd command, small typos are automatically corrected. Add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

# cd: autocorrect small typos and use best guess
shopt -s cdspell 

Example:

cd Porjects
# Projects

pwd
# /home/judith/Projects

Also, I recommend adding aliases for your most common typos of commands you regularly use to your ~/bashrc. Which ones that are is highly personal, for me it's e.g. tig:

alias tog='tig'
alias tug='tig'

We had a card that described how to install multiple mysql versions using mysql-sandbox. Nowadays with the wide adoption of docker it might be easier to use a MySQL docker image for this purpose.

Create a new mysql instance

docker run --name projectname_db -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=secret -p "33008:3306" -d --restart unless-stopped mysql:5.7

The port 33008 is a freely chosen free port on the host machine that will be used to establish a con...

6.0.0 2021-06-02

Compatible changes

• geordi commit will continue even if one of the given projects is inaccessible. It will only fail if no stories could be found at all.

Breaking changes

• Removed VNC test browser support for integration tests – Headless Chrome has
  matured and is almost a drop-in replacement. Also, key binding issues have
  increased with VNC and recent Linux.
  • Please use a headless Chrome setup https://makandracards.com/makandra/492109-capybara-running-tests-with-headless-chrome.
  • You might also ...

ZSH is an alternative command line shell that includes some features like spelling correction, cd automation, better theme, and plugin support. You can replace Bash with ZSH like following:

sudo apt-get install zsh

Setting ZSH as default login shell

sudo usermod -s /usr/bin/zsh $(whoami)

Opening a new terminal window will show you a dialog where you can configure your initial ZSH config (Option 2 recommended).

Afterwards you can install the plugin manager Oh-My-ZSH and select a prop...

By default parallel_tests will spawn as many test processes as you have CPUs. If you have issues with flaky tests, reducing the number of parallel processes may help.

Important

Flaky test suites can and should be fixed. This card is only relevant if you need to run a flaky test suite that you cannot fix for some reason. If you have no issues...

By default, your terminal emulator (Gnome Terminal, Terminator, etc.) sets some kind of window title to reflect the shell type you are running (e.g. /bin/bash).
This is most often not too helpful, but you can change that from your shell.

To set a specific title, print an escape sequence like this:

echo -en "\033]0;Hello\a"

You can easily include the current path:

echo -en "\033]0;$(pwd)\a"

Or, to replace your home directory's part with a tilde:

echo -en "\033]0;$(pwd | sed -e "s;^$HOME;~;")\a"

Or,...

Ubuntu 18.04 uses systemd to manage services.

There are basically two commands for listing all services and manipulating the state of a certain service: service and systemctl:

• service manages System V init scripts
• systemctl controls the state of the systemd system and service manager. It is backwards compatible to System V and includes the System V services

Therefore I prefer to use systemctl.

See which services are there

>systemctl list-units -a --type=service
  UNIT                                 LOAD     ...

After a recent Ubuntu update I didn't see the main menu bar of the RubyMine IDE (File | Edit | View | ...) anymore.

This could be solved by changing a RubyMine registry entry:

• Search "registry" within the "Actions" search
  • press ctrl + alt + n > click on Actions > type registry > click on Registry...
• Scroll down to linux.native.menu and disable the checkbox

After rebooting RubyMine, you'll have gotten the menu bar back.

Because colors improve readability so much.
On Ubuntu 18.04 you can install it with sudo apt install grc

From github:

For the impatient - try following commands:

grc netstat
grc ping hostname
grc tail /var/log/syslog
grc ps aux