gnome


Mastering Desktop Zoom: A Guide to Keyboard Shortcuts on GNOME

In today’s fast-paced digital world, accessibility features are vital in empowering users with different abilities. One such feature is desktop zoom, which allows users to magnify their screen content for better visibility. GNOME, a popular desktop environment for Linux, offers a convenient way to activate and utilize desktop zoom through keyboard shortcuts. This blog post will explore how to make the most of these shortcuts and enhance your GNOME experience.

Activating Desktop Zoom via the Settings:

To activate desktop zoom on GNOME, follow these steps:

Step 1: Open the GNOME Settings: Click on the “Activities” button in the screen’s top-left corner or press the “Super” key on your keyboard. Then type “Settings” and select the “Settings” application.

Step 2: Navigate to Accessibility Settings: In the GNOME Settings window, select the “Accessibility” category on the left sidebar.

Step 3: Enable Desktop Zoom: Within the Accessibility settings, locate the “Zoom” section. Toggle the switch to the “ON” position to activate desktop zoom.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts for Desktop Zoom:

You can use the following keyboard shortcuts to control and customize your zoom experience:

  1. Toggle Zoom On/Off: Super + Alt + 8 Pressing the Super (Windows) key, Alt key, and the number 8 simultaneously will toggle the zoom functionality on or off.
  2. Zoom In: Super + Alt + plus (+) Pressing the Super key, Alt key, and the plus (+) key simultaneously will zoom in, magnifying the content on your screen.
  3. Zoom Out: Super + Alt + minus (-) Pressing the Super key, Alt key, and the minus (-) key simultaneously will zoom out, reducing the magnification of the screen content.
  4. Zoom Reset: Super + Alt + 0 Pressing the Super key, Alt key, and the number 0 simultaneously will reset the zoom level to its default state.
  5. Pan Around the Screen: Super + Alt + left-click and drag While zoomed in, holding down the Super key, Alt key, and left-clicking the mouse button while dragging will allow you to pan around the zoomed-in screen area.

Customizing Desktop Zoom Options:

If you wish to customize your desktop zoom experience further, you can access additional settings through the GNOME Settings application. Here, you can modify options such as zoom factor, mouse wheel behavior, and more to suit your preferences.

Conclusion:

The keyboard shortcuts provided by GNOME for desktop zoom offer a convenient and efficient way to magnify your screen content. By activating and using these shortcuts, you can enhance your productivity and accessibility within the GNOME desktop environment. Explore additional customization options to tailor the desktop zoom feature to your needs. Embrace the power of keyboard shortcuts and take complete control of your GNOME experience.


How to empty the gnome tracker3 cache?

To empty the cache of gnome tracker3, you can follow the steps below:

Open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T.

Type the following command to stop the tracker daemon:

tracker3 daemon -t;

Type the following command to clear the tracker database:

tracker reset --filesystem;

This command will remove all indexed data from the tracker and clear its cache. (Remove filesystem indexer database)

Restart the tracker daemon by typing the following command:

tracker daemon -s ;

This will start the tracker daemon again, and it will begin to rebuild its database and cache.

After following these steps, the cache of gnome tracker3 will be emptied.

Execution example:

$ tracker3 daemon -t
Found 1 PID…
  Killed process 13705 — “tracker-miner-fs-3”
$ tracker3 reset --filesystem
Found 1 PID…
  Killed process 13705 — “tracker-miner-fs-3”
$ tracker3 daemon -s
Starting miners…
  ✓ File System

Error mounting filesystem

After installing the ewf-tools the right way on a GNU/Linux Ubuntu machine, we executed the following command to create the ewf1 mounting point for our .E01 image:

mkdir /mnt/ewf;
ewfmount ./DISK.E01 /mnt/ewf/;

After the operating system created the mounting point, we opened the ewf1 file that appeared in /mnt/ewf/ using the Gnome Disk Image Mounter. This action made a new entry in the Gnome Disks Utility, showing our new disk.

After clicking on the play button (labeled Mount selected partition) we got the following error:

We then tried to use the terminal to gain more control over the mounting parameters. To proceed with the following commands, we copied the Device value, which was /dev/loop54p3 in this case.

$ mkdir /mnt/loc;
$ sudo mount /dev/loop54p3 /mnt/loc;
mount: /mnt/loc: cannot mount /dev/loop54p3 read-only.
$ sudo mount -o ro /dev/loop54p3 /mnt/loc;
mount: /mnt/loc: cannot mount /dev/loop54p3 read-only.
$ sudo mount -o ro,loop /dev/loop54p3 /mnt/loc;
mount: /mnt/loc: cannot mount /dev/loop58 read-only.
$ sudo mount -o ro,loop -t ext4 /dev/loop54p3 /mnt/loc;
mount: /mnt/loc: cannot mount /dev/loop58 read-only.
$ sudo mount -o ro,norecovery,loop -t ext4 /dev/loop54p3 /mnt/loc;

The command that worked for us was the following:

sudo mount -o ro,norecovery,loop -t ext4 /dev/loop54p3 /mnt/loc;

The parameter that did the trick was norecovery. norecovery/noload instructs the system not to load the journal on mounting. Note that if the filesystem was not unmounted cleanly, skipping the journal replay will lead to the filesystem containing inconsistencies that can lead to any number of problems. This problem occurred because the machine did not shut down properly before it had its image cloned, so after we mount, we might not get the latest state of the disk.


How to access VMFS Datastore from Ubuntu GNU/Linux

Suppose the ESXi host fails, but the server’s local disk or disks are still operational. In that case, it is always possible to copy the virtual machine files (both data drives and configuration files) from the VMFS datastore and run the VM on a different server. This is true even if the ESXi host fails (even on VMware Workstation or Hyper-V). The most significant issue is that the widely used operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, do not have a VMFS driver, which causes them to be unable to recognize a partition that automatically has the VMFS file system.

To mount a VMFS file system on an Ubuntu, we will need to install the vmfs-tools package.

sudo apt-get install vmfs-tools;

Then, we need to create a folder where we will perform the mount later on:

# The folders does not have to be in the /mnt path, it can be anywhere on your file system where you have access.
sudo mkdir /mnt/vmfs;

Following that, we need to identify the disk we want to mount. There are two popular ways to do so, and the first is by executing the command fdisk -l on the terminal, which will show all physical disks attached to your system. You will get results that are similar to the ones below:

sudo fdisk -l;

...

Disk /dev/loop51: 884,85 GiB, 950075898880 bytes, 1855616990 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

From these results, the drive’s path is essential information for us. In this case, it was /dev/loop51.

The second method is to use the Gnome Disks Utility:

When you start the application, you will get an image similar to this:

If you have a physical VMFS datastore hard drive, it will appear on the list on the left. You will get more information on the right panel by clicking on it. The critical information is the value after the label Device. In this case, the vital value was /dev/loop51.

If you do not have a physical drive but an image of a drive, you can attach it by clicking on the menu button with the three lines on the top left and then selecting the Attach Disk Image... (.iso, .img) option. A new window will open, allowing you to navigate and find your image file.

After we acquire the path to the physical drive or the image file, we can mount it using the following command:

sudo vmfs-fuse /dev/loop51 /mnt/vmfs;

In case you get the following error:

VMFS: Unsupported version 6
Unable to open device/file "/dev/loop51".
Unable to open filesystem

Then, you need to install the package that can handle VMFS version 6. To install, use the following command:

sudo apt-get install vmfs6-tools;

Trying again to mount, this time with the tools that are appropriate for version 6, should do the trick:

sudo vmfs6-fuse /dev/loop51 /mnt/vmfs;

To unmount, we need to execute the following:

sudo umount /mnt/vmfs;