Notes

You’ve obviously stumbled upon a link at the bottom of the page. While the notes I’ve recorded here may be useful to you in some way, they’re way more useful to me. Normally, I would just add them to a relevant article (and some articles already contain variations), but most of these notes are too short to add to anything.

More than anything, they’re ready reference notes I can fall back on when setting up different linux distributions.

Bluetooth

When I installed Linux Mint 21 on my mini PC, which has an Intel processor, Bluetooth didn’t work. Based on web references, I had to obtain the files named ibt-0040-1050.sfi and ibt-0040-1050.ddc from https://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/sources/linux-firmware/intel/, and place them on my PC, in the /lib/firmware/intel directory. Bluetooth worked after I rebooted.

I didn’t have any issues when I installed Linux Mint 22.

MP3Gain

MP3Gain can be installed from Debian sources, using the APT package tool:

sudo apt install mp3gain

Once it’s installed, move into the directory where your mp3 files are stored and run this command in the terminal:

find . -name '*mp3' -exec mp3gain -r -k {} \;

I did this with over 2000 files. It reduced the volume in most of the files, and only raised it in a few. This is how normalization works.

Rsync

Rsync from directory to directory on the same computer:

rsync -a src/ dest

Rsync to another computer through SSH:

rsync -avzh -e ssh /home/localusername/directory/ [email protected]:/home/remoteusername/directory/ --delete

Windows Product Key

The product key is in the firmware for most computers when Windows comes preinstalled. To obtain the key, run this:

sudo cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

If that doesn’t work, and you don’t have a sticker or certificate with the product key on it, you have to contact the company that sold it to you. That’s what I had to do with my mini PC so that I could activate Windows in a virtual machine.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay