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.

Ext4 File System

The reserved blocks is set at five percent on ext4 file systems. Ext4 is the default file system for many Linux distributions. That five percent was put in place back when storage drives were much smaller. Five percent of a 500 gigabyte drive comes out to around 25 gigabytes. That’s a waste of space when four or five gigabytes would be more than enough. This command will reduce it one percent:

sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/(device name)

The change will persist with a reboot. For a drive used only for storage, you can safely set it to 0.

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