How to create a Linux LVM partition

In Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) manages physical disk drives by using the notion of "logical" volumes. A "volume" could be a partition or an entire disk drive. Among other things, LVM allows you to create one or more logical volumes out of one or more physical volumes, resize logical volumes on-the-fly, and move logical volumes across different physical volumes. Such flexible disk management of LVM is a great advantage as re-partitioning is often necessary while you are running your system. If you would like to try out LVM, here is a 3-minute guide on how to create a Linux LVM partition.Read more »

How to plot ratios of values with Gnuplot

Gnuplot is a tool that can generate script-driven graphics, including plots of functions and data samples. Gnuplot contains a useful scripting language that allows you to process raw data files while producing graphics. For example, you can plot ratios of different values contained in raw data files.Read more »

How to measure the average CPU utilization of a Linux process

Sometimes you may want to know the CPU usage of a particular Linux process. Since the CPU usage of a process can fluctuate over its lifetime, you will want to measure the average CPU usage or CPU utilization of the process. For this purpose, a Linux tool set called sysstat may come in handy. sysstat contains a collection of performance monitoring tools for Linux, reporting statistics on disk I/O, CPU, memory, networking, and other system activities. One of the utilities contained in sysstat is pidstat which measures the average CPU usage of Linux processes. In order to use pidstat, you need to install sysstat as follows.Read more »

How to compile the Linux kernel on Debian or Ubuntu

Reasons why you want to build a custom Linux kernel are numerous. For example, you may want to add driver support for devices which are not recognized by the generic kernel shipped with Linux distros. You may want to optimize the kernel for your hardware, tweak performance tuning options, or turn on or off specific kernel options that cannot modified at run time. If you would like to compile the Linux kernel for any of these reasons, follow these instructions on compiling the Linux kernel on Debian or Ubuntu.Read more »

How to convert TIFF files to PDF format on Linux

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a popular image file format. Unlike other types of image files, a TIFF file can contain multiple images (e.g., multi-page document scan) in it. TIFF editor software such as GIMP is able to support such multi-page TIFF files. If you would like to convert a TIFF file to PDF format on Linux, you can follow the instructions below.Read more »

How to reboot automatically after kernel panic

There are cases where you encounter kernel panic. Kernel panic may occur while you are playing with some experimental kernel module that someone else wrote, or developing a custom kernel module yourself. Kernel panic can happen due to hardware failure as well. If you would like to reboot your system automatically after kernel panic has occurred, there are three different ways to do it.Read more »

How to convert xlsx files to xls or csv format on Linux

The xlsx file name extension is a new file format based on XML, used by Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet application. The letter "x" appended to the existing "xls" extension used by earlier versions of Excel, signifies that the format is based on XML. If you would like to open or edit an xlsx file created by Excel 2007, on an earlier version of Excel or any other spreadsheet application, you need to convert xlsx files first.Read more »