Pandas is a free and open source Python library released under the BSD license. Originally developed by Wes McKinney in 2008, and supported by companies like Intel and Nvidia, it is targeted at data analysis and manipulation. It can be easily used to read and write data from a variety of sources such as Excel spreadsheets, Comma-separated Values (CSV) files, and many more.
Egidio Docile
How to create encrypted git repositories with git-remote-gcrypt
Git is, by far, the most used version control system. Being it “distributed”, means that each user can clone its own full copy of a repository on which he can work even if offline, pushing changes to a remote only when ready. Git repositories are not designed to host sensitive information, but in certain situations, the ability of transparently encrypt the content of a repository can come in handy. The git remote-gcrypt helper is designed with this goal in mind.
Introduction to Ansible roles
Ansible is a free and open source provisioning system written in Python and sponsored by Red Hat. In previous tutorials we learned the Ansible basics, and we saw how to organize tasks in playbooks and how to secure sensitive data using ansible-vault. There is another, very important concept we need to focus on when dealing with Ansible: roles.
Introduction to Vagrant
Vagrant is a free and open source tool developed by Hashicorp, defined as a “a tool for building and distributing development environments”. What Vagrant does is basically acting as an abstraction layer/wrapper around virtual machines providers such as Virtualbox, VMware and libvirt, allowing us to build, provision and easily replicate virtual machines environments on different operating systems, using a common syntax.
How to deploy a self-hosted Vaultwarden instance
Everyone, nowadays, has several accounts and credentials to take care of, that’s why everyone needs a decent and possibly open source password manager. When it comes to managing passwords there are many choices available on Linux: in the past, for example we talked about “pass”, a great, command line oriented, password-manager based on standard tools such as GPG and git. In this article we explore an alternative which can be the ideal solution for individuals and small organizations: Vaultwarden.
How to load, unload and blacklist Linux kernel modules
Linux kernel functionalities, such as the support for specific devices or filesystems, are organized in modules, which can be built statically into the kernel or as separated “units” which can be loaded and unloaded on request. Nowadays needed modules are automatically loaded, so we seldom need to explicit manage them. In certain situations, however, we may need to perform such actions.
How to customize Firefox using policies
In a world where Google Chrome is, by a large margin, the most used web browser, Firefox represents the only relevant open source alternative. The Mozilla browser is installed by default (or at least available in the official repositories) of all the most used Linux distributions. In order to configure its behavior we can change settings interactively, or, more conveniently, we can create and deploy “policies”.
How to manage flatpaks privileges with Flatseal
Flatpaks represent a relative new, cross-distribution way of distributing software on Linux: applications are packaged together with their dependencies and runs in a sandbox, isolated from the rest of the system, except for some specific areas they need to access to work correctly. The system resources a flatpak needs to access are visible when it is installed from the command line; with Flatseal we can inspect and manage them graphically.
How to set default programs using update-alternatives on Debian-based distributions
More often than not, on our Linux system, we can find two or more applications of the same type installed: it is typically the case of text editors, but we can also have multiple web browsers, for example. Setting the default application used to perform a specific task system-wide, however, can sometimes be problematic. To solve this problem, on Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions, we can use the alternatives system and the “update-alternatives” tool.
How to improve and debug your shell scripts with ShellCheck
ShellCheck is a free and open source static analysis tool which can be used to check and improve shell scripts. It is able to highlight both common and edge-case errors, and suggest the appropriate fixes. ShellCheck can be used as an online or system utility, but can also be integrated as a linter in various text editors.
How to manage power profiles over D-Bus with power-profiles-daemon on Linux
Power-profiles-daemons is a free and open source project designed to handle system power profiles over D-Bus. The two major Linux desktop environment, GNOME and KDE Plasma, are nicely integrated with it, allowing the user to easily manage power profiles from their dedicated power manager interfaces, but it is also possible to switch profiles and retrieve information about them from the command line, using a dedicated utility.
How to mount a remote filesystem over SSH with sshfs
SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol used to establish an encrypted connection with a remote machine using a client-server model: the ssh server runs on the machine we want to access remotely, while a client is used on the machines from which we want to connect. Thanks to sshfs, we can use an existing SSH connection to mount a remote directory in a secure way, without using additional services like NFS or Samba.