TOPIC: LINUX KERNEL
Keyboard remapping on macOS with Karabiner-Elements for cross-platform work
20th November 2025This is something that I have been planing to share for a while; working across macOS, Linux and Windows poses a challenge to muscle memory when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. Since the macOS set up varies from the others, it was that which I set to harmonise with the others. Though the result is not full compatibility, it is close enough for my needs.
The need led me to install Karabiner-Elements and Karabiner-EventViewer. The latter has its uses for identifying which key is which on a keyboard, which happens to be essential when you are not using a Mac keyboard. While it is not needed all the time, the tool is a godsend when doing key mappings.
Karabiner-Elements is what holds the key mappings and needs to run all the time for them to be activated. Some are simple and others are complex; it helps the website is laden with examples of the latter. Maybe that is how an LLM can advise on how to set up things, too. Before we come to the ones that I use, here are the simple mappings that are active on my Mac Mini:
left_command → left_control
left_comtrol → left_command
This swaps the left-hand Command and Control keys while leaving their right-hand ones alone. It means that the original functionality is left for some cases when changing it for the keys that I use the most. However, I now find that I need to use the Command key in the Terminal instead of the Control counterpart that I used before the change, a counterintuitive situation that I overlook given how often the swap is needed in other places like remote Linux and Windows sessions.
grave_accent_and_tilde → non_us_backslash
non_us_backslash → non_us_pound
non_us_pound → grave_accent_and_tilde
It took a while to get this three-way switch figured out, and it is a bit fiddly too. All the effort was in the name of getting backslash and hash (pound in the US) keys the right way around for me, especially in those remote desktop sessions. What made the thing really tricky was the need to deal with Shift key behaviour, which necessitated the following script:
{
"description": "Map grave/tilde key to # and ~ (forced behaviour, detects Shift)",
"manipulators": [
{
"conditions": [
{
"name": "shift_held",
"type": "variable_if",
"value": 1
}
],
"from": {
"key_code": "grave_accent_and_tilde",
"modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
},
"to": [{ "shell_command": "osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke \"~\"'" }],
"type": "basic"
},
{
"conditions": [
{
"name": "shift_held",
"type": "variable_unless",
"value": 1
}
],
"from": {
"key_code": "grave_accent_and_tilde",
"modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
},
"to": [
{
"key_code": "3",
"modifiers": ["option"]
}
],
"type": "basic"
},
{
"from": { "key_code": "left_shift" },
"to": [
{
"set_variable": {
"name": "shift_held",
"value": 1
}
},
{ "key_code": "left_shift" }
],
"to_after_key_up": [
{
"set_variable": {
"name": "shift_held",
"value": 0
}
}
],
"type": "basic"
},
{
"from": { "key_code": "right_shift" },
"to": [
{
"set_variable": {
"name": "shift_held",
"value": 1
}
},
{ "key_code": "right_shift" }
],
"to_after_key_up": [
{
"set_variable": {
"name": "shift_held",
"value": 0
}
}
],
"type": "basic"
}
]
}Here, I resorted to AI to help get this put in place. Even then, there was a deal of toing and froing before the setup worked well. After that, it was time to get the quote (") and at (@) symbols assigned to what I was used to having on a British English keyboard:
{
"description": "Swap @ and \" keys (Shift+2 and Shift+quote)",
"manipulators": [
{
"from": {
"key_code": "2",
"modifiers": {
"mandatory": ["shift"],
"optional": ["any"]
}
},
"to": [
{
"key_code": "quote",
"modifiers": ["shift"]
}
],
"type": "basic"
},
{
"from": {
"key_code": "quote",
"modifiers": {
"mandatory": ["shift"],
"optional": ["any"]
}
},
"to": [
{
"key_code": "2",
"modifiers": ["shift"]
}
],
"type": "basic"
}
]
}The above possibly was one of the first changes that I made, and took less time than some of the others that came after it. There was another at the end that was even simpler again: neutralising the Caps Lock key. That came up while I was perusing the Karabiner-Elements website, so here it is:
{
"manipulators": [
{
"description": "Change caps_lock to command+control+option+shift.",
"from": {
"key_code": "caps_lock",
"modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
},
"to": [
{
"key_code": "left_shift",
"modifiers": ["left_command", "left_control", "left_option"]
}
],
"type": "basic"
}
]
}That was the simplest of the lot to deploy, being a simple copy and paste effort. It also halted mishaps when butter-fingered actions on the keyboard activated capitals when I did not need them. While there are occasions when the facility would have its uses, it has not noticed its absence since putting this in place.
At the end of all the tinkering, I now have a set-up that works well for me. While possible enhancements may include changing the cursor positioning and corresponding highlighting behaviours, I am happy to leave these aside for now. Compatibly with British and Irish keyboards together with smoother working in remote sessions was what I sought, and I largely have that. Thus, I have no complaints so far.
Generating Git commit messages automatically using aicommit and OpenAI
25th October 2025One of the overheads of using version control systems like Subversion or Git is the need to create descriptive messages for each revision. Now that GitHub has its copilot, it now generates those messages for you. However, that still leaves anyone with a local git repository out in the cold, even if you are uploading to GitHub as your remote repo.
One thing that a Homebrew update does is to highlight other packages that are available, which is how I got to learn of a tool that helps with this, aicommit. Installing is just a simple command away:
brew install aicommit
Once that is complete, you now have a tool that generates messages describing very commit using GPT. For it to work, you do need to get yourself set up with OpenAI's API services and generate a token that you can use. That needs an environment variable to be set to make it available. On Linux (and Mac), this works:
export OPENAI_API_KEY=<Enter the API token here, without the brackets>
Because I use this API for Python scripting, that part was already in place. Thus, I could proceed to the next stage: inserting it into my workflow. For the sake of added automation, this uses shell scripting on my machines. The basis sequence is this:
git add .
git commit -m "<a default message>"
git push
The first line above stages everything while the second commits the files with an associated message (git makes this mandatory, much like Subversion) and the third pushes the files into the GitHub repository. Fitting in aicommit then changes the above to this:
git add .
aicommit
git push
There is now no need to define a message because aicommit does that for you, saving some effort. However, token limitations on the OpenAI side mean that the aicommit command can fail, causing the update operation to abort. Thus, it is safer to catch that situation using the following code:
git add .
if ! aicommit 2>/dev/null; then
echo " aicommit failed, using fallback"
git commit -m "<a default message>"
fi
git pushThis now informs me what has happened when the AI option is overloaded and the scripts fallback to a default option that is always available with git. While there is more to my git scripting than this, the snippets included here should get across how things can work. They go well for small push operations, which is what happens most of the time; usually, I do not attempt more than that.
And then there was one...
25th August 2025Even with the rise of the internet, magazine publishing was in rude health at the end of the last century. That persisted through the first decade of this century before any decline began to be noticed. Now, things are a poor shadow of what once used to be.
Though a niche area with some added interest, Linux magazine publishing has not been able to escape this trend. At the height of the flourish, we had the launch of Linux Voice by former writers of Linux Format. That only continues as a section in Linux Magazine these days, one of the first casualties from a general decline in readership.
Next, it was the turn of Linux User & Developer. This came into the hands of Future when they acquired Imagine Publishing and remained in print for a time after that due to the conditions of the deal set by the competition regulator. Once beyond that, Future closed it to stick with its own more lightweight title, Linux Format, transferring some of the writers across to the latter. This echoed what they did with Web Designer; they closed that in favour of .Net.
In both cases, dispatching the in-house publications might have been a better idea; without content, you cannot have readers. In time, .Net met its demise and the same fate awaited Linux Format a few months ago after it celebrated its silver jubilee. There was no goodbye edition this time: it went out with a bang, reminding us of glory days that have passed. The content was becoming more diverse with hardware features getting included, perhaps reflecting that something else was happening behind the scenes.
After all that, Linux Magazine soldiers on to outlive the others. It perhaps helps that it is published by an operation centred around the title, Linux New Media, which also publishes Admin Magazine. Even so, it too has needed to trim things a bit. For a time, there was a dedicated Raspberry Pi title that lives on as a section in Linux Magazine.
It was while sprucing up some of the content on here that I was reminded of the changes. Where do you find surveys of what is available? The options could include desktop environments and Linux distributions as much as code editors, web browsers and other kinds of software. While it is true that operations like Future have portals for exactly this kind of thing, they too have a nemesis in the form of GenAI. Asking ChatGPT may be their undoing as much as web publishing triggered a decline in magazine publishing.
Technology upheaval means destruction as much as creation, and there are occasions when spending quiet time reading a paper periodical is just what you need. We all need time away from screen reading, whatever the device happens to be.
Upheaval and miniaturisation
4th March 2025The ongoing AI boom got me refreshing my computer assets. One was a hefty upgrade to my main workstation, still powered by Linux. Along the way, I learned a few lessons:
- Processing with LLM's only works on a graphics card when everything can remain within its onboard memory. It is all too easy to revert to system memory and CPU usage, given the amount of memory you get on consumer graphics cards. That applies even with the latest and greatest from Nvidia, when the main use case is for gaming. Things become prohibitively expensive when you go on from there.
- Even with water cooling, keeping a top of the range CPU cool and its fans running quietly remains a challenge, more so than when I last went for a major upgrade. It takes time for things to settle down.
- My Iiyama monitor now feels flaky with input from the latest technology. This is enough to make me look for a replacement, and it is waking up from dormancy that is the real issue. While it was always slow, plugging out from mains electricity and then back in again is a hack that is needed all too often.
- KVM switches may need upgrading to work with the latest graphical input. The monitor may have been a culprit with the problems that I was getting, yet things were smoother once I replaced the unit that I had been using with another that is more modern.
- AMD Ryzen 9 chips now have onboard graphics, a boon when things are not proceeding too well with a dedicated graphics card. Even though this was not the case when the last major upgrade happened, there were no issues like what I faced this time around.
- Having LED's on a motherboard to tell what might be stopping system startup is invaluable. This helped in July 2021 and averted confusion this time around as well. While only four of them were on offer, knowing which of CPU, DRAM, GPU or system boot needs attention is a big help.
- Optical drives are not needed any longer. Booting off a USB drive was enough to get Linux Mint installed, once I got the image loaded on there properly. Rufus got used, and I needed to select the low-level writing option before things proceeded as I had hoped.
Just like 2021, the 2025 upgrade cycle needed a few weeks for everything to settle down. The previous cycle was more challenging, and this was not just because of an accompanying heatwave. The latest one was not so bedevilled.
Given the above, one might be tempted to go for a less arduous path, like my acquisition of an iMac last year for another place that I own. After all, a Mac Mini packs in quite a lot of power, and it is not the only miniature option. Now that I have one, I have moved image processing off the workstation and onto it. The images are stored on the Linux machine and edited on the Mac, which has plenty of memory and storage of its own. There is also an M4 chip, so processing power is not lacking either.
It could have been used for work affairs, yet I acquired a Geekom A8 for just that. Though seeking work as I write this, my being an incorporated freelancer means that having a dedicated machine that uses my main monitor has its advantages. Virtualisation can allow drift from business affairs to business matters, that is not so easy when a separate machine is involved. There is no shortage of power either with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS and Radeon 780M Graphics on board. Add in 32 GB of memory and 2 TB of storage and all is commodious. It can be surprising what a small package can do.
The Iiyama's travails also pop up with these smaller machines, less so on the Geekom than with the Mac. The latter needs the HDMI cable to be removed and reinserted after a delay to sort out things. Maybe that new monitor may not be such an off the wall idea after all.
Fixing an Ansible warning about boolean type conversion
27th October 2022My primary use for Ansible is doing system updates using the inbuilt apt module. Recently, I updated my main system to Linux Mint 21 and a few things like Ansible stopped working. Removing instances that I had added with pip3 sorted the problem, but I then ran playbooks manually, only for various warning messages to appear that I had not noticed before. What follows below is one of these.
[WARNING]: The value True (type bool) in a string field was converted to u'True' (type string). If this does not look like what you expect, quote the entire value to ensure it does not change.
The message is not so clear in some ways, not least because it had me looking for a boolean value of True when it should have been yes. A search on the web revealed something about the apt module that surprised me.: the value of the upgrade parameter is a string, when others like it take boolean values of yes or no. Thus, I had passed a bareword of yes when it should have been declared in quotes as "yes". To my mind, this is an inconsistency, but I have changed things anyway to get rid of the message.
Resolving VirtualBox Shared Folders problems in Fedora 32 through a correct Guest Additions installation
26th July 2020While some Linux distros like Fedora install VirtualBox drivers during installation time, I prefer to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions themselves. Before doing this, it is best to remove the virtualbox-guest-additions package from Fedora to avoid conflicts. After that, execute the following command to ensure that all prerequisites for the VirtualBox Guest Additions are in place before mounting the VirtualBox Guest Additions ISO image and installing from there:
sudo dnf -y install gcc automake make kernel-headers dkms bzip2 libxcrypt-compat kernel-devel perl
During the installation, you may encounter a message like the following:
ValueError: File context for /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-<VERSION>/other/mount.vboxsf already defined
This is generated by SELinux, so the following commands need to be executed before repeating the installation of VirtualBox Guest Additions:
sudo semanage fcontext -d /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-<VERSION>/other/mount.vboxsf
sudo restorecon /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-<VERSION>/other/mount.vboxsf
Without doing the above step and fixing the preceding error message, I had an issue with mounting of Shared Folders whereby the mount point was set up, but no folder contents were displayed. This happened even when my user account was added to the vboxsf group, and it proved to be the SELinux context issue that was the cause.
Generating PNG files in SAS using ODS Graphics
21st December 2019Recently, I had someone ask me how to create PNG files in SAS using ODS Graphics, so I sought out the answer for them. Normally, the suggestion would have been to create RTF or PDF files instead, but there was a specific need that needed a different approach. Adding something like the following lines before an SGPLOT, SGPANEL or SGRENDER procedure should do the needful:
ods listing gpath='E:\';
ods graphics / imagename="test" imagefmt=png;
Here, the ODS LISTING statement declares the destination for the desired graphics file, while the ODS GRAPHICS statement defines the file name and type. In the above example, the file test.png would be created in the root of the E drive of a Windows machine. However, this also works with Linux or UNIX directory paths.
Sorting out sluggish start-up and shutdown times in Linux Mint 19
9th August 2018The Linux Mint team never forces users to upgrade to the latest version of their distribution, but curiosity often provides a strong enough impulse for me to do so. When I encounter rough edges, the wisdom of leaving things unchanged becomes apparent. Nevertheless, the process brings learning opportunities, which I am sharing in this post. It also allows me to collect various useful titbits that might help others.
Again, I went with the in-situ upgrade option, though the addition of the Timeshift backup tool means that it is less frowned upon than once would have been the case. It worked well too, apart from slow start-up and shutdown times, so I set about tracking down the causes on the two machines that I have running Linux Mint. As it happens, the cause was different on each machine.
On one PC, it was networking that holding up things. The cause was my specifying a fixed IP address in /etc/network/interfaces instead of using the Network Settings GUI tool. Resetting the configuration file back to its defaults and using the Cinnamon settings interface took away the delays. It was inspecting /var/log/boot.log that highlighted problem, so that is worth checking if I ever encounter slow start times again.
As I mentioned earlier, the second PC had a very different problem, though it also involved a configuration file. What had happened was that /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume contained the wrong UUID for my system's swap drive, so I was seeing messages like the following:
W: initramfs-tools configuration sets RESUME=UUID=<specified UUID for swap partition>
W: but no matching swap device is available.
I: The initramfs will attempt to resume from <specified file system location>
I: (UUID=<specified UUID for swap partition>)
I: Set the RESUME variable to override this.
Correcting the file and executing the following command resolved the issue by updating the affected initramfs image for all installed kernels and speeded up PC start-up times:
sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
Though it was not a cause of system sluggishness, I also sorted another message that I kept seeing during kernel updates and removals on both machines. This has been there for a while and causes warning messages about my system locale not being recognised. The problem has been described elsewhere as follows: /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/root_locale is expecting to see individual locale directories in /usr/lib/locale, but locale-gen is configured to generate an archive file by default. Issuing the following command sorted that:
sudo locale-gen --purge --no-archive
Following these, my new Linux Mint 19 installations have stabilised with more speedy start-up and shutdown times. That allows me to look at what is on Flathub to see what applications and if they get updated to the latest version on an ongoing basis. That may be a topic for another entry on here, but the applications that I have tried work well so far.
Making pages of new documents look right in LibreOffice Writer on wide screens
21st April 2017My recent move from Linux Mint 17.3 to Linux Mint 18.1 brought with it version 5.3.0.3 of LibreOffice. What that brought was an oddity where the default blank document in a fresh LibreOffice Writer session had its only page displayed to the right within the application window. To me, this looks like a bug, even if I have a 24" computer screen.
After searching, I found a solution that displays a single page in the centre of the application window instead of offset to the right. First, go to the View menu and select Zoom. In the sub-menu, click on 'Zoom...' to open a dialogue box. This has two columns. Under View Layout, the Columns setting was highlighted with 2 columns selected. Choose Single Page instead and click OK to dismiss the dialogue. The Automatic option also works. I cannot understand why such an odd default was selected.
The bold gamble behind Linux Voice magazine
1st March 2014During the latter part of last year, the magazine Linux Format suffered a staff clear-out, and I was left wondering why. It was as if a load of folk left at once and, even if I have seen that sort of thing happening at my current place of work, I was asking if something went wrong at Future Publishing. Instead, I had missed the fact that the former Linux Format staff were starting their own magazine. They crowdfunded it on Indiegogo. It took the appearance of Linux Voice on a shelf in the Macclesfield WHSmith's for me to become enlightened about this.
It seems risky for a whole team from one publisher's magazine to leave and create their own similar publication, especially given the current instability of magazine publishing in the digital age. The mention of a non-compete agreement reminded me of my own workplace. Their former employers' reaction would be interesting to know, as mine might consider legal action if I did something similar, assuming it were possible; I too would be bound by a six-month non-compete clause after leaving.
Regarding the magazine's content, it is appropriately good. While occasional misspellings might occur, articles on OwnCloud and Arch Linux installation, along with reviews of Mageia 4 and FreeBSD 10, would interest me. Many familiar names from Linux Format are also present, creating a sense of continuity. The new magazine's design is less extravagant than its established competitor, and their coexistence will be worth observing.
New ideas take time to develop, and I wish the new magazine success. Its goals are positive: half of its profits will support open-source software, and articles will be openly accessible via a Creative Commons licence. However, its immediate financial stability is crucial, making the next few months significant. The experienced team behind the magazine is a strong asset and could prevent it from becoming like Walking World Ireland and Cycling World, which appear irregularly in stores. The support of an enthusiastic community is also beneficial. I might eventually have to choose between Linux Voice and Linux Format, similar to my choice between Linux Magazine and Linux User & Developer. Despite being a niche operating system, Linux users have a good selection of magazines.