How does Linux's display work?

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Linux display

The Linux’s display system, uses multiple technology, protocols, extensions, applications, servers (daemon), drivers and concepts to achieve the windowing system for instance: Xorg, Wayland, X11, OpenGL, RandR, XrandR, Screen Resolution, DPI, Display server, etc. This can be overwhelming to understand fully, but each side of it is meant for a specific purpose and they are not used all together at the same time.

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How to scale the desktop's resolution?

While using Xorg X11, on KDE/Gnome/XFCE how can we scale the display/resolution for the whole desktop and/or per application? (when this is not available on the settings GUI)

The purpose of this guide is to keep the screen resolution unchanged (at max) while scaling the size (bigger/smaller) of the desktop/applications.

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How to setup a VNC Server on Linux?

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How to configure and secure a VNC server on Linux with TigerVNC? (on a screen less server or a classic machine)

Since the VNC Server (TigerVNC) configuration is the same on most Linux distributions and only the installation method differ, this wiki is targeting: OpenSUSE, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, Mageia, Void Linux, Arch Linux, Manjaro and FreeBSD (in order to be useful for more people)

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How to detach a process from terminal's shell?

Usually using & at the end of a command (like command &) is enough to send a process to the background but this does not detach the process from its parent; to detach a process completely from its parent (like the terminal’s shell) a combination of & and disown can be used, example with gedit:

gedit &
disown
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Forcing a custom disk encryption on Google's Cloud KVM

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Google cloud services (computing instance) offer encryption by default for disk storage, the customer can provide its own key with the feature customer supplied encryption (detailed here also).

How can we apply a disk encryption with cryptsetup without giving the encryption key to google?

On Linux, when using an encrypted disk (luks), it is unlocked at boot time with a password the idea here is to encrypt the disk with cryptsetup on top of the google system (default encryption) and get an earlier access to the instance to be able to unlock the drive at the boot time. This can be implemented with the help of the remote serial console feature (note that an opensuse VM was used for this howto, the different steps should not differ for other distros).

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Serious backup options for linux

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Linux system backup

When targeting a true full system backup, disk image backup (as required for this investigation) offer substantial advantage (detailed bellow) compared to files based backup.

With files based backup disk/partition structure is not saved; Most of the time for a full restore, the process is a huge time consumer in fact many time consuming steps (like system reinstall) are required; and finally backing up installed applications can be tricky; Image disk backup avoid all these cons and restore process is a one shot step.

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