i3 has been my window manager of choice for a while and I really enjoy its simplicity and ease of use. I use plenty of gtk applications, such as Firefox and Evolution, and configuring them within i3 can be confusing. This post covers a few methods to change configurations for GNOME and gtk applications from i3. lxappearance Almost all of the gtk theming settings are available in lxappearance. You can change fonts, mouse cursors, icons, and colors.

Monit is a tried-and-true method for monitoring all kinds of systems, services, and network endpoints. Deploying monit is easy. There’s only one binary daemon to run and it reads monitoring configuration from files in a directory you specify. Most Linux distributions have a package for monit and the package usually contains some basic configuration along with a systemd unit file to run the daemon reliably. However, this post is all about how to deploy it inside OpenShift.

When you build tons of kernels every day like my team does, you look for speed improvements anywhere you can. Caching repositories, artifacts, and compiled objects makes kernel builds faster and it reduces infrastructure costs. Need for speed We use GitLab CI in plenty of places, and that means we have a lot of gitlab-runner configurations for OpenShift (using the kubernetes executor) and AWS (using the docker-machine executor). The runner’s built-in caching makes it easy to upload and download cached items from object storage repositories like Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3.

Buildah and podman make a great pair for building, managing and running containers on a Linux system. You can even use them with GitLab CI with a few small adjustments, namely the switch from the overlayfs to vfs storage driver. I have some regularly scheduled GitLab CI jobs that attempt to build fresh containers each morning and I use these to get the latest packages and find out early when something is broken in the build process.

Fedora 30 is my primary operating system for desktops and servers, so I usually try to take it everywhere I go. I was recently doing some benchmarking for kernel compiles on different cloud plaforms and I noticed that Fedora isn’t included in Google Compute Engine’s default list of operating system images. (Note: Fedora does include links to quick start an Amazon EC2 instance with their pre-built AMI’s. They are superb!