Recently, I needed to install Debian on an Acer Aspire ES1-522 laptop. There were quite a few issues to do with drivers.

git-credential-cache is a useful tool to remember your HTTP/HTTPS git credentials (though you really should be using SSH instead). It’s useful for things like long passwords or access tokens. It stores them in memory for a certain number of seconds.

It is often useful to configure VirtualBox virtual machines to automatically start and stop on startup and shutdown. The official documentation is a bit unclear, so I have made a tutorial about how to configure it.

This article assumes you have set up the Vino VNC server correctly, but your client gives you a message like “encryption not supported” or “the authentication method requested is not availaible”.

One little-known feature of the GNOME desktop environment is that it has the ability to record screencasts. By default, the keyboard shortcut to do so is CTRLALTSHIFTR. Press it again to stop recording. This will save the video as a webm video into your Videos folder.

Sometimes, it is useful to go to the GNOME login screen from the terminal or a bash script. This can be accomplished with the following command: