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If you’re going to add data disks to a linux install, use the UUID rather than the device name (/dev/sda1 etc).

I was adding a volume to my azure VM to use as backup for my local stuff. I added it with the system running and saw it as /dev/sdd. I partitioned it, formatted it etc and saw a nice big 4TB /dev/sdd1. I then added this to my fstab and restarted…

After restarting I took ownership of my /backups mount point without first checking the contents, as it was blank. It turned out that after restarting the device names had jumped around and now sdd1 was my system partition and I had just fsck’ed over my permissions.

I checked into it, and while you *can* try and fix it, there are always going to be some things wrong.
Had to make a new machine, reinstall nextcloud (using nginx this time) and fsck around with moving data from the old data volume to the new one. On the upside, nginx is faster and I now have 4TB for nextcloud.

tl;dr; Always use UUIDs.

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I seem to spend far too much time on changing menu colours, but I take issue with having white menus on white background. Cut to the chase, I did a little light digging into my preferred Cinnamon theme: Mint-Y-Darker-Blue and located the correct (I think) settings.

First off, you’re going to want to copy the theme:
sudo cp -r /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Darker-Blue My-Darker-Blue

Next, edit the context menu for GTK2 apps:
sudo xed /usr/share/themes/My-Darker-Blue/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

Scroll to the end of the top line and edit menu_bg:#FFFFFF to menu_bg:#DBDBDB. Make sure you leave the closing ” in place, also the preceding \n

Next up, we’re looking for the GTK3 setting:
sudo xed /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Darker-Blue/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

Scroll down to line 1439 and change the colour value to eg. #DBDBDB

That’s about it. Just open up Preferences>Themes and select your new controls theme.

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I did a post a while back about customising the XFCE Whisker menu. I’ve expanded on this and rolled the customisations into a theme.

The theme is based on ARC-Darker. By based on, I mean it is almost a 100% copy. The only parts I’ve changed are the colours for Whisker menu and a slight tweak to the context menu to make it more visible on light backgrounds. I find the theme looks nicest with the ePapirus icon theme, but YMMV.

To install, download this file
Extract it and copy to its own folder in either /usr/share/themes or ~/.themes

If you previously customised whisker menu as per my previous post, you will need to remove or rename ~/config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and run xfce4-panel -r to reload and reset the panel config.