Daniel Lange's blog

Resizing Xterm fonts with Ctrl+ and Ctrl+

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:15:00 +0000

Xterm misses the convenient option to resize the fonts with Ctrl+<plus> and Ctrl+<minus> like xfce4-terminal or gnome-terminal do out of the box.

This feature can be added on Debian systems by dropping a configuration snippet into /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-xterm-fontsize:

! Allow XTerm font size to be changed with Ctrl+<plus> and <minus>
XTerm.vt100.translations: #override \n\
Ctrl <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\
Ctrl <Key> plus: larger-vt-font()

Any new X session will inherit this configuration and Ctrl+<plus> and Ctrl+<minus> will work to adjust the font size (and taking the window size along).

The font sizes that Xterm iterates through can be viewed on the Ctrl-<right click> context menu:

NB: The context menu allows to switch the fonts on systems where the above snippet has not (yet) been installed. So good enough for a one-off.

Credits: Stack Overflow/Ask Ubuntu, Matthew Hoener.

Getting scanning to work with Gimp on Trixie

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Trixie ships Gimp 3.0.4 and the 3.x series has gotten incompatible to XSane, the common frontend for scanners on Linux.

Hence the maintainer, Jörg Frings-Fürst, has disabled the Gimp integration temporarily in response to a Debian bug #1088080.

There seems to be no tracking bug for getting the functionality back but people have been commenting on Debian bug #993293 as that is ... loosely related .

There are two options to get the Scanning functionality back in Trixie until this is properly resolved by an updated XSane in Debian (e.g. via trixie-backports):

Lee Yingtong Li (RunasSudo) has created a Python script that calls XSane as a cli application and published it at https://yingtongli.me/git/gimp-xsanecli/. This worked okish for me but needed me to find the scan in /tmp/ a number of times. This is a good stop-gap script if you need to scan from Gimp $now and look for a quick solution.

Upstream has completed the necessary steps to get XSane working as a Gimp 3.x plugin at https://gitlab.com/sane-project/frontend/xsane. Unfortunately compiling this is a bit involved but I made a version that can be dropped into /usr/local/bin or $HOME/bin and works alongside Gimp and the system-installed XSane.

So:

sudo apt install gimp xsane
Download xsane-1.0.0-fit-003 (752kB, AMD64 executable for Trixie) and place it in /usr/local/bin (as root)
sha256sum /usr/local/bin/xsane-1.0.0-fit-003
# result needs to be af04c1a83c41cd2e48e82d04b6017ee0b29d555390ca706e4603378b401e91b2
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/xsane-1.0.0-fit-003
# Link the executable into the Gimp plugin directory as the user running Gimp:
mkdir -p $HOME/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/xsane/
ln -s /usr/local/bin/xsane-1.0.0-fit-003 $HOME/.config/GIMP/3.0/plug-ins/xsane/
Restart Gimp
Scan from Gimp via File → Create → Acquire → XSane

The source code for the xsane executable above is available under GPL-2 at https://gitlab.com/sane-project/frontend/xsane/-/tree/c5ac0d921606309169067041931e3b0c73436f00. This points to the last upstream commit from 27. September 2025 at the time of writing this blog article.

Polkitd (Policy Kit Daemon) in Trixie ... allowing remote users to suspend, reboot, power off the local system

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 17:30:00 +0000

As per the previous Polkit blog post the policykit framwork has lost the ability to understand its own .pkla files and policies need to be expressed in Javascript with .rules files now.

To re-enable allowing remote users (think ssh) to reboot, hibernate, suspend or power off the local system, create a 10-shutdown-reboot.rules file in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/:

polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
if ((action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.reboot-multiple-sessions" ||
action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.reboot" ||
action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.suspend-multiple-sessions" ||
action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.suspend" ||
action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate-multiple-sessions" ||
action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate" ||
action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.power-off-multiple-sessions" ||
action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.power-off") &&
(subject.isInGroup("sudo") || (subject.user == "root")))
{
return polkit.Result.YES;
}
});

and run systemctl restart polkit.

Printing labels with the DYMO LabelWriter Wireless (and LabelWriter 5xx) on Debian Linux

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 21:00:00 +0000

In 2020 my company bought a DYMO LabelWriter Wireless. It is an awesome little device for thermal printing a wide variety of labels. The labels are easily available both from DYMO and from third parties so the pricing is quite acceptable.

Unfortunately DYMO supplies their DYMO Connect Software only for Microsoft Windows and MacOSX. A mobile app of the same name for Android and Apple iOS devices is available in the app stores.

There is a SDK for Linux and there are drivers published for Linux but the LabelWriter Wireless was not supported on Linux when I tried to get it running for Debian in 2020.

This year I have had a new look at the situation as we still use the LabelWriter Wireless printers a lot and the company runs fully on Linux. So it is always a chore to run a Windows VM just to run DYMO Connect.

Continue reading "Printing labels with the DYMO LabelWriter Wireless (and LabelWriter 5xx) on Debian Linux"