7 ways AI can help with your Linux system management

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I'm not a big fan of employing AI for everything. I strongly believe that it should have no place in creative endeavors (with some exceptions -- such as DaVinci Resolve's incredible AI voice isolation), but it does make sense to employ AI in certain areas.

Before anyone gets up in arms, I'm not saying that system administrators should be replaced by machines. What I am saying is that AI can help those who are new to Linux learn how to manage (or better manage) their systems. And in cases where a single admin has to manage more machines than they have time for, AI can make for a great assistant.

I've cobbled together seven uses where AI could really make a difference for those who are either very busy or who are just now learning the ins and outs of Linux.

Although bash scripts aren't a necessity for basic desktop Linux use, anyone who's ever managed a Linux server or wanted to simply create a custom backup task for their desktops, bash scripts are essential.

For those who are just learning Linux, these scripts can be daunting, which is where AI can be handy. Using AI, you could type a prompt like, "Create a Linux bash script that backs up my ~/Documents directory to an external drive mounted at /backups on a daily basis and retains only the most recent five backups."

Also: 5 factors steadily fueling Linux's desktop rise

Your AI will create the bash script for you, which you can then test. If it works, cron that baby (another instance where you might need to use AI), and trust that your backups are going to be successful. Do make sure to check that they are not only working, but that the backups contain the files you want backed up. Because… you never know.

Log files are key to understanding what's going on with your system or what's happened to your system. Most Linux log files are contained within /var/log, and some of them can be a bit challenging to understand. Here's a good example. I recently ran into a syslog entry that I'd never seen before. Each entry contained "cause font doesn't have a family name." I did some DuckDuckGo'ing and found nothing. I then opened Opera's Aria and queried it about the error. Turns out the error relates to font handling or rendering, and that the fonts in question do not have an essential attribute (in this case, a family name). Clearly, that's not an error I need to worry about, so I decided to suppress those errors by creating a blacklist file in /etc/rsyslog.d/ with the contents:

:msg, contains, "cause font doesn't have a family name" stop