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There’s lots of fun in the terminal. How about a classic iconic tile-matching puzzle video game? Step forward tetris, a terminal interface for Tetris with the main file coded in a mere 333 lines of Haskell.

Raspbian's repositories now ship version 68.5.0 ESR of Firefox. This version was released in February 2020. As it's the latest Extended Support Release, I've revisited Firefox to see if it's a viable alternative to Chromium or Vivaldi on the RPI4.

In a single sentence, nnn can be probably best summarized as software seeking to bridge the gap between the terminal and the desktop environment.

For this week, I’m going to look at a few retro games, all nestling in Raspbian’s repositories. While its quad-core BCM2711 system-on-chip has more powerful processing cores, and the first upgrade to the graphics processor in the project’s history, it’s important to be realistic with expectations about the RPI4’s gaming potential.

For this article, we’re looking at a different take on cowsay. It goes by the name xcowsay. This program displays a cute graphical cow and speech bubble. The program was first started over 12 years ago, but it’s still under active development, with a new release published only last week.

For this week’s blog, I turn to a desktop activity that I use fairly frequently. It’s screen capturing – offering the ability to share images on my computer screen with a colleague or friend. Recording a video or screencast might be snazzier, but a still-image screen capture, known as a screenshot, is often all I need to get the message across.

dutree is a command line tool to analyze disk usage. It’s written in the Rust programming language. It’s free and open source software. How does it compare to other disk usage analyzers?

A glaring omission from my RPI4 blog to date is gaming on this wee machine. There’s so many games to play on the machine, it’s difficult to know where to begin. I’ll start with something that shouldn’t be taxing on the machine. Emulating home computers. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but also ran other types of software.

Many of the text games we’re covered on LinuxLinks have focused on the roguelike genre. But how about a real-time terminal-based game? And a space shooter to boot? Interested? If so, why not check out Terminal Phase, a fast paced, action-packed game.

There are 3 models of the Raspberry Pi 4 (RPI4) available. They are identical except for the amount of RAM onboard; choose from 1GB of RAM, 2 GB of RAM, or 4GB of RAM. There’s no way of upgrading the RAM once a user has made their purchase. So it’s pretty important to choose the model that best fits your requirements, or you may end up spending more than necessary, or even need to buy extra RPI4’s. For this week’s blog, I’m seeking to provide information that’ll help you determine which model of the RPI4 to get.

I’ve reviewed a smorgasbord of open source music players. But there’s still quite a few I’ve yet to put through their paces. For this review, I’m looking at Deepin Music. The software bills itself as a “beautiful and simple music player that plays local audio. It supports viewing lyrics during playback, playing lossless audio, and playlist customization”.

Given the multimedia strengths of the RPI4, I’ve spent a few weeks covering video streaming, then examining the viability of the RPI4 to play locally stored video, before turning to examining the RPI4 as a home theater. Continuing this theme, for this week’s blog I look at the RPI4 as a screencaster.

This week, I’ve been exploring LXMusic. It’s a minimalist music player for LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment. LXMusic is written in the C programming language, and uses GTK+, a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. LXMusic is based on xmms2, using xmms2d, a daemon through which XMMS2 clients playback and manage music.

I’ve covered some fairly meaty areas in this blog in recent weeks. For this week, I’m turning to a much lighter side of the Linux desktop. Reading comics on the RPI4.

elementary OS is a distribution based on Ubuntu that focuses mainly on non-technical users. That pretty much describes me. I’ve been meaning to try elementary OS for a while. Before doing so, I’m going to explore some apps designed for it, starting with Melody. Melody is a music player designed for elementary OS but runs on other Linux distributions. Luke puts Melody under the microscope.

This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers. In this week's blog, we put Kodi through its paces on the RPI4. Kodi is free, open-source software for managing your local collection of movies, television shows, music, and photos. It’s the finest free home theater software available, although it’s interface isn’t the most intuitive. It can even play games.

conrad is a free and open source command-line tool designed to help you track conferences and meetups. The tool is written in Python.

For this week's blog, I’m looking at straightforward video playback from locally stored media. Does the RPI4 have sufficient grunt to be a capable video player?

exa is a modern replacement for ls, a venerable command-line program that’s an integral part of any Linux distribution.

It’s common knowledge that Christmas is a time for merriment, goodwill to everyone, and above all a time for lists. So there’s no better time to compile a list for the year. Once you’ve digested everything below, you can plan your new year resolutions!