Showing headlines posted by eldersnake

You might be forgiven for maybe having not even heard of the game, as it's maybe one of the more older obscure titles, but it is also a classic for those who do remember it. For those people, including myself, it was quite a joy to see this title just recently land on Steam, bringing with it Linux support. It seems THQ Nordic have brought the game code to modern systems and at the same time, ported it to Linux and Mac.

For any Xfce gurus who may have tried to emulate the Unity desktop look, or maybe just wanted to save a bit of screen real estate, this may not be new to you. For anyone else though, here's a tip on this neat functionality.

If you've ever given a slide presentation at a conference, you know the drill. Tell the audio-visual people what session your talk is in, then hand them a USB stick with your PowerPoint on it. The presentation has to be in Microsoft PowerPoint because the one and only laptop plugged into the data projector runs Windows and PowerPoint. No LibreOffice Impress, no other presentation software, sorry. Of course, if you do your presenting from your own computer, there are a couple of dozen free and proprietary alternatives to PowerPoint. But you already have a presentation application on your computer! And I mean almost any computer, including the laptop used at that conference. It's called a browser.

Ahh, Void Linux. You may or may not have heard of it. If you have, more than likely it was by word of mouth, so to speak, from internet comments on a forum, YouTube video or in passing on Reddit. But this little distro rarely gets any press or recognition otherwise. Perhaps it's time that changes, as Void Linux is an interesting distro in its own right and a good alternative to something like Arch Linux. It also has a no-systemd approach.

Simple Scan is one of my personal favourite and perhaps even one of the "essential" apps on the Linux desktop for me. It does what it says on the tin: it's simple and it scans, with a nice preview system and enough options to be decently functional. Some new designs for the app have emerged and they are looking quite nice indeed.

So, let's talk social media buttons. You know them; you probably see them on most sites that you visit these days. The little badges or icons that load, encouraging you to click on them to either connect with the associated social media account or to share the article you may be reading at the time. If you're a web author or developer, I would strongly encourage you to use static badges or buttons instead.

For those using an NVIDIA powered machine, especially those running Optimus laptops, a new NVIDIA driver stack has landed in the negativo17.org repo for Fedora 25 (and up) users.

The fast moving Solus Project that is making some waves in the Linux distribution world has some new shiny things going on. Joshua Strobl, Solus Project Communications Manager has announced them in the latest This Week In Solus.

We all have at least one or maybe even a handful of programs we seemingly just can't live without. You know, that program that you instantly go looking for as soon as you've installed your new shiny OS (or Linux distribution, more specifically in our case). For me, personally it's the Vim text editor.

A few months back we took a look at the new GNOME Recipes app that's currently in heavy development. Matthias Clasen has announced that along with a growing team of developers, some further improvements are on the way, both in terms of user experience and the selection of recipes and cuisines available.

Nearly all Linux distros come with a graphical file manager tied to a particular desktop environment. KDE comes with Dolphin file manager, Gnome with Files, MATE with Caja, Cinnamon with Nemo, Xfce with Thunar, LXDE with PCManFM. [...] I now use a graphical file manager that's completely independent: not tied to any particular distro or DE. And I really like it.

While not Linux specific by any means, here is a Firefox add-on (currently in Firefox Test Pilot) that I've been using and I believe is beneficial to any Firefox user, especially those who want a bit of extra privacy. Containers are basically a way of isolating tabs to their own profiles (profile-per-tab, if you like). This isn't quite the same as separate profiles that Firefox allows you to start up the browser with, but the result is quite similar nonetheless: tabs are confined to their particular container, including cookies and login data.

Just mere days after the news broke that Canonical would be using the GNOME desktop environment in the default release of the Ubuntu operating system, following the news of the company also dropping the Unity desktop and the greater goal of "convergence", newly re-appointed Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has shocked the Linux community with yet another bombshell - to reboot the plans for convergence, through what he calls the "No Desktop Environment".

When writing or editing scientific-type text in LibreOffice Writer, I rely a lot on its spellchecker. Unfortunately, the scientific terms I'd like to check aren't in the default dictionaries behind LibreOffice's spellchecking routine. There are two ways out of this dilemma...

With the recent bombshell that Canonical is quitting the Unity desktop project as well as the overall goals for convergence and returning to GNOME, one can't help but wonder what Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will look like. However, as you will see it is very easy to tweak GNOME to look and feel quite similar to Unity in a matter of minutes, so perhaps this gives an idea.

I use the YAD dialog program quite a lot in my shell scripts. Written and maintained by Victor Ananjevksy, YAD is easy to use and has dozens of handy options.

In my data-cleaning work I often make up tallies of selected individual characters from big, UTF-8-encoded data files. What's the best way to do this? As shown below, I've tried grep/sort/uniq, AWK and Ruby, and AWK's the fastest. The trials also revealed an unexpected problem with the uniq program in GNU coreutils.

I've just built my own GUI calculator (script below).

OK, you're probably thinking "WHY? There are plenty of perfectly good GUI calculators for Linux. Why build another one?" And my answer is "Because the available calculators are way too powerful and don't do what I want on-screen."

You might be surprised to learn that there are programs for running presentations in a terminal. No, I don't mean opening PowerPoint or Impress slides one after the other, as images in a frame-buffered console. I mean presenting slides coded for the terminal, in a terminal. Interesting idea? It seems to be, because there are (at least) 8 terminal presentation programs for Linux. [..] I haven't tried them all, but I've found tpp and patat to be fairly easy to use. Below are a few tips on working with these two programs.

Alright, so, disclaimer. This will likely be most suited for advanced or at least intermediate level Linux users. If you love NetworkManager, look away now, because we're going to obliterate it from the system. Unless, of course, someone works out how to make NetworkManager use the 'wext' driver. In which case, let me know! Having recently bought a TP-Link TL-WN725N Nano USB Wireless Dongle for my laptop, I encountered what seems to be an unfortunately common problem with these wireless dongles that use Realtek drivers, such as 8188EU, which mine uses...