Showing headlines posted by eldersnake

If the release of Firefox's Australis interface got you down, there are Firefox-based alternatives out there with a more traditional Mozilla UI. One such alternative is Pale Moon and here's how you get it.

In this tutorial I explain one way to generate a random geographical location, using simple command-line tricks.

Thanks to the recent Linux support provided by DRM-free classic games provider, GOG.com, getting that nostalgic kick on Linux has never been easier. In this article I'll also detail a few of my favourite classic games that are now available to play in Linux.

That's right, GOG.com has just announced they are supporting Linux, way ahead of their scheduled dates of around October or November. The launch brings 50 Linux-compatible games right away.

If you just love making 'top 10'-type lists but are a little embarrassed to say so, tell people you're passionate about data exploration. To impress them even more, explain that you do your data exploration on the command line. But don't ruin the impression by telling them how easy that is!

GNU/Linux gaming keeps on getting better and a recent announcement from developer Double Fine has caused much excitement. The remake of Grim Fandango is coming to Linux, alongside the console exclusive Playstation 4 and Vita versions as well as Windows and Mac!

If you're like me, you may not have heard much about Corebird, a native GTK+3 Twitter client. Which is a bit surprising really, as Corebird is a very nice and stable application that holds it's own with any of the other clients out there and deserves more love.

The title explains what this article is about. If you save an .odt file as text, or copy/paste the contents as a text file, or run odt2txt or the unoconv utility, you lose the apparent line structure of the original, and with it the line numbering. But there is a way...

The mission: use GNOME Shell as the primary desktop for an entire week. Do I choose to accept it? Yes. It's easy enough to try something for a short time and discard it in a negative manner, which has been the case for me with GNOME Shell in the past, but perhaps it can be fun to challenge yourself to try something properly and for a longer time. Or perhaps you're a masochist! Either way, feel free to join me...

I wrote the shell script described here ('grep4') to find up to four items at the same time in my data tables, which are big text files with one record per line. The script gives each searched-for item its own color on the terminal screen. It lets me know in advance how many 'hits' there are, so that if there are lots of hits, I get the choice of printing the results to a file instead of displaying them. The script also lets me choose between seeing all records with any of the items (the OR case: A or B or...) or just the records containing all the searched-for items on one line (the AND case: A and B and...).

If there's one thing that's undeniable in the GNU/Linux world at the moment, is that users' tastes can be as diverse as the choices of desktop interfaces we have available and that there is no true one-size-fits-all desktop. In addition to this, there is no doubt a vocal group of users who reject some of the recent desktop directions in the likes of Unity and GNOME-Shell and long for the days of GNOME 2. In this article I'll show you how to install MATE 1.8 in Ubuntu 14.04 and give it a classic Ubuntu look and feel, much like the days of Ubuntu 10.10, for example.

Now, don't get me wrong - when it comes to choice of desktop interface it's a very subjective matter and often a matter of taste and what you, as the user, finds most comfortable and/or productive. Still, browse through various forums, comment sections or blogs across the internet concerning Unity or even Linux desktops in general and you'll still likely find plenty of negativity towards Canonical's flagship desktop offering. However, I do believe some of the common criticisms leveled at Unity are based on some of the early incarnations of that desktop. Is it really so bad nowadays?

All computer systems can suffer from malware and viruses, including Linux. Thankfully, very few viruses exist for Linux, so users typically do not install antivirus software. It is still recommended that Linux users have antivirus software installed on Linux systems that are on a network or that have files being transfered to the device. Some users may argue that antivirus software uses up too much resources. Thankfully, low-footprint software exists for Linux. To better understand antivirus programs, it may be beneficial to understand malware itself.

Many individuals may want to contribute to Linux or some open-source software project. However, many people may not be sure where to start or how to help. Others may not know computer programming and feel that there is no way they can contribute. Well, guess what? There are many ways anyone can contribute to Linux directly or some open-source software (OSS).

Big data or small data, a lot of it comes these days as plain text arranged in rows and columns. Here are a few tips on working with tables of text, both in text editors and on the command line.

Many of you can probably relate to this: that machine, whether it be a laptop or a desktop computer, that just seems to hate any Linux operating system you throw at it. Poor performance, inefficiency or non-working bits of hardware or functionalities seem the norm whenever you try your favourite Linux distro on it to the point where you reluctantly accept this machine may only ever be usable on it's factory installed OS (often Windows, of course). I too had this experience but it turns out sometimes a little patience and the fast moving nature of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) can turn things around.

GNU AWK is a great tool for working with tables of data, and by using AWK arrays, you can quickly do column sums (and other calculations) based on unique values in another column. Pivot tables in AWK are a bit trickier. In this article I do a slow walk through the code for a simple pivot table.

Command line wizards are forever encouraging the rest of us to learn regular expressions (regex). We're told regex is elegant, powerful and incredibly useful.

The downside is that regex can be seriously fiddly. One fly-spot out of place, and the code fails. For this reason I only use 'non-simple' regex when I absolutely have to. But when I do, sigh... Regex really is elegant and powerful, as the following example shows.

I use two different GUI text editors. Mousepad does my basic editing jobs in a single window, while Gedit gives me tabbed windows, syntax highlighting and (with the Draw Spaces plug-in) a toggle-able view of whitespace and tabs.

Unfortunately, both Mousepad and Gedit struggle with big text files, say 10 mb and up. In contrast, finding strings on the command line with grep is zippety-quick, even for huge text files. String replacement with sed is also pretty fast. I recently wrote a simple shell script for finding-and-replacing in some very large text files I was editing.

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last few weeks, you would have heard about GOG.com (formally known as Good Old Games) finally announcing they will be adding Linux support! I think this is a great thing and here's 5 good reasons why.