Linux
gregladen | August 29, 2014UPDATE (January 2, 2016): The makers of Scrivener have decided to abandon their Linux project. Kudos for them for giving it a try. The Scrivener on Linux users were not many, and almost nobody donated to the project, and as far as I can tell, the project was not OpenSource and thus could not have attracted much of an interest among a community of mostly OpenSourceHeads.
So, I'm no longer recommending that you mess around with Scrivener on Linux, as it is no longer maintained. Back to emacs, everybody!
Scrivener is a program used by authors to write and manage complex documents, with…
gregladen | July 7, 2014When I first became a regular user of Linux, several years ago, I tried out different text editors and quickly discovered that emacs was my best choice. By coincidence, about that time I ran into an old emacs manual written by Richard Stallman in the dollar section of a used booksore. In that edition, near the end of the book, was a section on “Mail Amusements.” This documented the command “M-x spook” which adds “a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.” (I note that the…
gregladen | April 24, 2014MOST CURRENT INFORMATION WILL BE FOUND HERE: Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
NEW: Very first look at Ubuntu Linux 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta Mate Flavor
See: Books on Linux and Ubuntu
NOTE: This may not be the blog post you are looking for. If you have installed Ubuntu 14.10 and want to tweak that, GO HERE.
Continue on for 14.04.
Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr has just been released, and I’m sure you are about to install it. I’ve put together a few ideas for what to do after installation in order to make it work better for you. You’ll find that below. First, a bit of ranty…
gregladen | April 19, 2014UPDATE: Linux Install.
Installing Copy on Linux was pretty easy. You go to the web page, download a tarball, upack it, then inside the tarball figure out the folder that matches your OS (i.e., 32 vs 64 bit) and go into that folder. Then run the Agent. That may, if you are good, put a thingie on your notification area. Click on that and then sign in and install and stuff, that's it.
There are two pages you might find useful, one for Ubuntu the other for Copy more generally if needed.
Notably, the install on Linux was easier for Copy than for Dropbox. Dropbox install LOOKS easy but never…
gregladen | April 8, 2014Hey, wait! Ubuntu One was the next big thing. It was better than dropbox and iTunes and everything! I never personally got it to work for me, though I did sign up for it. Just now, I got an email from The Ubuntu One team telling me the file service system would be gone effective June 1, 2014.
Ubuntu has this blog post about it. This news is a few days old, so you probably already knew about it, but just in case, have a look: Shutting down Ubuntu One file services.
Today we are announcing plans to shut down the Ubuntu One file services. This is a tough decision, particularly when our…
gregladen | December 6, 2013The Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards are out with the current issue. Let's talk about some of them.
The number one distribution was, as usual Ubuntu. But, Ubuntu only got 16 percent, with Debian coming in second at 14.1 percent. So, one could say that Debian is strong since Ubuntu is based on Debian. One could also say that Ubuntu is surprisingly weak. One would think it would be higher. One possibility is that Linux Journal readers are pretty hard core, and might often eschew Ubuntu for other distributions that cause more pain. Face it. Real Linux users like to wear hair shirts.
I…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2013Linux is a common operating system, not least in its Android version, and it is universally assumed that a PC (or whatever "IBM compatible" is called these days) will be able to run it. In fact, machines that can’t run Linux are extremely rare since aficionados keep porting the open-source operating system to even the most obscure and outdated machine families.
One of the PC makers who sell Linux compatible computers is Samsung. That is, almost all of their machines can run Linux, and when it was discovered last January that some recent laptops cannot, it was universally seen as a bug. Nobody…
gregladen | October 7, 2013I just finished "Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook" (Second Edition) by Shantanu Tushar and Sarath Lakshman. This is a beginner's guide to using shell scripting (bash) on linux.
Usually, a "cookbook" is set up more like a series of projects organized around a set of themes, and is usually less introductory than this book. "Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook" might be better titled "Introduction to Linux Shell Scripting" because it is more like a tutorial and a how too book than like a cookbook. Nonetheless, it is an excellent tutorial that includes over 100 "recipes" that address a diversity of…
gregladen | September 1, 2013On this blog.
Below is the relative percentage of operating system use by the readers of this blog from a four month longs sample form the middle of the year last year compared to the most recent six months this year. There is not a lot of change, but notice the nearly five percent drop i nWindows use, which seems to be taken up mainly by an increase in the use of iOS.
In addition, Linux use has dropped a worrying two percent.
However, really, OSX and Android etc. are all based on Unix-like operating systems, so the numbers for this year can be recalculated to look like this:
But…
gregladen | February 17, 2013I checked out the book Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to Linux by Rickford Grant and Phil Bull (No Starch Press). With any book like this, the trick is matching it to the correct user. If you are the kind of person inclined to install the latest version of Ubuntu on your computer, you probably have already done enough with Linux to not need this book. If you are the kind of person who believes the trash talk about how bad Linux is, or who is frightened of the idea of stepping away from Windows or your Mac for any reason, run away now. This book is not for you. But, if you…
gregladen | December 5, 2012A large scale model of a human brain has been created by a team of scientists at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, Ontario. This is a virtual model, inside a computer, that involves 2,5 million virtual neurons structures in a pattern resembling the overall human brain’s anatomy, including cortical regions, motor control regions, etc. There are two components of the model: Visual processing including input and visual memory, and motor control sufficient to make a relatively simple, but 3D, arm move so it can draw things. The brain is called Semantic Pointer…
gregladen | October 28, 2012A wild GNU was spotted at some sort of event organized by a computer company named "Microsoft" which was launching a new version of its operating system. The GNU, accompanied by some friends carrying literature related to the widely used Unix-like operating system, GNU/Linux, did not cause any damage or harm to the attendees, but is it reported that later in the evening several Windows using people took out their old hardware, the hardware that would no longer run on Windows, and installed the GNU/Linux system so they would have a computer that worked just in case the new "Windows Bites" (…
gregladen | September 29, 2012RIP Ubuntu. Ubuntu was great. For years, I kept trying to get my own Linux box up and running, initially so I could relive the halcyon days of UNIX and later so I could avoid Windows. But every time I tried to get Linux working some key thing would not be configurable or would not work. Well, I'm sure it was configurable and could work but configuring it and making it work was beyond me. Those were also the days when what little support was available on the Internet was limited mostly to the sort of geeks who prefer to give answers that are harder to parse than one's original problem. In…
gregladen | July 18, 2012I just got a copy of The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction. I read one review of it a while back which was quite positive, suggesting that the book was both really useful and really not boring. Here's the description from the publisher:
You've experienced the shiny, point-and-click surface of your Linux computer—now dive below and explore its depths with the power of the command line.
The Linux Command Line by William Shotts. No Starch Press. Image from the publisher.
The Linux Command Line takes you from your very first terminal keystrokes to writing full programs in Bash,…
gregladen | June 19, 2012Linux inventer Linus Torvalds gave a talk recently at Aalto University in Finland. It is a very interesting talk that anyone involved in Open Source technology or computer software development would enjoy. During the talk, the issue of support for Linux from hardware manufacturers came up, and Linus had a comment for Nvidia, which it seems is not only non-supportive but maybe even anti-OpenSource. Linus's comment is below the fold becuase it is not work safe:
If your browser does not support moving GIF's then you may want to go to the source, here.
UPDATE: Nvidia has responded. They say…
gregladen | June 3, 2012The big new of the day in the OpenSource world is that FreeDOS's web site, revised and updated, is out of Beta and fully up and running, here. If you click through you'll find an update on a number of recent changes and updates to the operating system.
Just in case you need to know how to figure out what day of the week it is using only bash scripting (including some awk) click here.
Apparently Windows users have something Linux users don't. But there's a fix, so it no longer matters:
It is done. Almost. As predicted here on this blog but denied by many, it is probably true that with…
gregladen | April 18, 2012Joey Bernard, who writes about science under Linux, has just started a multi (as in two?) part series on GSL, the GNU Scientific Library. It is here. Just browsing through the files of GSL is fun. You find little gems like this:
const size_t npidigits = 5000 ;
const double pidigits [5000] = { 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8,
9, 7, 9, 3, 2, 3, 8, 4, 6, 2, 6, 4, 3, 3, 8, 3, 2, 7, 9, 5, 0, 2,
8, 8, 4, 1, 9, 7, 1, 6, 9, 3, 9, 9, 3, 7, 5, 1, 0, 5, 8, 2, 0, 9,
7, 4, 9, 4, 4, 5, 9, 2, 3, 0, 7, 8, 1, 6, 4, 0, 6, 2, 8, 6, 2, 0,
8, 9, 9, 8, 6, 2, 8, 0, 3, 4, 8, 2, 5, 3, 4, 2…
gregladen | March 11, 2012Do you have a Roku with which you watch Netflix? Do you watch Netflix on a Mac? If so, you are using either the Linux operating system or a closely related "*Nix" operating system. (Mac's run on a form of OS that is the same basic system as Linux*)
However, if you run Linux on a regular computer, you can't watch Netflix videos, as you can with Windows or a Mac. Why? My understanding is that the the people who own and operate Netflix, bless their pointy heads, think that if they released a Linux version of Netflix, Linux "hackers" would break through the DRM protection schemes and everyone…