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{ Category Archives } Ubuntu and its ilk

Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) adjustments and workarounds for the Beta

October is around the corner so a new Ubuntu version is getting ready. See the Release Notes. The control buttons for each window are moved back to the right top after seven years and Unity has been replaced by Gnome 3.26 so you might be a bit discombobulated by user interface changes. The standard issue image […]

Secure the pi

Good article at Make: Take These Steps to Secure Your Raspberry Pi Against Attackers. Pretty much standard stuff but good stuff well worth considering even on a project SBC [single board computer]. Why is the SBC a target? Make suggests it might be used for distributed computing to aid Bitcoin miners, as a host for I’net […]

Gnome approaches majority (legal age to vote and drink!)

Alan Day ponders The Gnome Way and that gains a special interest as Canonical is folding up Unity and its dreams of integration of the user interface across all platforms. Day notes that the Gnome project has been able to maintain its core identity, expressed in fundamental principles, for 20 years. When I first got […]

Must be good. Brickbat quotient is quite high

It’s like the Upstart and Systemd upgrades to the Linux init system. Boy, did that get some people upset. This time around its Snap, Flatpack, and other efforts to solve application compatibility and security issues. (see 2daygeek). The thing is, software applications often depend upon common libraries of functions. Some of these libraries are provided […]

An appeal to Linux developers: BASH in Windows

The latest news about how Microsoft is going to cater to Linux developers is big news. There is a lot of the computer world hidden in that idea. Peter Bright describes Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software “And how it could leapfrog Apple as the dev platform of choice.” Microsoft has always […]

Upstart Systemd

Getting a computer operating system powered up is no small feat with today’s complex processors and computers. If you look at a system monitor that tells you the number of processes running in the background on your computer, you’ll likely find that there are hundreds of them (514 on mine right now). These processes handle […]

Google Earth install on Ubuntu 14.04

It’s google-earth-stable (7.1.2.2041-r0) and installs on 13.10, too. IT World has a simple recipe to Install Google Earth in Ubuntu 14.04 using a .deb file from google.com for 32 bit or noobslab.com for 64 bit systems. It works for 13.10 as well. For 64 bit systems, dependencies are libc6:i386 and lsb-core that you need to […]

Ubuntu 13.10 axepad (Picaxe)

Eliminating the auto-login got the dual monitor and keyboard shortcuts issues fixed. Using suspend took care of the full reboot and login hassle. Wally is in there to change desktop backgrounds on a schedule. — So now to get the Picaxe and Microchip stuff going. For axepad, installing libgtk2.0-0:i386 and libc6:i386 got it going – […]

System information

inxi is a linux utility that provides system information to assist in locating problems or just to see what the hardware and its drivers are on your system. See Inxi is an amazing tool to check hardware information on Linux. The utility is in most distribution application repositories so it is easy to install. Check […]

Microcontroller development install based on Netbeans

Finding a few PIC12f683 microcontrollers in a $1 thriftstore music on hold box stimulated another look at the feasibility of implementing development tools. There is a bit of synergy, too, because Microchip now has a cross platform IDE and C compiler available at no cost. A problem is that Mplab X runs in a netbeans […]