Eric Adams - Linux and Open Source

09/01/2022

I performed an upgrade from Linux Mint 20.2 to 20.3. I got an error that something had timed out but it appears to have been successful. I'm really liking the changes. My favorite thing so far is the addition of events to the pop-up calendar under the clock. It's very useful information to have at a glance.

28/12/2021

I am currently dual-booting Ubuntu 20.10 and Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon on my Dell XPS 15. What are you folks using these days? I'm interested to know hardware and software. Let me know!

13/12/2021

I've been using the new release of Endeavour OS named Atlantis. I have been a user of this distro since their second release. If you want an easy way to install a mostly unaltered Arch Linux desktop, Endeavour is a great choice.

29/03/2020

I'm a very happy user of flatpak. In general, they work very well with few exceptions. One issue I've encountered a few times is the default permissions making it so that I am unable to save a file from a flatpak application. This can be a major issue if you've spent time working on something and realize it is lost effort. I've since started checking the default permissions of any given app to make sure it doesn't happen again.

You can do set permissions from the terminal with 'flatpak override [app-id] --[permission]`. In this video I use `flatpak override --user net.xmind.XMind8 --filesystem=home` for Xmind. Note that I include the --user option since I install flatpak at the user level instead of the system level.

Another much more convenient way to do this is via a new tool called Flatseal. It provides a very nice UI to view and manage permissions.

https://youtu.be/ke1nM66GtaI

I'm a very happy user of flatpak. In general, they work very well with few exceptions. One issue I've encountered a few times is the default permissions maki...

29/03/2020

Regular expressions are a way to define an advanced search pattern that can be very useful for manipulating text, among other things. They are used quite a bit in programming languages but in this case, I am showing how I use them in a text editor to manipulate text copied from a website into a clean list format. This isn't so much a tutorial as it is a real world example of how you can use regular expressions to speed up your work. And I'll admit - they are just fun to use!

https://youtu.be/0Ds55OPlFUY

Regular expressions are a way to define an advanced search pattern that can be very useful for manipulating text, among other things. They are used quite a b...

29/03/2020

https://dlnxtend.com/18

Welcome to DLN Xtend Episode 18. In this episode, Eric finds a new home studio/office space and Nate tells us about using LeoCAD with his kids. LeoCAD lets you design virtual models with LEGO® bricks.

We thank DigitalOcean for sponsoring DLN Xtend. DigitalOcean offers the simplest, most developer-friendly cloud platform. It’s optimized to make managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, multiple storage options, integrated firewalls, load balancers and so much more. You can get all this plus access to their world-class customer support for as low as $5 per month. DigitalOcean also has 2,000 cloud-agnostic tutorials to help you stay up to date with the latest open source software, languages, and frameworks. Get started on Digital Ocean for 2 Months FREE with a $100 credit by going to do.co/dln.

On This Week in Linux, Michael mentioned Folding@Home as a way to help with COVID-19 research. They have a blog post describing what they are doing and how you can help.

Also on This Week in Linux, there is a new release of Clonezilla live, a partition and disk imaging/cloning program. We discuss the benefits of using this type of software to create full snapshots of disks and partitions.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

Build better web applications faster with DigitalOcean's industry leading price-performance and predictable costs

29/03/2020

This is a follow-up video to one I made a while ago about using libinput-gestures for multitouch gestures in Linux. That option still works but, since then, I have been using a different option that I wanted to share. Fusuma is a multitouch gesture recognizer. This Ruby gem makes your Linux desktop able to recognize swipes or pinches and assign commands to them. I've found it to be more flexible and configurable than libinput-gestures as you can hopefully see in this video.

https://youtu.be/bn11Iwvf29I

This is a follow-up video to one I made a while ago about using libinput-gestures for multitouch gestures in Linux. That option still works but, since then, ...

29/03/2020

On DLN Xtend Episode 17, Nate tests FreeOffice and Eric spends some time with Kdenlive.

We thank DigitalOcean for sponsoring DLN Xtend. DigitalOcean offers the simplest, most developer-friendly cloud platform. It’s optimized to make managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, multiple storage options, integrated firewalls, load balancers and so much more. You can get all this plus access to their world-class customer support for as low as $5 per month. DigitalOcean also has 2,000 cloud-agnostic tutorials to help you stay up to date with the latest open source software, languages, and frameworks. Get started on Digital Ocean for 2 Months FREE with a $100 credit by going to do.co/dln.

Destination Linux talked about the open source document viewer KOReader which peaked Nate's interest and leads to a discussion on e-readers.

Ask Noah brings up the recent news of an AMD vulnerability discovered as part of a study funded by Intel and also the excellent Opensource.Builders website which showcases open source alternatives to common proprietary software.

Jason Evangelho of Linux for Everyone recently interviewed Alan Pope of Canonical and asked some interesting questions. We break down a few of the more interesting aspects of their conversation.

On the DasGeek YouTube channel, Ryan covered using the El Gato Streamdeck Mini with Linux which led Eric to wonder if there was a way to use a general-purpose tablet to do the same thing rather than buying dedicated hardware. Turns out, there is a very easy way to accomplish this with obs-websocket and OBS Tablet Remote. Thanks to Venn Stone of LinuxGameCast for the tutorial.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

https://dlnxtend.com/17

Build better web applications faster with DigitalOcean's industry leading price-performance and predictable costs

29/03/2020

I made a video in January about video cutting tools which included LosslessCut. Since then, they have been very busy adding new features and putting out releases. The pace is impressive and the results are equally so. This is a quick comparison between the older version and where they are now as well as how to use LosslessCut.

https://youtu.be/IPQymOSei_Q

I made a video in January about video cutting tools which included LosslessCut. Since then, they have been very busy adding new features and putting out rele...

29/03/2020

Welcome to DLN Xtend Episode 16. Eric tests Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa. Nate looks at KDE Plasma 5.18 and the Calligra office suite.

We thank DigitalOcean for sponsoring DLN Xtend. DigitalOcean offers the simplest, most developer-friendly cloud platform. It’s optimized to make managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, multiple storage options, integrated firewalls, load balancers and so much more. You can get all this plus access to their world-class customer support for as low as $5 per month. DigitalOcean also has 2,000 cloud-agnostic tutorials to help you stay up to date with the latest open source software, languages, and frameworks. Get started on Digital Ocean for 2 Months FREE with a $100 credit by going to do.co/dln.

In this week's community focus, there was a great discussion on KDE Plasma 5.18 and we get the warm fuzzies from a comment in Telegram.

Stuart Langridge guest hosted on Destination Linux and their guest was Ikey Doherty discussing his latest project, Lispy Snake, an independent game studio.

On This Week in Linux, Michael Tunnell covered the Manjaro 19.0 release which I made a video about and also Facebook becoming a sponsor of the OBS Studio project.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

https://dlnxtend.com/16

Build better web applications faster with DigitalOcean's industry leading price-performance and predictable costs

29/03/2020

Ubuntu includes a few simple options for customizing their dock. The Ubuntu dock is based on the GNOME extension Dash to Dock which includes many more options. These options are available however not via a convenient UI like Dash to Dock provides. You can use dconf-editor instead to access these settings. This video demonstrates how to install and use dconf-editor to make changes to these settings.

https://youtu.be/uiAtZiYZao8

Ubuntu includes a few simple options for customizing their dock. The Ubuntu dock is based on the GNOME extension Dash to Dock which includes many more option...

28/03/2020

Manjaro recently released 19.0 Kyria for their main editions which are XFCE, GNOME and KDE Plasma. I spend a few minutes looking at each to see what's new and what we can expect from this release. Note that I was looking at the release candidates just a few hours before the main release was made available so the video reflects the final release with possibly some small changes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t73ChYmcQ6o&t=427s

Manjaro recently released 19.0 Kyria for their main editions which are XFCE, GNOME and KDE Plasma. I spend a few minutes looking at each to see what's new an...

28/03/2020

Welcome to DLN Xtend Episode 15. This time, some acquaintances of Nate have asked him for help getting started with Linux and helping his son with an electronics engineering course. Eric goes deeper into Linux audio with JACK and Reaper.

Dalton Durst from the UBports project was a guest host on Destination Linux. They discussed the PinePhone Braveheart edition and how UBports was progressing on the device. We, of course, couldn't be happier about the prospect of a Linux smartphone.

On the Ask Noah show, Noah doesn't see a place for rolling release distros. We disagree and think they serve a need just as fixed release distributions do.

Jason Evangehlo of Linux for Everyone covers the negativity surrounding proprietary software and dual booting. It's an attitude that bothers us as well.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

https://dlnxtend.com/15

Build better web applications faster with DigitalOcean's industry leading price-performance and predictable costs

28/03/2020

I take a quick look at the work in progress 20.04 version of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix. Of particular interest is the new Cinnamon Layout tool which lets you pick from several familiar desktop layouts.

https://youtu.be/hZyt6FPrvGc

I take a quick look at the work in progress 20.04 version of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix. Of particular interest is the new Cinnamon Layout tool which lets you pic...

28/03/2020

Welcome back to DLN Xtend. In this 14th episode, Eric talks about setting up a VPN to connect to his home network as well as more experimentation with JACK audio. Nate discusses transferring his domain to a new registrar and the upcoming move to self hosting his website.

That leads nicely into our announcement this week of DigitalOcean becoming a network-wide sponsor of DLN. All Destination Linux Network shows, including ours, will be taking part. We discuss their introductory offer and how and why we are happy customers.

In Listener Feedback this week, Leviticus suggests we use video for the podcast and we hear from TheAssasin, developer of AppImageLauncher, who answers our questions from episode 11.

The DLN community has been discussing the PinePhone Braveheart edition over on the Discourse forum, testing UBPorts and other distros as well as some software. Many have shared their experiences. Did you buy a PinePhone? How has it been? Come share your thoughts in this thread.

A recent Software Spotlight on Destination Linux covered FreeCAD, a free and open-source general-purpose parametric 3D CAD application. It just so happens Nate is a long time user of FreeCAD and gives us some reasons why he is such a fan.

KDE's Plasma desktop version 5.18 was recently released and we talk about what's new and why we like Plasma in general.

Hardware Addicts, a new DLN podcast covering all things hardware, discussed the various cooling solutions and the virtues of each. We discuss our own experiences having both recently built AMD workstations. There is a new segment lead by Wendy Hill covering photography. This week she dives into the different types of cameras (i.e. Point and Shoot, DSLR) and explains what each does.

And finally, Michael Tunnell covers many. many things on each episode of This Week in Linux. He recently brought up ProtonCalendar from ProtonMail. This fills a gap we've previously had with using ProtonMail as a true alternative to other mail services that include this functionality.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

https://dlnxtend.com/14

This week we discuss using a home VPN server, JACK audio, DLN's DigitalOcean sponsorship, feedback from the AppImageLauncher developer, community testing the PinePhone, FreeCAD, KDE Plasma 5.18, PC cooling, and ProtonCalendar.

28/03/2020

I've been slacking on posting here so I'm going to get caught up. I apologize for the influx of new posts and I'll be better about spacing them out.

07/02/2020

Welcome to episode 13 of DLN Xtend. In the weekly update segment, Nate fixes his robot vacuum. Eric talks about his latest YouTube videos, including video trimming tools and a new episode the LibreOffice Calc series with Serge.

Our community focus this week is a topic from the Destination Linux Network Discourse forum about laptop brands that support Linux.

Nate and Eric discuss wanting a Linux-based tablet.

DLN recently held their second game night.

Destination Linux discussed Linux User Groups (LUGs) and we discuss what it takes to get started.

Destination Linux also interviewed Hayden Barnes of Canonical's WSL team. The DL crew asked some tough questions and we go into how Hayden seems to have swayed their opinions on Microsoft's recent "love" for Linux.

And last for this week, Jason Evangehlo of Linux for Everyone, Jason interviewed Dustin Krysak of Ubuntu Budgie and we discuss the nature for FOSS and how we can be appreciative and give back.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

https://dlnxtend.com/13

This week we talk Linux laptop brands, Linux tablets, DLN's latest game night, Linux user groups, Hayden Barnes of Canonical on WSL and Microsoft, and Dustin Krysak of Ubuntu Budgie and giving back to FOSS.

25/01/2020

Spell check was made available in Telegram Desktop as of version 1.9.3 and, while it worked fine with Ubuntu-based distros, it was not working on Arch-based ones. It didn't take me too long to figure it out but I wasn't sure if others had yet. This video shows the simple the for this issue.

https://youtu.be/EfIg3Rc0Uac

Spell check was made available in Telegram Desktop as of version 1.9.3 and, while it worked fine with Ubuntu-based distros, it was not working on Arch-based ...

25/01/2020

A video cutting tool is a purpose-built application for cutting smaller parts of a larger video and then saving those clips as one or more new video files.

Traditional video editors typically take multiple source files of varying types (different file types, audio and video codecs, containers and so on) and combine them into a project which is then rendered as a single, high-quality output file. Video cutting tools are much simpler, taking a single input file and reusing the same video and audio formats of the source formats when exporting. Skipping the need to render a new file makes the output process much faster than using a traditional video editing program.

Applications Featured

Avidemux
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.

Available for Linux, PC-BSD, MacOS and Windows
Latest Linux Version - 2.7.4 released on 2019-08-15
Installable on Linux as a native package in many distros and also as an AppImage
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

LosslessCut
Simple and ultra fast cross platform tool for lossless trimming/cutting of video and audio files. Great for saving space by rough cutting your large video files taken from a video camera, GoPro, drone, etc. It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data without doing a slow re-encode and thereby losing quality. It extremely fast because it does an almost direct data copy. It is fueled by the awesome ffmpeg (included) for doing the grunt work. It also features some other lossless operations on videos.

Available for Linux, MacOS and Windows
Latest Linux Version - 2.6.2 released on 2019-11-05
Installable on Linux as a snap package and also as an AppImage
https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

https://youtu.be/SgKn2m3htQI

A video cutting tool is a purpose-built application for cutting smaller parts of a larger video and then saving those clips as one or more new video files. T...

25/01/2020

In this installment of the LibreOffice Calc series, Serge takes us through using database functions. Not to be confused with the database capabilities of LibreOffice, this is specific to using a table to set the criteria for a function rather than specifying it within a formula directly.

https://youtu.be/GOpLa4wV3jI

In this installment of the LibreOffice Calc series, Serge takes us through using database functions. Not to be confused with the database capabilities of Lib...

25/01/2020

DLN Xtend - Episode 12

In the weekly update segment, Eric talks about testing and making videos about the preview releases of Manjaro's upcoming 19.0 release as well as KDE Plasma 5.18 Beta on Kubuntu. Nate tells us about using Windscribe VPN, managing Kontact, and a hardware fail with a vintage power supply.

We get some listener feedback from GOK via the Destination Linux Discourse forum about SAP and SUSE Linux.

Our community focus this week touches on a topic also discussed in the DLN forum about domain registrars.

On Linux for Everyone this week, Jason Evangehlo interviewed Philip Mueller of Manjaro and we discuss how smaller hardware manufacturers like Tuxedo Computers are filling a void left by their larger competitors.

Destination Linux brought up the topic of Linus Torvalds' response to a question about the Linux kernel and ZFS support. We had a few differing thoughts on the subject.

Finally, this week marks the first episode of Destination Linux Network's newest show, Hardware Addicts.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

https://dlnxtend.com/12

Manjaro 19.0 previews, KDE Plasma 5.18 Beta, Nate on Windscribe VPN, managing Kontact, Nate's hardware fail, listener feedback, community discussion on domain registrars, Manjaro's new laptop, Linux Torvalds and ZFS, and DLNs new show Hardware Addicts.

25/01/2020

Be sure to check out the Big Daddy Linux Live stream every Saturday night at 8 PM Eastern US time. It's the best virtual LUG around!

https://bigdaddylinux.com/bdll/

Join us every Saturday night for a round table discussion on the bi-weekly Distro challenge and anything else related to Linux.

19/01/2020

ManjaroLinux has a second preview of their upcoming KDE 19.0 release. I took a quick look to see what's changed. Highlights include theming and Simple Menu as an alternative. https://youtu.be/qoUSqN_PVpM

19/01/2020

Testing KDE Plasma 5.18 Beta on Kubuntu 19.10 or 20.04

KDE Plasma 5.18 Beta release was just made available on Kubuntu for testing. You can use either the 19.10 or 20.04 releases. This video show you how to install it and how to report bugs if you find any. Thanks to the KDE and Kubuntu teams for continuing to make the Plasma desktop a great experience on the Linux desktop.

https://youtu.be/2PyLT-WOYug

KDE's Plasma 5.18 Beta release was just made available on Kubuntu for testing. You can use either the 19.10 or 20.04 releases. This video show you how to ins...

17/01/2020

KDE Plasma 5.18 Preview - Live Stream

I've been wanting to make a video on KDE Plasma 5.18 but was waiting until they got far enough along to show something comprehensive. I think they are at that point now so let's take a look.

https://youtu.be/j4Rw5RPsF7Q

I've been wanting to make a video on KDE Plasma 5.18 but was waiting until they got far enough along to show something comprehensive. I think they are at tha...

17/01/2020

LibreOffice Calc - SUMPRODUCT

This video takes us through using the LibreOffice Calc SUMPRODUCT array function which multiplies corresponding elements in the given arrays, and returns the sum of those products. Not sure what that means? Neither did I until Serge explained it to me.

https://youtu.be/0UUruWtxPp0

This video takes us through using the LibreOffice Calc SUMPRODUCT array function which multiplies corresponding elements in the given arrays, and returns the...

17/01/2020

DLN Xtend - Episode 11

This week Nate talks about his admiration for Kdenlive and even using it to editing audio. Who knew? Eric gets back to making YouTube videos, in particular one on AppImageLauncher.

The community segment is on a topic Eric started about the best dIstro and DE combo for workstations. He ended up giving openSUSE Tumbleweed a try much to Nate's delight. We discuss the magic of Tumbleweed snapshots.

As a reminder in case you missed it, last week we had Wendy Hill as a guest to tell us how she uses darktable as a professional photographer. Absolutely worth a listen if you have any interest in photography.

Destination Linux brought up the issue of elitism in Linux this week and we give a few thoughts on both sides of the argument.

The subject of backing up settings and deploying them on KDE Plasma came up this week on Destination Linux. Nate explains how this works by installing an SDK.

We talk about our Linux "hopes and dreams" for 2020. Eric hopes for good Linux options for mobile devices, especially on tablets and Nate wishes that more companies develop professional software for Linux.

There is a special Destination Linux Network announcement this week in the form of a new podcast. Hardware Addicts will focus on hardware that works with Linux, from single board computers to high-end AMD systems. Look for the first episode to land in the coming week.

That's all for this week. Be sure to stop by DLN's Discourse, Telegram, Mumble and Discord servers to continue the discussion. More information about this show and other Destination Linux Network shows and creators (like Eric and Nate for example) is available at destinationlinux.network.

Until next time, see yas!

https://dlnxtend.com/11

This week Kdenlive including editing audio, AppImageLauncher, openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots, Linux elitism, using the KDE Plasma SDK to export settings, our 2020 Linux hopes and Dreams, and a special announcement about a new DLN podcast.

13/01/2020

EndeavourOS net-installer - Install the Desktop of Your Choice

I posted an article several weeks ago describing the recently released EndeavourOS net-installer. This allows you to install a mostly stock Arch Linux base with the desktop environment of your choice, all from a single installer (ISO) file. It is a quick and simple way to get started with Arch Linux. EndeavourOS provides documentation and an active community forum as well as a Telegram group. If you haven't tried this release you should certainly take a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r8_G9-y5-k

I posted an article several weeks ago describing the recently released EndeavourOS net-installer. This allows you to install a mostly stock Arch Linux base w...

09/01/2020

AppImages are another of the portable package formats available in Linux allowing you to run software without installing packages on the underlying operating system. Some AppImages offer to in "integrate" themselves (create a launcher in the menu) when run. Many do not. This can make them feel second-class compared to native packages or other universal formats like flatpak and snap. AppImageLauncher overcomes this by offering to integrate any AppImage when launched. It also provides some other nice features like updating and removing AppImages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2WA2zdLvVk

AppImages are another of the portable package formats available in Linux allowing you to run software without installing packages on the underlying operating...

09/01/2020

Not to overdo it but one more quick look at the ManjaroLinux
KDE 19.0 Preview, this time on hardware to see how the NVIDIA Optimus support in the 440 hybrid package is working. Turns out rather well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDF-yUg9N40&t=42s

I made a video earlier on the Manjaro KDE 19.0 Preview release running in a virtual machine. I decided to give it a try on my Dell XPS 9570 laptop with an NV...