Linux Blimp

GNOME Control Center is an open source project that allows GNOME users to control various aspects of their desktop environment, as well as of the Linux operating system on top of which GNOME is installed. The application provides a single, easily accessible place where users can interact with GNOME’s settings. It is integrated into the GNOME desktop environment and can be accessed through the system tray area.

Easy access to main GNOME settings

The program is comprised of three main settings categories, such as Personal, Hardware and System. The Personal section includes the Background, Notifications, Online Accounts, Privacy, Region & Language, and Search entries. The Hardware category includes Bluetooth, Color, Displays, Keyboard, Mouse & Touchpad, Network, Power, Printers, Sound and Wacom Tablet. Lastly, the System category include Date & Time, Details, Sharing, Universal Access and Users.

Designed for new and experienced users

It can be easily used by new and experienced users alike, so they can successfully configure various aspects of the GNOME desktop environment. Therefore, users will be able to change the desktop wallpaper, add or remove online accounts, change privacy, language and notification settings, configure the integrated search function, enable Bluetooth support, and configure their peripheral devices.

Additionally, the application can be used to change the color profile and settings of your monitor, configure network connections, printers, wacom tablet, sound and power settings. Also, you can use it to change the default applications, set the date and time, add and remove users, or enable sharing.

Also known as Unity Control Center

Several well known Linux-based operating system forked the GNOME Control Center application, transforming it into their very own control center app. A popular example is the Ubuntu distribution, where GNOME Control Center is present in the form of Unity Control Center. Any GNOME user has interacted with the GNOME Control Center in a form or another to set various hardware components, change the wallpaper or even to add new users on their Linux system.

Source

If you are like me, you use several different chat and messaging services during the day. Some are for work and some are for personal use, and I find myself toggling through a number of them as I move from apps to browser tabs—here, there, and everywhere.

The Franz website explains, “Being part of different communities often requires you to use different messaging platforms. You end up with lots of different apps and browser windows trying to stay on top of your messages and chats. Driven by that, we built Franz, a one-step solution to the problem.”

Franz 5 (version 5.0.0-beta.18), available under the Apache 2 license, is an open source chat/messaging aggregator. With Franz 5, you can access a variety of messaging apps in one window and simply toggle through them. The source code for Franz can be found on GitHub.

I find Franz 5 useful for aggregating my Gmail, Trello, Hangouts, GitHub, and LinkedIn messages (so far).

Who is Franz?

Franz was created by Austrian-based Stefan Malzner, a graphic designer and game creator at Bloodirony. “Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria [who reigned from 1848-1916] had a rough time following the downfall of the Austrian Empire,” Malzner says. “Why not give someone with the presumably exceptional communication skills of an emperor a second chance?”

Franz 5 supports many services, including GitHub, Slack, LinkedIn, Skype, and Trello.

Cooking up some recipes

If those services aren’t enough for you, Franz is extensible by adding plugins (called “recipes”). Franz 5’s plugin architecture lets you add additional services to adapt the tool as you see fit. The recipe repository can be found on GitHub.

Moreover, the Franz community is adding new services to the platform. Adding new recipes is simple; the instructions are available on GitHub and listed here (Bitbucket, in this example):

1. Clone/download the folder franz-recipe-bitbucket.
2. Open the Franz Recipe folder on your machine:
   • Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Franz/recipes/
   • Windows: %appdata%/Franz/recipes/
   • Linux: ~/.config/Franz/recipes/
3. Create a dev folder, if you have not already done so
4. Unzip and copy the franz-recipe-bitbucket folder into the recipes dev directory
5. Restart or reload Franz

Instructions for adding your own services can be found on GitHub. To list your plugin with Franz 5, create an issue with the tag deploy, link to your repository, and write a short description of what it does.

For example, Daniel Weinberger added an issue for Android Messages suggesting a mechanism for including unread badge counts, which Poland’s Filip Malczak has been thinking of too. His repository can be found on GitHub.

Leave the messaging to Franz

I’ve been using Franz for only a few days but already rely on it to keep all my messaging corralled in one easy-to-find place. In addition to the free open source version of Franz 5, two premium levels are available on the Franz website if you need added functionality.

Source

Nov 09, 2018, 23:00

Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop environment derived from GNOME/GTK components has tagged its v4.0.0 release in source and is already beginning to appear in distribution repositories from the likes of Manjaro.

Complete Story

Source

RPCS3, the open source PlayStation 3 emulator is coming along nicely. The latest progress report goes over some recent work with various improvements.

They’ve now managed to hit over 1,300 titles that you’re able to actually get in-game now, although that doesn’t mean they’re playable just yet but progress is progress. Playable titles has risen to around 1,014 now too.

It’s quite hilarious how badly some games are made, which get uncovered when developers do projects like this since they have to look into so much detail about how each and every game works. They talked a little about Afro Samurai and how it renders all geometry twice to get a stylish black outline, I’m sure there’s plenty of other games doing some terrible things.

One sweet little feature added, is the ability to load a background from games while it’s loading shaders. It’s such a small thing, but it makes it look quite a lot more professional.

They also did some new videos to show off their improvements:

Great to see work going strong on such an important project, it would be such a shame to have so many titles vanish into the abyss as technology moves on. Preservation of gaming is important, even if some rights holders don’t agree with emulation.

I wouldn’t mind playing through the Resistance titles again, so it’s pleasing to see that with their recent work some major graphical issues have been solved.

They still have a long road ahead, with some of the features they’ve worked through sounding rather tricky. They should get there eventually though, the first step is to get things working and rendering and then they can really push through on the optimisation.

See the full post here for the technical details.

Source

GNOME Calendar is a free, easy-to-use, simple, attractive and open source graphical software project that has been designed from the offset to provide a calendar application for the GNOME desktop environment.

The application aims to be a drop–in replacement of the calendar widget that is currently implemented in the main GNOME Panel, offering users a cool and modern calendar tool in style of the default calendar apps of modern operating systems.

You can view, search and create events or reminders

With GNOME Calendar, users will be able to easily and quickly view calendar events from local and remote sources, such as Google Calendar, search for events, create events, set and view event reminders, as well as to display day, week, month and year calendar views.

Users will be able to view multiple events by hovering the mouse of the respective group of events, to create multi-day events, easily navigate between months and years in the calendar, as well as to manage multiple calendars into a single instance.

Beautiful, intuitive and modern graphical user interface

As expected, the graphical user interface (GUI) of the GNOME Calendar application follows the GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) specifications, which means that it has a modern, beautiful and intuitive look and feel.

The main toolbar hosts the event navigator, the Week, Month and Year views, the integrated search functionality, the calendar manager and the app’s menu. Events can be easily created by right clicking on the day you want to create the event, entering all the necessary data on the New Event dialog.

Distributed as part of GNOME 3.16

The final version of GNOME Calendar, which will be integrated by default in GNOME 3.16, will handle iCalendar (ICS) files, as well as to support attachments, attendees, alarms, different timezones for events, recurring events, Day and List views.

Source

Service management is something you don’t even think of when you use your Linux workstation or Linux server everyday, but when it’s not there you will really hate it. When you create for example a new server program that needs to run 24/7, doing this challenge without service management is a nightmare where you create in fact a small service system yourself, which will be obviously not as good as the manager developed by a full team during years, anyway.

With its services, systemd makes all of this easier, really easier. As soon as you want something monitoring your application and easy control of it, systemd is the way to go, and that’s what I’m going to explain here!

To add a new service, well, you need to answer this question. As always in systemd, it depends if the service is only for your user or the whole system. We’ll focus on how systemd works for whole system services.

The exact location depends of why and how the service got installed. If the service is installed by a package manager, it will be generally in /usr/lib/systemd/system. For software you develop or the ones that doesn’t support systemd by itself, you will put the service file in /usr/local/lib/systemd/system. Please keep in mind though that some distributions doesn’t support this folder in /usr/local. Finally, if you want to configure an existing systemd service, /etc/systemd/system is the way to go.

Inside these folders you can find multiple file extension such as *.socket, *.target or *.service. Obviously we’re going to focus on the last. systemd uses the filename as the name of the service when starting it or stopping it etc. So generally filenames in service only contains alphanumeric characters along with hyphens and underscores. During development I recommend to create it in your documents and then copy it to systemd location when done, that would avoid you problems if you save in middle of editing.

OK so please create your service file in your documents. Now we’re ready to review how to write this file.

[Unit]
Description=Penguins Web Application HTTP server (running in port 8080)
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/penguin-web-app/main.py
Restart=always

The file format is in fact close to ini. I know it may be weird given ini files are often found in Windows but that’s how it works. The service file is first divided in 2 sections: [Unit] and [Service]. Each section configures a specific aspect of systemd: [Unit] contains elements shared by all systemd unit files while [Service] is only for configuration specific to setting up a new service.

Then the section is configured with properties such as Description= or ExecStart=. The value is separated from property name by the equal sign = without any space.

Let’s go back to the file shown above. It describes a service designed to run a web app written in Python about penguins. systemd will restart it whenever the process exits and starts the server upon server’s start-up if you enable it with systemctl enable command. Cool eh?

But you’re maybe your next web app isn’t about penguins — and that’s a shame — and it’s not written in Python. In this case you’ll want to learn more about the possible configurations.

Properties of Systemd Services

Let’s first focus about the properties in [Unit]:

Description= is just about giving a clear description of what service is doing. It’s displayed in service list, service logs so you want it to be descriptive but it should stay in one line and one sentence.

WantedBy= allows to say to systemd: when this thing is started, starts me as well. Generally you’ll put the name of a target. Examples of common targets:

1. multi-user.target: when server is OK and is ready to run command line applications
2. graphical.target: when GNOME or KDE is ready
3. network-up.target: when server is connected properly to a network

OK for the beginning these properties of [Unit] is enough. Let’s take a look on [Service] now.

Type= helps systemd in how to know if a service is running. Here are common types:

1. simple is probably the most commonly used: systemd considers the process you launch as the one doing the service. If the process stops, it considers the service stopped as well, etc.
2. forking is preferred for applications that were written to be a server but without the help of a service management system. Basically it expects the launched process to fork and that fork is considered the final process for the service. In order to be more accurate, you may also help systemd with a PID file, where the PID of the process to track is written by the launched application.

ExecStart= is probably the most important for a service: it precises what application to launch when starting the service. As you can see in the Penguin service, I have used /usr/bin/python3 and not python3 straight away. It’s because systemd documentation explicitly recommends to use absolute paths in order to avoid any surprises.

But that’s also for another reason. Other services’ management system tend to be based on Shell scripts. However systemd, for performance reason, doesn’t run a shell by default. So you can’t provide directly a shell command in ExecStart=. You can however still use a shell script by doing:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash /usr/local/bin/launch-penguin-server.sh

Not that hard right? Note that if you need to run some process to signal your service to stop cleanly, ExecStop= exists, as well as ExecReload= for reloading services.

Restart= allows you to explicitly tell when the service should be restarted. This is one of the important features of systemd: it ensures that your service stays up as long as you wish to, so pay close attention to this option.

Restart=	Meaning
always	systemd will keep restarting it whenever it terminates or crashes. Well, until you do systemctl stop service-name.service. It’s perfect for servers and online services as you prefer few useless restarts over having to manually restart the service without any reason.
on-abnormal	When the service process crashes, restart the service. However, if the application exits cleanly, don’t restart it. It’s more useful for cron-jobs like services that needs to do a task reliably but don’t need to run all the time.
on-failure	Much like on-abnormal, but it also restarts the service when the application exits cleanly but with a non-zero exit code. Non-zero exit codes generally means an error happened.
no	systemd will not restart the service automatically. Generally useful to get access to other systemd features such as logging without the restart feature.

WorkingDirectory= can enforce a working directory when launching your application. The value must be an absolute directory path. Working directory is used when you use relative paths in your application’s code. For our penguins service, it could be:

WorkingDirectory=/srv/penguin-web-app/

Then, security is important so you generally want to not launch your service with root privileges. User= and Group= enables you to set the user or group name or UID/GID under which your application will be launched. For example:

User=penguin-web
Group=penguin-web

EnvironmentFile= is a powerful option. Applications running as services often needs configuration and environment files allows to set that configuration in two ways:

1. The application can read directly the environment variable.
2. But also you can set different command line arguments to your application without changing the service file.

The syntax of this file is simple: you type the environment variable name, the equal sign = and then its value. Then you put the absolute path of your environment file into EnvironmentFile property.

So example:

EnvironmentFile=/etc/penguin-web-app/environment

And the /etc/penguin-web-app/environment file contains:

Then our penguins web app will have access to LISTEN_PORT environment variable and listen to the expected port.

Save and Start the Newly Created Systemd Service

So if you followed my advice, you edited your service file in your home directory. Once you’re satisfied, copy that file to /usr/local/lib/systemd/system, assuming your distribution supports that path. The filename of your service file will be its service name. This filename have to end with .service. For example, for our penguins server, it would be penguin-web-app.service.

Then, you have to tell systemd you added a new service, so you need to type this command:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Okay now systemd is aware of your new service, assuming your file doesn’t contain a syntax error. After all, it’s your first file so it’s likely you’ll make mistakes. You have to run this command above on every update in your service file.

Now, time to start the service:

$ sudo systemctl start penguin-web-app.service

If it fails with a Unit not found error such as this one:

$ sudo systemctl start penguin-web-app.service
Failed to start penguin-web-app.service: Unit not found.

It means that your distribution doesn’t support the directory or you didn’t named correctly your service file. Be sure to check out.

If you set up your service with WantedBy= and wants that your service starts automatically, you have to enable it, with this command:

$ sudo systemctl enable penguin-web-app.service

The cool thing with a service is that it runs in background. The problem: how to know if it runs properly and if it’s running if it’s running in background? Don’t worry, systemd team thought about that too and provided a command to see if it runs properly, since how much time, etc:

$ systemctl status penguin-web-app.service

Conclusion

Congrats! You can now have your applications managed without you caring about restarting it manually every time. Now, I recommend you to read our other article about systemd logs: Master journalctl: understand systemd logs. With that you can use the powerful logging system on your new service and build more reliable servers!

Source

Every year, the question pops up; which Linux distribution is best? The reason that question persists the way it does is because there is no singular concrete answer. Most distributions are purpose built for certain situations, and even when they aren’t, there are bound to be conditions that they’re better and worse in.

This list attempts to pin down the best distributions for common use cases and situations. These are by no means the only options, but they are arguably the best as of now. Things in the Linux world always change, so keep an eye out for new developments.

Best Linux Distro For Beginners: Linux Mint

Linux Mint

Linux Mint has always been a big favorite among Linux beginners, and that’s for good reason. Mint is Ubuntu, but with all the polish that you could want. Linux Mint comes pre-configured with common third party packages already installed and configured for you. There’s no need to know the ins and outs of a Linux system or which packages do what. That’s all taken care of for you. The Linux Mint team went to even greater lengths to create a seriously user friendly desktop experience. They developed their own desktop environment, Cinnamon, to provide a design and philosophy that new and veteran Linux users alike would be at home in. Cinnamon has grown well beyond it’s Mint roots, and is now one of the most popular Linux desktop environments on any distribution.

Mint also benefits greatly from its Ubuntu base. Ubuntu is easily the most popular Linux distribution in the world(unless you count Android) and receives tons of third party support from software developers and the community alike. That support results in a wide array of packages for nearly every situation with regular updates. It’s hard to find software that supports Linux but not Ubuntu, and Mint, in turn, receives the exact same support.

Even if you’ve never used Linux a day in your life, you can pick up Mint and feel comfortable. As an Ubuntu and Debian derived distribution, it will also afford you plenty of room to grow over time, and explore what Linux has to offer.

Best Linux Distro For Gaming: Arch Linux

Antergos

Gaming on Linux has been something of a hot button issue for years. Gamers are still divided on whether or not Linux is a viable operating system for gaming, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that with the right support, Linux is definitely a serious contender.

You can game on any Linux distribution. There’s nothing holding you back. That said, there are a few that make the endeavor much easier, and the Arch Linux based distributions stand above the rest. Arch has a massive and active community, similar to Ubuntu, but it also benefits from a bleeding edge rolling release schedule that provides all the latest software that helps to boost your system’s gaming performance. Arch and its derivatives like Manjaro and Antergos are lightweight and simple distributions. They also afford nearly limitless customization. Lightweight and customizable distributions are excellent for gaming because they allow you to free up system resources for your games to use while still configuring your layout for an optimal gaming experience.

Arch empowers you to build your ideal gaming system and still have access to all the latest packages and software for everything you could possibly need. Even if there’s something Arch doesn’t package, the AUR will probably have you covered.

Best Linux Distro For Servers: Debian

Debian

Server admins can be particular. They all have their distribution of choice, and a lot of that comes down to familiarity. That said, unless you’re working in an enterprise environment that demands third party enterprise support, Debian is always a great option.

Debian is one of the longest running distributions, and it’s spawned countless distributions along the way, including Ubuntu. A big part of the reason Debian has lasted as long as it has and remained relevant is its focus on stability. There’s no need to ever question the stability of a Debian release. Debian may not have corporate backing, but it does have a gigantic community around it that support and develop the venerable distribution. That support leads to a gigantic package library, and even more third party package support. So, even though Debian’s repositories usually contain older packages, as with most server distros, there usually are updated versions available when you need them.

Best Linux Distro For Balance: Fedora

Fedora

Some more experienced Linux users want a more balanced experience from their distribution. They’re not looking to have their hand held as much as a newbie, but they also don’t want to configure every little thing. The distributions that usually meet this need are often referred to as “intermediate distros” because the experience required to use them effectively usually falls somewhere between a beginner an expert. That said, plenty of experts prefer these type of distributions because of the time and work they save without sacrificing much in the way of control.

Fedora is currently the best option here for a whole host of reasons. First, Fedora’s got one of the best installers in the Linux world, Anaconda. The real strength of Anaconda comes from the fact that it can be as simple or detailed an install process as you need. You can run through Anaconda, use all the defaults, and get a perfectly functional system. At the same time, you can customize nearly everything about your installation and select from nearly all the available packages in Fedora to install as you set up your system, resulting in a perfectly tailored install from the start. Fedora also has a fair amount of third party support and a wealth of packages available. Those packages are usually very well updated, and you shouldn’t have a hard time finding anything that you need in Fedora’s extended repository network with repos like RPMFusion included.

Best Linux Distro For Advanced Users: Gentoo

Gentoo

There are a select few distributions that cater almost exclusively to advanced Linux users. These distributions aren’t necessarily hard to use, but they do place the bulk of choice and power in the user’s hands without determining too many things for you. While this kind of setup gives you a lot more control, it also opens the door to mistakes.

While Arch and Slackware are excellent distributions, Gentoo stands out in terms of unbeatable flexibility and control. Gentoo isn’t a traditional distribution. It even refers to itself as a meta-distribtion because Gentoo doesn’t provide you with a complete install. Instead, Gentoo provides you with a toolbox and instructions and lets you build and maintain your own distribution with relative ease.

Gentoo doesn’t have many of the same boundaries and limitations that other distributions do. Gentoo doesn’t have a release schedule. Gentoo doesn’t even have a set pace for its rolling packages. All of that is in your hands. If you’d rather run the newest version of Firefox, great! Unmask it. Do you want to hold back the latest PHP release to check your code? You can do that too. That philosophy extends to which packages you build your system with. Most distributions let you pick things like the desktop environment. Gentoo lets you pick your kernel, init system, libraries, and just about anything that does into a Linux distribution. It also gives you the freedom to build your packages the way you want, with only the features you need. With Gentoo, your system is truly your own.

Best Linus Distro For Privacy: Tails

Tails

If you’re looking for the absolute best option for online privacy, it’d be hard to beat Tails. Tails is engineered from a Debian base with privacy as the central focus. It even refers to itself as the amnesiac distribution because Tails doesn’t store any data by default.

Tails is configured to work in conjunction with Tor for all network connections out of the box. It can easily be run from a USB drive, and it can even disguise itself to look like Windows in public.

No, Tails isn’t a great daily driver distribution, but when you’re in need of the best privacy protection possible, Tails should be your go-to choice.

Closing Thoughts

There is no “best” Linux distribution, but these few are excellent options. You can always experiment and try some of them out on virtual machines. Don’t forget that things do change, and new distributions are always popping up, so there may be more options in any of these categories in the future.

Source

Tecmint: Fzf is a tiny, blazing fast, general-purpose, and cross-platform command-line fuzzy finder, that helps you to search and open files quickly in Linux and Windows operating system. It is portable with no dependencies and has a flexible layout with support for Vim/Neovim plugin, key bindings, and fuzzy auto-completion.

Complete Story

Source

It’s taken Valve a while to get there but they’ve new added the new Steam Chat into Steam’s Big Picture Mode.

One thing to note, is that for the new key-binds to actually work on the Steam Controller, I had to go into Steam’s settings and re-select the official Steam Controller config. Do this by going into Big Picture Mode > Settings > Base Configurations > Big Picture configuration and then simply select the official one again and apply it. I’ve opened an issue on the Valve GitHub for it.

Once I did that, it worked better, although not exactly as they describe. The D-pad binds don’t seem to work correctly, you’re supposed to be able to do a long press on the D-pad or the stick for certain actions. This works for the stick, but the D-pad always picks up like you’re pressing Left to open/close the actual friends list. On top of that, it was basically unusable with a Logitech F310. The Steam Chat system is still new to Big Picture, so there will be teething issues.

This should mean that SteamOS itself will now have the new Steam Chat too, for those of you using it. Even so, it’s a shame they basically shoehorned the existing UI into Big Picture Mode without making it work any better.

Another Steam Input change, is now having per-game settings into the desktop client’s game properties:

See here for the full details, including key-binds.

Source

Tracker is an open source command-line software that can crawl through your disk drive, index files and store data to be easily accessible at a later time. It has been specifically engineered for the GNOME desktop environment. The application is known as the default search engine, metadata storage system and search tool for the freely distributed GNOME project. It deeply integrates with the GNOME Shell user interface.

Features at a glance

Its key highlights include thread safety, UTF-8 support, internationalization, documentation, and localization. It also features full text search functionality, with support for case folding, unaccenting, and Unicode normalization, fle notification support, as well as support for numerous file formats. Actually, end users normally don’t even interact with this application when using the GNOME desktop environment, as it runs in the background as a daemon, indexing each new file or installed application.

Integrates with GNOME Shell

When you use the GNOME Shell overview mode to search for a specific file or program, it is actually Tracker that you interact with. It can seach for files, folders, music tracks, music artists, music albums, image files, video files, document files, emails, contacts, software, feeds, bookmarks, and software categories.

Supports a wide range of ontologies

Among the supported ontologies, we can mention XML Schema Document (xsd), Simplified Calendar Ontology (scal), Dublin Core meta-data (dc), Resource Description Framework (rdf), Multimedia Transfer Protocol (mtp), and Tracker specific annotations (tracker). Several Nepomuk and Maemo ontologies are also supported. In addition, the application is known to comply with several desktop technology standards, including D-Bus, XDG, SPARQL, Nepomuk, as well as the thumbnailer, base directory, shared configuration, shared file meta-data and auto-start specification.

Bottom line

All in all, Tracker is a very important component of the GNOME desktop environment. It automatically stores, organizes and categorizes your files, folders and applications, so you can easily find them whenever you want, with a single mouse click.

Source