Interview with MidnightBSD Founder and Lead Dev Lucas Holt

Recently, I have taken a little dip into the world of BSD. As part of my attempt to understand the BSD world a little better, I connected with Lucas Holt (MidnightBSD founder and lead developer) to ask him a few questions about his problem. Here are his answers.

It’s FOSS: Please explain MidnightBSD in a nutshell. How is it different than other BSDs?

Lucas Holt: MidnightBSD is a desktop focused operating system. When it’s considered stable, it will provide a full desktop experience. This differs from other efforts such as TrueOS or GhostBSD in that it’s not a distro of FreeBSD, but rather a fork. MidnightBSD has its own package manager, mport as well as unique package cluster software and several features built into user land such as mDNSresponder, libdispatch, and customizations throughout the system.

It’s FOSS: Who is MidnightBSD aimed at?

Lucas Holt: The goal with MidnightBSD has always been to provide a desktop OS that’s usable for everyday tasks and that even somewhat non technical people can use. Early versions of Mac OS X were certainly an inspiration. In practice, we’re rather far from that goal at this point, but it’s been an excellent learning opportunity.

It’s FOSS: What is your background in computers?

Lucas Holt: I started in technical support at a small ISP and moved into web design and system administration. While there, I learned BSDi, Solaris and Linux. I also started tinkering with programming web apps in ASP and a little perl CGI. I then did a mix of programming and system administration jobs through college and graduated with a bachelors in C.S. from Eastern Michigan University. During that time, I learned NetBSD and FreeBSD. I started working on several projects such as porting Apple’s HFS+ code to FreeBSD 6 and working on getting the nforce2 chipset SATA controller working with FreeBSD 6, with the latter getting committed. I got a real taste for BSD and after seeing the lack of interest in the community for desktop BSDs, I started MidnightBSD. I began work on it in late 2005.

Currently, I’m a Senior Software Engineer focusing on backend rest services by day and a part-time graduate student at the University of Michigan Flint.

It’s FOSS: I recently installed TrueOS. I was disappointed that a couple of the programs I wanted were not available. The FreeBSD port system looked mildly complicated for beginners. I’m used to using pacman to get the job done quickly. How does MidnightBSD deal with ports?

Lucas Holt: MidnightBSD has it’s own port system, mports, which shared similarities with FreeBSD ports as well as some ideas from OpenBSD. We decided early on that decent package management was essential for regular users. Power users will still use ports for certain software, but it’s just so time consuming to build everything. We started work on our own package manager, mport.

Every package is a tar lzma archive with a sqlite3 manifest file as well as a sqlite 3 index that’s downloaded from our server. This allows users to query and customize the package system with standard SQL queries. We’re also building more user friendly graphical tools.

Package availability is another issue that most BSDs have. Software tends to be written for one or two operating systems and many projects are reluctant to support other systems, particularly smaller projects like MidnightBSD. There are certainly gaps. All of the BSD projects need more volunteers to help with porting software and keeping it up to date.

It’s FOSS: During your June 2015 interview on BSDNow, you mentioned that even though you support both i386 and amd64, that you recommend people choose amd64. Do you have any plans to drop i386 support in the future, like many have done?

Lucas Holt: Yes, we do plan to drop i386 support, mostly because of the extra work needed to build and maintain packages. I’ve held off on this so far because I had a lot of feedback from users in South America that they still needed it. For now, the plan is to keep i386 support through 1.0 release. That’s probably a year or two out.

It’s FOSS: What desktop environments does MidnightBSD support?

Lucas Holt: The original plan was to use Etoile as a desktop environment, but that project changed focus. We currently support Xfce, Gnome 3, WindowMaker + GNUstep + Gworkspace as primary choices. We also have several other window managers and desktop environments available such as Enlightenment, rat poison, afterstep, etc.

Early versions offered KDE 3.x but we had some issues with KDE 4. We may revisit that with newer versions.

It’s FOSS: What is MidnightBSD’s default filesystem? Do you support DragonflyBSD’s HAMMER filesystem? What other filesystems?

Lucas Holt: Boot volumes are UFS2. We also support ZFS for additional storage. We have read support for ExFat, NTFS, ext2, CD9660. NFS v3 and v4 are also supported for network file systems.

We do not support HAMMER, although it was considered. I would love to see HAMMER2 get added to MidnightBSD eventually.

It’s FOSS: Is MidnightBSD affected by the recent Spectre and Meltdown issues?

Lucas Holt: Yes. Most operating systems were affected by these issues. We were not informed of the issue until the general public became aware. Work is ongoing to come up with appropriate mitigations. Unfortunately, we do not have a patch yet.

It’s FOSS: The Raspberry Pi and its many clones have made the ARM platform very popular. Are there any plans to make MidnightBSD available on that platform?

Lucas Holt: No immediate plans. ARM is an interesting architecture, but by the very nature of SoC designs, takes a lot of work to support a broad number of devices. It might be possible when we stop supporting i386 or if someone volunteers to work on the ARM port.

Eventually, I think most hobby systems will need to run ARM chips. Intel’s planning on locking down hardware with UEFI 3 and this may make it difficult to run on commodity hardware in the future not only for MidnightBSD but other systems as well.

At one point, MidinightBSD ran on sparc64. When workstations were killed off, we dropped support. A desktop OS on a server platform makes little sense.

It’s FOSS: Does MidnightBSD offer support for Linux applications?

Lucas Holt: Yes, we offer Linux emulation. It’s emulating a 2.6.16 kernel currently and that needs to be updated so support newer apps. It’s possible to run semi-recent versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, Java, and OpenOffice on it though. I’ve also used it to host game servers in the past and play older games such as Quake 3, enemy territory, etc.

It’s FOSS: Could you comment on the recent dust-up between the Pale Moon browser developers and the team behind the OpenBSD ports system?

[Author’s Note: For those who haven’t heard about this, let me summarize. Last month, someone from the OpenBSD team added the Pale Moon browser to their ports collection. A Pale Moon developer demanded that they include Pale Moon’s libraries instead of using system libraries. As the conversation continued, it got more hostile, especially on the Pale Moon side. The net result is that Pale Moon will not be available on OpenBSD, MidnightBSD, or FreeBSD.]

Lucas Holt: I found this discussion frustrating. Many of the BSD projects hear a lot of complaints about browser availability and compatibility. With Firefox moving to Rust, it makes it even more difficult. Then you get into branding issues. Like Firefox, the Pale Moon developers have decided to protect their brand at the cost of users. Unlike the Firefox devs, they’ve made even stranger requirements for branding. It is not possible to use a system library version of anything with Pale Moon and keep their branding requirements. As such, we cannot offer Pale Moon in MidnightBSD.

The reason this is an issue for an open source project is that many third party libraries are used in something as complex as a web browser. For instance, Gecko-based browsers use several multimedia libraries, sqlite3 (for bookmarks), audio and video codecs, etc. Trying to maintain upstream patches for each of these items is difficult. That’s why the BSDs have ports collections to begin with. It allows us to track and manage custom patches to make all these libraries work. We go through a lot of effort in keeping these up to date. Sometimes upstream patches don’t get included. That means our versions are the only working copies. With pale moon’s policy, we’d need to submit separate patches to their customized versions of all these libraries too and any new release of the browser would not be available as changes occur. It might not even be possible to compile pale moon without a patch locally.

With regard to Rust, it requires porting the language, as well as an appropriate version of LLVM before you can even start on the browser.

It’s FOSS: If someone wanted to contribute to your project, both financial and technical, how can they do that?

Lucas Holt: Financial assistance for the project can be submitted online. We have a page outlining how to make donations with Patreon, Paypal or via bitcoin. Donations are not tax deductible. You can learn more at http://www.midnightbsd.org/donate/

We also need assistance with translations, porting applications, and working on the actual OS. Interested parties can contact us on the mailing list or through IRC on freenode #midnightbsd We also could use assistance with mirroring ISOs and packages.

---

I would like to thank Lucas for taking the time to reply to my many questions. For more information about MidnightBSD or to download it, please visit their website. The most recent version of MidnightBSD is 0.8.6.

Have you ever played around with MidnightBSD? What is your favorite version of BSD?

If you found this article interesting, please take a minute to share it on social media.

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2oznI8t
via IFTTT

Five Tiny Features of Linux Mint Cinnamon I’ve Come to Love

How to Install and Use Snap in Various Linux Distributions

Brief: Snaps are Canonical’s way of providing a cross-distribution package management system. In this article, we will see how to install and use snaps in various Linux distributions.

You might be hearing about Snap applications these days. Canonical describes Snap as a universal Linux package which can work on any distribution.

Snaps are basically an application compiled together with its dependencies and libraries – providing a sandboxed environment for the application to run. These are easier and faster to install, can receive latest updates and is confined from the OS and other apps.

An application can be packaged for every Linux desktop, server, cloud or devices in the form of snap. For an application developer, maintaining different package formats and subsequent updates is a pain, which Canonical in the form of Snaps has tried to overcome. It has worked well because more and more applications are now providing Snap packages.

In other words, instead of worrying about DEB packages for Debian/Ubuntu, RPM packages for Fedora etc, you can use Snap package that would work on all Linux distributions with Snap support.

Advantages of snaps

• Easier to create and manage for Developers: Snaps are easier to create and contain all the dependencies and libraries needed to run, which also means the application uses the latest libraries and do not face any dependencies issues.
• Automatic Updates: Updates to a snap are delivered automatically on a daily basis, and reaches out to everyone irrespective of the base OS.
• One snap for everything: be it a desktop, server or cloud.
• Different releases availability: A snap can be maintained in the stable release, beta versions, and daily build at the same time and you can switch between each other whenever you want.
• Security: Snaps run in a sandboxed environment, isolated from the rest of your system.

How to install Snap on Linux

Before you Snap packages, you will have to install snapd. snapd is a management environment that handles installation and updates of snaps. Installing snapd will enable Snap support on your Linux distribution.

Let’s see how to install it for different Linux distributions.

Enabling Snap support on Debian and Ubuntu based distributions

If you want to use Snap applications on Linux Mint and other Debian or Ubuntu based distributions, use the command below:

sudo apt install snapd

Enabling Snap support on Fedora based distributions

sudo dnf install snapd

Enabling Snap support on Arch-based distributions

snapd is available in Arch User Repository. Run the below command to install and enable it.

yaourt -S snapd
sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

Enabling Snap support on OpenSUSE based distributions

snapd is not officially included for OpenSUSE. To install in Tumbleweed use the below commands:

sudo zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/system:/snappy/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/ snappy
sudo zypper install snapd

Once the package is successfully installed from the community repo, enable the systemd unit.

sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

How to use snap with the basic Snap commands

Once you are done with the snapd installation, it’s time to see how to use it. We have already covered Snap commands in detail. Here, I’ll just quickly list out the most useful Snap commands.

You can search different snaps and install it. There is a Snap store which holds different public and private apps (or snaps) for clouds, desktops, devices etc.

Finding a snap

Anyone can publish a snap in the store, however, you only see the snaps that are published to the stable release and has been reviewed. Use the below command to search for a snap:

sudo snap find libreoffice

Installing snaps

Once you found the snap you are looking for, you can install it with the below command:

sudo snap install <snap_name>

List out installed snaps

You can use the below command to see the snaps you have installed along with their versions and the developer:

snap list

Update an installed snap app

Snaps are updated periodically to their latest version. In case you are trying to do it manually, type in the below command in the terminal:

sudo snap refresh <snap_name>

Uninstall a snap package

To remove a snap

sudo snap remove <snap_name>

Final Words

With different Linux distributions running different package managers and formats, there is no single way of installing an application in every Linux distribution the same way. Snap can be the solution to this problem, over-coming the installation issues (like a missing library) and making sure you are running the latest version!

What do you think about snaps? Do tell us in the comments.

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2HKi9wI
via IFTTT

Have a Laugh With Funny Linux Man Pages

Brief: Who says Linux command line is no fun? When you are in the mood of some naughty, geeky fun, read these witty man page entries. 

If you have been using Linux for some time, you might already be familiar with the term man pages. Mostly because you would have been advised by your colleague, friend or a total stranger on a Linux forum to RTFM (read the f***ing manpage).

Long before people start using search engines for each and everything, Linux users relied on the man pages to know how a certain Linux command works. It is still a great help.

But I am not going to talk about greatness or usefulness of the man pages. I am going to show you the witty side of man pages.

How about reading some witty man page entries?

Suggested read

Top 10 Command Line Games For Linux

Funny Man Pages: for some light-hearted Linux fun

There is a package unsurprisingly called funny-manpages and it adds some witty entries to the man pages.

Before I show you a few examples, let me give you the same ‘warning’ that its description does:

A set of miscellaneous humorous manpages (don’t take them too seriously!). Includes, amongst others, rtfm (1). Warning! Some of these manpages might be treated offensive. You’ve been warned.

If you are not extra-sensitive and can tolerate stuff with a sexual overtone, you should be fine with these entries.

I think funny-manpages are available in most Linux distributions. You can install it using your distribution’s package manager. In Debian and Ubuntu based distributions, use the command below:

sudo apt install funny-manpages

Once you have this package installed, you can read some entries using the man command. For example, if you use command man celibacy, you’ll see an output like this:

You can see the style of writing is identical to the real man page entries. While this particular entry is deliberately not big, some of the funny man page entries are well detailed.

NAME
baby — create new process from two parents

SYNOPSIS
baby -sex [m|f] [-name name]

DESCRIPTION
baby is initiated when one parent process polls another server process through a socket connection in the BSD version or through pipes in the System V implementation. baby runs at low prior‐
ity for approximately forty weeks and then terminates with a heavy system load. Most systems require constant monitoring when baby reaches its final stages of execution.

Older implementations of baby did not require both initiating processes to be present at the time of completion. In those versions the initiating process which was not present was awakened
and notified of the results upon completion. It has since been determined that the presence of both parent processes result in a generally lower system load at completion, and thus current
versions of baby expect both parent processes to be active during the final stages.

Successful completion of baby results in the creation and naming of a new process. Parent processes then broadcast messages to all other processes, local and remote, informing them of their
new status.

OPTIONS
-sex define the gender of the created process

-name assign the name name to the new process

EXAMPLES
baby -sex f -name Jacqueline

completed successfully on July 9, 1992 at 9:11pm. Jacqueline's vital statistics: 8 pounds 3 oz, 20 inches, long dark hair. The parent process, Kim Dunbar, is reportedly doing fine.

SEE ALSO
cigar(6), dump(5), cry(3).

BUGS
Despite its complexity, baby only knows one signal, SIGCHLD, (or SIGCLD in the System V implementation), which it uses to contact the parent processes. One or both parent processes must then
inspect the baby process to determine the cause of the signal.

The sleep(1) command may not work as expected on either parent process for some time afterward, as each new instance of baby sends intermittent signals to the parent processes which must be
handled by the parents immediately.

A baby process will frequently dump core, requiring either or both parent processes to clean up after it.

Despite the reams of available documentation on invoking and maintaining baby, most parent processes are overwhelmed.

Funny, isn’t it? Perhaps next time someone says RTFM, you could actually type man rtfm and read the entry:

NAME
rtfm - a response for easy questions from clueless lusers

SYNOPSIS
rtfm [ -p ] [ -h ] [ -d option ] [ -i interval ] [ -a action ] [ -q luser]

DESCRIPTION
rtfm is a command for system administrators to use in dealing with new users. rtfm is useful for dealing with users having trouble with their pictures downloaded from alt.binaries.pic‐
tures.erotica. rtfm will continue to run until killed by hand, using `kill processid'. rtfm can be invoked by anyone who has enough of a clue to know what a man page is.

OPTIONS
-p Give the answer in a polite fashion.

-h Tell the clueless luser to go to hell. Used with the -p option, they'll look forward to the trip.

Some of the other funny man page entries are sex, condom, flame, flog, gong, grope, party, rescrog etc.

If you find Linux man pages a bit boring, try reading these funny man pages. If you like referring to man pages, you would surely chuckle at these funny man pages.

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2Fjh3HI
via IFTTT

Iridium Browser: A Browser for the Privacy Conscience

Tutanota: Encrypted Open Source Email Service for Privacy Minded People

A little while back, I reviewed an email service call ProtonMail. I had been a long time ProtonMail user by that time, and I had little negatives to say about the service. In fact, I went so far as to say that everyone should use it.

Since then, I have heard of another email provider that you may be interested in. It’s a little different, but it touts some of the same features ProtonMail does: privacy, security, open-source code, etc. It’s called Tutanota, and like ProtonMail, I am a very big fan.

Without wasting any time, here’s why I think Tutanota is worth your time.

What is Tutanota:

Tutanota is a German based, privacy centered email provider. The Tutanota team refers to their product as “Secure mail for everyone!”, exclamation point and all. This lets us know that just because they tout a crazy sounding feature like “end-to-end encryption” doesn’t mean the average joe computer user can’t utilize their service. That’s because, unlike ProtonMail, Tutanota does not advertise its location as a feature of the service, and instead puts their marketing emphasis on encryption and ease of use. Which, as you will see later, is much deserved.

Suggested read

8 Privacy Oriented Alternative Search Engines To Google in 2018

Why use Tutanota:

Here are just a few of the many reasons you may want to choose Tutanota as your next email provider.

1. Privacy and Security

It makes sense that with an email client that advertises itself as private and secure that their customers would benefit from privacy and security. And in Tutanota’s case, that is absolutely true. Now, I can’t really speak to that as I don’t believe anyone has tried to intercept my emails since I have been using the product, but the features themselves seem promising.

Unlike other email clients, Tutanota has multiple ways that it has implemented encryption. It has end-to-end encryption between Tutanota clients, as well as optional password protected encryption when a Tutanota user is emailing someone using another email provider. How this works is if I, a Tutanota user, wants to send an encrypted email to my coworker, a Gmail user, for example, we can agree on a predetermined password that will allow us, and only us, to see the email. How this works is when I write the email, I have the option to encrypt it with a password. Then when the recipient receives the email, the only way for them to read the email is by inputting that password I set to encrypt the email. This way of doing this is simple, seamless, and secure. Though there are other email providers that do something similar, I have not found one that does it is easily as Tutanota.

2. Custom Domain

Like almost every other email client, you get a custom email address under the Tutanota domain when you sign up for an account. But, similar to ProtonMail, Tutanota offers a couple pricing tears for users to choose from, starting at a grand total of $0 a month, and working its way up from there.

The main difference between the free account and the paid offerings is that the free account has limited users, limited storage, the inability to use a custom domain, slightly less customization, and the free account only has community support with the paid accounts have premium support from the Tutanota staff. Then, starting at 1€ a month, or about $1.24USD a month, the number of users, storage, etc. increases depending on how much you pay.

Suggested read

Librem 5 is a Security and Privacy Focused Smartphone Based on Linux

3. Open Source

Does this one really need any more explanation? Since Tutanota is open source, under the GPL v3 license, us users can be certain that our rights are not infringed upon, as well as all the other goodies that come with an open source product.

4. Simple to Use

This is where I think Tutanota has it’s real competitive advantage. It is one of the most simple email clients to use that I have come across. Even email clients that I did not think were confusing before, like Gmail, now seem confusing compared to Tutanota. I would like to say that I could count on the community to help me if something went wrong, but since Tutanota was so easy to set up and use, I don’t know when I would reach out to them to find out. It was so simple, that I would feel comfortable enough signing my grandparents up for a Tutanota account knowing that they would be able to use the product without much guidance and that they wouldn’t accidentally break something in everyday use. To use the provider the user needs to use the web interface or custom applications, and both of these are designed very intuitively and are easy to digest. Which brings me to my next point.

4. Cross-Platform

Since Tutanota uses encryption, you cannot use third-party email clients, but Tutanota has done a fantastic job developing their web application as well as custom applications for both Android and iOS. That means whatever device you use, as long as it has a browser, you will be able to use Tutanota.

Suggested read

Best Linux Distributions For Privacy Freaks

Downsides of using Tutanota:

Just because Tutanota is secure, easy to use, and open source, doesn’t mean the experience is completely perfect. Here are some negatives you may run into using the product.

1. No Third-Party integration

Like I just mentioned, since Tutanota uses encryption there is no ability to use third-party email clients. That means I cannot use Tutanota on some of my favorite email applications like Thunderbird, Geary, or even K-9 Mail. I am stuck using the Tutanota mobile application and the web app. This isn’t all that bad, but since I use other email accounts for work and my personal life, this just means there has to be yet another application on my phone, and one more tab open in my browser in order to everyday tasks.

Suggested read

Mycroft Mark II: The Open Source Answer to Amazon Echo and Google Home That Doesn't Spy on You

2. Limited Features

On the free account, you only get up to 1gb or storage, no premium support, and you only have one user. This may be fine if you are just using the application for personal everyday use, but for something more professional you will need to fork up some cold hard cash to get some of the features you might be wanting.

Another limitation is just how the encryption works. Password protected emails to non-Tutanota users can only truly function unidirectionally, which means only emails that I initially send out can be encrypted. If another email provider emails me first, then the email will not be encrypted, making the communications susceptible to interception.

For me, the worst part about Tutanota’s free account is the domain. You have the choice to choose between a couple different variations of the word Tutanota, including tuta and tutamail, as well as the option to use keemail, as the domain at the end of your email address, but honestly, I can’t say I am a fan of the domain options. With all due respect, I just don’t really like the way “blank@tutanota.com” sounds. Maybe I am being picky, but ProtonMail sounds a little less goofy to me, and other options like Gmail and Yahoo are more commonplace so they don’t sound as out of place. This is just my opinion.

Suggested read

Min: An Open Source Web Browser for Minimalists

3. No easy account recovery

Like all products that utilize encryption, recovery is a headache. Since Tutanota treats its customers like adults, we are expected to be responsible and remember our passwords. That means keeping your password in a safe, secure, and probably offline location is a must. This really isn’t that big of a deal if you take the necessary precautions. So be intentional about creating a safe and secure password and be sure to keep track of it, and you will be fine.

Conclusion

When all is said and done, Tutanota is a fantastic option to consider when you are thinking about choosing an email provider. I have definitely adopted it as one of my two main personal email providers, as well as ProtonMail. The community seems vibrant, though haven’t needed to reach out to them for support since the product is dead simple, and it is easy to contribute to the project for those who so desire.

Tutanota truly stands out in my mind as a straightforward, minimalist approach to encrypted communication. In a world that seemingly needs to pump more functionality into every product, Tutanota does to the opposite. There are no unnecessary features, no confusing language or crazy UI, just an awesome product that works as promised. What more could you possibly want from them?

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2sDyrUO
via IFTTT

Fix Laptop Doesn’t Suspend After Lid is Closed on Ubuntu Linux

Brief: You close the lid of your laptop but it keeps on running instead of going into suspend mode? Here are a few ways how you can make Ubuntu suspend when the lid is closed.

One of the ways to save battery on Ubuntu without losing work is to use the suspend mode. I prefer to link with the lid action of my laptop. If I close the lid of the laptop, it goes to suspend/sleep mode and when I open the lid, it wakes up.

However, there are several users who are facing issues with suspend behavior when the lid of the laptop is closed. Ubuntu simply keeps on running without bothering about going in suspend mode.

There is a confirmed bug on this issue starting Ubuntu 16.04. Unfortunately, this bug has not been fixed even after more than a year.

While I cannot fix the bug, I can surely suggest you a couple of ways so that Ubuntu goes to suspend mode after the lid is closed. Let’s see how to do that.

Fixing Ubuntu won’t suspend when laptop lid is closed

I do hope that these fixes work for everyone but it’s not a guarantee because the bug is hardware dependent and though the workaround works for most laptop models, there are surely a few exceptions.

Let’s start working on it.

Make sure to enable suspend for lid close action

This is a no-brainer. You must make sure that you have the correct settings in place.

Go to System Settings and then click on Power. In the power setting, make sure that option for ‘When the lid is closed’ is set to Suspend.

If you had a different setting here, you should check if you are able to suspend Ubuntu by closing the lid. If not, then follow the workaround in the next section.

Workaround to make Ubuntu suspend when laptop lid is closed

First, ensure that you have pm-utils installed on your system. pm-utils is a collection of scripts that handle suspend and resume. Ubuntu should already have it but no harm in verifying it.

sudo apt install pm-utils

After that, we need to edit the logind.conf file of systemd. This file usually contains the entries that are used by default by systemd. However, all the entries are commented out here. If you change the settings in this file, it will take precedence and over the systemd default settings.

It’s always a good idea to make a backup of configuration files before changing them. Use this command:

sudo cp /etc/systemd/logind.conf  /etc/systemd/logind.conf.back

And after that, install gksu so that you can open a graphical application (gedit in this case) from the terminal. You can also use a terminal based text editor like Vim if you are comfortable with that.

sudo apt install gksu && gksudo gedit /etc/systemd/logind.conf

You’ll see lines like these in this file:

#NAutoVTs=6
#ReserveVT=6
#KillUserProcesses=no
#KillOnlyUsers=
#KillExcludeUsers=root
#InhibitDelayMaxSec=5
#HandlePowerKey=poweroff
#HandleSuspendKey=suspend
#HandleHibernateKey=hibernate
#HandleLidSwitch=suspend
#HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
#PowerKeyIgnoreInhibited=no
#SuspendKeyIgnoreInhibited=no
#HibernateKeyIgnoreInhibited=no
#LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=yes
#HoldoffTimeoutSec=30s
#IdleAction=ignore
#IdleActionSec=30min
#RuntimeDirectorySize=10%
#RemoveIPC=yes
#UserTasksMax=12288

What you have to do is to remove the # from some of the lines and change it’s value to:

HandleSuspendKey=suspend
HandleLidSwitch=suspend
HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend

Save your changes and restart your system. Now check if your system goes to suspend mode when the lid is closed.

If not, you can also try changing the below line (though I am not sure if that makes a difference):

HandleHibernateKey=suspend

I hope this helps you to fix the annoying issue of Ubuntu not suspending when laptop lid is closed. This should work with Ubuntu 16.04, 17.04 and 17.10. Not sure about Ubuntu 18.04.

Do share your feedback whether it worked for you or not.

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2EruDHL
via IFTTT

Min: An Open Source Web Browser for Minimalists

Why do you see error: snap “xyz” not found?

Resize Images with Right Click on Ubuntu and Other Linux Distributions [Quick Tip]

Brief: A Quick tip that shows how to resize images with right click menu in Linux quickly. The trick should work on any Linux distribution that uses Nautilus file manager.

How do you resize an image on Linux? Do you use GIMP or Shutter? Or perhaps you use ImageMagick in the terminal.

As I often need to resize the image before uploading them on It’s FOSS, Shutter was my favorite tool for this task until now. Shutter is an excellent screenshot tool that allows some quick editing features. However, if you just need to change the size, length and width of an image, opening an entire tool and going through menu options can be saved by using a nifty Nautilus plugin.

What’s Nautilus? Nautilus is a file manager used by GNOME and several other desktop environments. This is where you visually see your files. It’s equivalent to Windows Explorer in Linux.

There are several Nautilus plugins available that enhance its capability. They are not installed by default as they server specific purpose and users can choose to install them as per their needs.

One such Nautilus plugin is called Image Manipulator and it allows you to rotate or resize images by right-clicking on an image and choosing the option of rotating or resizing.

Quickly resize images with right click in Linux

Before you try to install the Nautilus plugin for quickly resizing images, I advise that you verify if your Linux system uses Nautilus file manager or not. To check that, use the command below:

nautilus --version

If you get an output with version numbers, you have Nautilus file manager on your system. Else, your Linux distribution is using some other file manager.

Once you have made sure that you have Nautilus file manager on your system, you can install the plugin using the command below:

sudo apt install nautilus-image-converter

If you are using Fedora, Arch or other non-Debian Linux, you can use your distribution’s package installing command.

Once installed, restart Nautilus using the command below:

nautilus -q

Now if you right click on an image, you’ll see two new options of resize and rotate in the context menu.

You can choose the resize option to resize the image right from the right-click menu quickly. It will present you a few options for resizing the image. It doesn’t retain the aspect ratio though.

It might not be a path-breaking trick but it does save you a few clicks.

To remove the plugin, you can use the command below:

sudo apt install nautilus-image-converter

And then restart the Nautilus. Simple!

I hope you liked this quick tip. If you know some neat little trick, do share with rest of us.

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2GUX42e
via IFTTT

SoftMaker Office 2018 is Now Available for Linux

Brief: Premium office suite SoftMaker has released its latest version for Linux. The new version comes with ribbon interface, improved compatibility with Microsoft Office and several other improvements.

Last week we saw the release of LibreOffice 6.0. This week we have SoftMaker 2018 office suite released for Linux.

SoftMaker is a premium office suite available for Windows, macOS and Linux. It is neither free nor open source and this is the reason why I didn’t include it in the list of best open source office suites for Linux.

However, if you don’t care for the open source part and you are not happy with LibreOffice, you can have a try at SoftMaker. It is a feature rich office product with a modern and intuitive UI. Compatibility with Microsoft Office is a big plus for SoftMaker office.

SoftMaker office has four products:

TextMaker: Word processing application

PlanMaker: Spreadsheet application

Presentations: Presentation application

Thunderbird “powered by SoftMaker”: Thunderbird with plugins to manage emails, tasks and appointments

New features in SoftMaker 2018 Linux

Here are some of the new features in SoftMaker 2018:

• Includes modern ribbon interface with option to switch to the classic view
• Uses GNOME’s standard file dialogs
• Documents can be tabbed with option to drag them to open in a new window 
• Uses DOCX, XLSX and PPTX natively to provide seamless compatibility with MS Office documents
• New 2D and 3D animations and slide transitions based on OpenGL
• Includes “presenter view” where presenter’s monitor displays current and upcoming slides while the viewers see the current slide in full view
• Available for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. This is the first 64-bit release for Linux.

Download SoftMaker 2018

With my conversation with a number of Linux users, I know that many people have to deal with MS Office for business purposes. LibreOffice, though excellent, is not often the best solution in such cases. Going back to Windows just for an office product should be avoided. One can either use something like CrossOver or SoftMaker and keep on using Linux happily.

As I mentioned earlier, SoftMaker is proprietary software and the pricing starts at 70 Euro for a one-time license for five computers. Upgrade to a new major version is sold separately but you can choose to continue using your existing purchased version.

Good thing is that you don’t have to throw your money without trying. SoftMaker offers a 30 days free trial period.

You can easily install SoftMaker using the DEB and RPM packages for Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora. There is also a tar package for installing SoftMaker for other distributions.

Get SoftMaker 2018 for Linux

SoftMaker 2018 is already released for Windows while work is in progress for macOS version.

Quick Note: I know this question will be raised (again) as to why I am covering a non-FOSS product on a website called “It’s FOSS”. To clarify, at It’s FOSS we have the focus on two things: Open Source and Linux. As a desktop Linux user, I cover stuff that relates to Linux even when it is not FOSS. But if it helps an average Linux user, then why not. 

By the way, which office suite do you use on Linux?

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2EKZb8g
via IFTTT

How to Install VLC 3.0 in Ubuntu and Other Linux Distributions

Brief: The upcoming major release of VLC is going to bring a number of improvements including Chromecast support. Here’s how to install VLC 3.0 in Ubuntu Linux right now.

The open source video player VLC 3.0 has been in the development for several years now. The good news is that development is 97% complete for the upcoming version and we should be seeing VLC 3.0 stable release in some days or weeks, hopefully.

VLC 3.0 Features

Here are some of the main new features coming to VLC 3.0:

• Chromecast support
• Limited 360-degree video and audio support
• HTTP/2 support
• Now uses OpenGL
• Support for network browsing with Samba, FTP/SFTP, NFS, and other protocols
• Autodetect external audio tracks (ac3, m4a, aac, dts…), similar to subtitles
• Adaptive streaming
• Improved support for Wayland
• Support for more codecs

You can find all the changes in VLC 3.0 in the release note.

How to install VLC 3.0 on Linux right now

Please note that VLC 3.0 is not stable yet. If you opt to use the unstable VLC 3.0, you may encounter some issues like program crash or poorly behaving functionalities. If you want a stable system with things working normally, avoid using an unstable application.

If you are a little impatient and want to try VLC 3.0 before its release, you can use the official PPA of the daily build. However, I would advise waiting for the final stable release.

This article is written using Ubuntu and the commands mentioned should work for other Linux distributions.

The easiest way is to use Snap package of VLC. You can use it alongside your current VLC install. The default channel of VLC snap package uses VLC 3.0 release candidate.

If you are using Ubuntu 16.04 or higher, you should already be able to use Snap packages. But for other distributions like Linux Mint, elementary etc, you can use the command below in a terminal to enable Snap package support:

sudo apt install snapd

Once you have made sure that your system has Snap package support, time to install VLC 3.0. All you need to do is to use the command below:

sudo snap install vlc

Install VLC 3.0 on Ubuntu when it is released (stable)

VLC 3.0 stable is not released yet.Even when VLC 3.0 stable version is released, it will be some time before your Linux distribution makes it available. So either you download VLC 3.0 from its website or you can use the stable PPA (if you use an Ubuntu-based distribution).

At present, this PPA will just install (or upgrade to) latest stable VLC release.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc

Suggested read

5 Tricks To Get More Out Of VLC Player In Linux

Install VLC 4.0 in Ubuntu right now (highly unstable and not recommended at all)

It is surprising that even though VLC 3.0 stable is not released, the work on VLC 4.0 has already started. I won’t recommend using it unless you have strong reasons to try out the unstable release.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/master-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc

I also recommend reading this article about removing PPA so that you can uninstall the applications installed using a PPA.

What say?

I had been waiting for VLC 3.0 for some years because it had Chromecast support. Which would mean I could cast the local media to the TV using Chromecast. Alas! As VLC 3.0 is close to its final release, I don’t have a Chromecast anymore. The charm of VLC 3.0 is lost on me.

What about you? Are you looking forward to VLC 3.0? Will you install VLC 3.0 before its release?

from It's FOSS http://ift.tt/2nKQoeB
via IFTTT

How to Check if Your Computer Uses UEFI or BIOS

What’s coming to elementary OS 5.0 Juno!