Be it Nvidia or Radeon or Intel, they all may have some issues with Linux. When you are on your way to troubleshoot the graphics problem, the first thing you want to know is which graphics card do you have in your system.
Linux has several commands to check hardware information. You can use them to check what graphics card (also refer to as video card) do you have. Let me show you a couple of commands to get GPU information in Linux.
Check graphics card details in Linux command line
Use lspci command to find graphics card
The lspci command displays the information about devices connected through PCI (peripheral Component Interconnect) buses. Basically, this command gives you the detail about all the peripheral devices to your system from keyboard and mouse to sound, network and graphics cards.
By default, you’ll have a huge list of such peripheral devices. This is why you need to filter the output for graphics card with grep command in this manner:
lspci | grep VGA
This should show a one line information about your graphics card:
As you can see, my system has Intel HD 620 video card.
Get detailed graphics card information with lshw command in Linux
The lspci command is good enough to see what graphics card you have but it doesn’t tell you a lot. You can use lshw command to get more information on it.
This command requires you to have root access. You need to specify that you are looking for video card (graphics card) information in this fashion:
sudo lshw -C video
And as you can see in the output below, this command gives more information on the graphics card such as clock rate, width, driver etc.
It’s not that you must use the command line to find graphics card details in Linux. Most Linux distributions (or should I say desktop environments) provide essential details in the settings application.
For example, if you are using GNOME desktop environment, you can check the details by going to About section of Settings. Here’s what it looks like in Ubuntu 20.04:
Brief: IEEE Standards Association has announced a GitLab-based open source collaboration platform. Read how is it different and what advantages it has.
IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology. The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) is an organization within IEEE that develops global standards in a broad range of industries.
The IEEE Standards Association (SA) has come up with an open-source collaboration platform i.e IEEE SA Open.
The platform enables independent software developers, startups, industry, academic institutions, and others to create, test, manage, and deploy innovative projects in a collaborative, safe, and responsible environment.
How is it different or useful?
The main key attraction for this platform would be IEEE’s members’ network, technical expertise, and resources.
IEEE President, Robert Fish, also mentions in brief (during an interview with Radio Kan) how it’s different and why IEEE wanted to go with it:
Today, much of the world’s infrastructure is run by software, and that software needs to comply with standards in communications networking, electrical grids, agriculture, and the like.
It makes sense – if we want to improve standardizing technologies, it highly depends on the software. So, this definitely sounds like something to standardize innovative open-source projects to gear them up for potential capital opportunities as well.
IEEE also clarified that:
As software becomes increasingly prevalent in the world today, ethical alignment, reliability, transparency, and democratic governance become must-haves. IEEE is uniquely positioned to endow open-source projects with these attributes.
While this sounds good, what exactly the open-source platform by the IEEE offer? Let’s take a look at that:
Along with the benefits associated with IEEE’s extensive network of Members, you can also expect guidance support from their open-source community managers or community members.
Ieee Gitlab
The platform presents use cases for both standard and non-standard projects, so you can give it a try.
For its choice to go with GitLab combined with Mattermost and Pages, you get a couple of useful features, they are:
Project planning and management features
Source code management
Testing, code quality, and continuous integration features
Docker container registry and Kubernetes integration
Application release and delivery features
Integrated Mattermost chat forum w/slash commands; (Android and iPhone apps are fully supported)
Capable of bridging the gap between Standards development and open source communities to allow for the advancement of nimble and creative technical solutions at a faster pace
A safe open space with an enforced code of conduct
Wrapping Up
It’s obviously a good thing to have more platforms to potentially amplify the exposure of open-source projects – hence, IEEE’s initiative sounds promising to start with.
What do you think about it? Let me know your thoughts!
Brief: Rambox is an all-in-one messenger that lets you combine multiple services like Discord, Slack, Facebook Messenger and hundreds of more such services in one place.
Rambox: Add multiple messaging Services in a single app
Rambox is one of the best ways to manage multiple services for communication through a single app installed. You can use multiple messaging services like Facebook Messenger, Gmail chats, AOL, Discord, Google Duo, Viber and a lot more from the same interface.
This way, you don’t need to install individual apps or keep them opened in browser all the time. You can use a master password to lock the Rambox application. You can also use do not disturb feature.
Rambox offers an open source community edition which is free to use. The paid pro version gives you access to 600+ apps while the community addition has 99+ apps. Pro version has additional features like themes, hibernation, ad-block, spell check and premium support.
Don’t worry. The open source community edition itself is quite useful and you may not even need those pro features.
Features of Rambox
While you should find most of the essential features in the open-source edition, you might notice some of them limited to the pro version.
Here, I’ve mentioned all the essential features available:
You get about 100 apps/services to choose from in the open-source edition
Ability to protect the app with a single Master password lock
Ability to lock each session that you load up
Do Not Disturb mode
Ability to sync apps and configuration across multiple devices.
You can create and add custom apps
Support for keyboard shortcuts
Ability to enable/disable apps without needing to delete them
JS & CSS injection support to tweak the styling of apps
Ad-block (pro version)
Hibernation support (pro version)
Theme support (pro version)
Mobile view (pro version)
Spell check (pro version)
Work hours – to schedule a time for incoming notifications (pro version)
Proxies support (pro version)
In addition to what I’ve listed here, you might find some more features in the Rambox Pro edition. To know more about it, you can refer to the official list of features.
It is also worth noting that you cannot have more than 3 active simultaneous device connections.
It can be a little overwhelming to have a lot of apps installed using Rambox. So, I’d suggest you monitor the RAM usage when adding more apps and using them for work.
There is also a similar app called Franz which is also part open source and part premium like Rambox.
Even though solutions like Rambox or Franz are quite useful, they aren’t always resource-friendly, specially if you start using tens of services at the same time. So, keep an eye on your system resources (if you notice a performance impact).
Otherwise, it’s an impressive app that does the work that you’d expect. Have you tried it out? Feel free to let me know your thoughts!
If you use automatic login in Ubuntu or other Linux distributions, you might have come across a pop-up message of this sort:
Enter password to unlock your login keyring
The login keyring did not get unlocked when you logged into your computer.
Enter Password To Unlock Your Login Keyring Ubuntu
It keeps on popping up several times before disappearing if you keep on clicking cancel. You may wonder why do you keep seeing this keyring message all the time?
Let me tell you something. It’s not an error. It’s a security feature.
Surprised? Let me explain the keyring concept in Linux.
What is keyring in Linux and why is it used?
Why do you use a keyring (also called keychain) in the real life? You use it to keep one or more keys grouped together so that they are easy to find and carry.
It’s the same concept in Linux. The keyring feature allows your system to group various passwords together and keep it one place.
Most desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, Xfce etc use an implementation of gnome-keyring to provide this keyring feature in Linux.
This keyring keeps your ssh keys, GPG keys and keys from applications that use this feature, like Chromium browser. By default, the keyring is locked with a master password which is often the login password of the account.
Every user on your system has its own keyring with (usually) the same password as that of the user account itself. When you login to your system with your password, your keyring is unlocked automatically with your account’s password.
The problem comes when you switch to auto-login in Ubuntu. This means that you login to the system without entering the password. In such case, your keyring is not unlocked automatically.
Keyring is a security feature
Remember I told you that the keyring was a security feature? Now imagine that on your Linux desktop, you are using auto-login. Anyone with access to your desktop can enter the system without password but you have no issues with that perhaps because you use it to browse internet only.
But if you use a browser like Chromium or Google Chrome in Ubuntu, and use it to save your login-password for various websites, you have an issue on your hand. Anyone can use the browser and login to the websites for which you have saved password in your browser. That’s risky, isn’t it?
This is why when you try to use Chrome, it will ask you to unlock the keyring repeatedly. This ensures that only the person who knows the keyring’s password (i.e. the account password) can use the saved password in browser for logging in to their respective websites.
If you keep on cancelling the prompt for keyring unlock, it will eventually go away and let you use the browser. However, the saved password won’t be unlocked and you’ll see ‘sync paused’ in Chromium/Chrome browsers.
Sync paused in Google Chrome
If this keyring always exited, why you never saw it?
That’s a valid question if you have never seen this keyring thing in your Linux system.
If you never used automatic login (or changed your account’s password), you might not even have realized that this feature exists.
This is because when you login to your system with your password, your keyring is unlocked automatically with your account’s password.
Ubuntu (and other distributions) asks for password for common admin tasks like modifying users, installing new software etc irrespective of whether you auto login or not. But for regular tasks like using a browser, it doesn’t ask for password because keyring is already unlocked.
When you switch to automatic login, you don’t enter the password for login anymore. This means that the keyring is not unlocked and hence when you try to use a browser which uses the keyring feature, it will ask to unlock the keyring.
You can easily manage the keyring and passwords
Where is this keyring located? At the core, it’s a daemon (a program that runs automatically in the background).
Don’t worry. You don’t have to ‘fight the daemon’ in the terminal. Most desktop environments come with a graphical application that interacts with this daemon. On KDE, there is KDE Wallet, on GNOME and others, it’s called Password and Keys (originally known as Seahorse).
Password And Keys App in Ubuntu
You can use this GUI application to see what application use the keyring to manage/lock passwords.
As you can see, my system has the login keyring which is automatically created. There is also a keyrings for storing GPG and SSH keys. The Certificates is for keeping the certificates (like HTTPS certificates) issued by a certificate authority.
Password and Keys application in Ubuntu
You can also use this application to manually store passwords for website. For example, I created a new password-protected keyring called ‘Test’ and stored a password in this keyring manually.
This is slightly better than keeping a list of passwords in a text file. At least in this case your passwords can be viewed only when you unlock the keyring with password.
Saving New Password Seahorse
One potential problem here is that if you format your system, the manually saved passwords are definitely lost. Normally, you make backup of personal files, not of all the user specific data such as keyring files.
There is way to handle that. The keyring data is usually stored in ~/.local/share/keyrings directory. You can see all the keyrings here but you cannot see its content directly. If you remove the password of the keyring (I’ll show the steps in later section of this article), you can read the content of the keyring like a regular text file. You can copy this unlocked keyring file entirely and import it in the Password and Keys application on some other Linux computer (running this application).
So, let me summarize what you have learned so far:
Most Linux has this ‘keyring feature’ installed and activated by default
Each user on a system has its own keyring
The keyring is normally locked with the account’s password
Keyring is unlocked automatically when you login with your password
For auto-login, the keyring is not unlocked and hence you are asked to unlock it when you try to use an application that uses keyring
Not all browsers or application use the keyring feature
There is a GUI application installed to interact with keyring
You can use the keyring to manually store passwords in encrypted format
You can change the keyring password on your own
You can export (by unlocking the keyring first) and import it on some other computer to get your manually saved passwords
Change keyring password
Suppose you changed your account password. Now when you login, your system tries to unlock the keyring automatically using the new login password. But the keyring still uses the old login password.
In such a case, you can change the keyring password to the new login password so that the keyring gets unlocked automatically as soon as you login to your system.
Open the Password and Keys application from the menu:
Look for Password and Keys app in the menu
Now, right click on the Login keyring and click on Change Password:
Change Keyring Password
What if you don’t remember the old login password?
You probably know that it is easy to reset forgotten password in Ubuntu. The problem comes with the keyring in such cases. You changed the account password but you don’t remember the old account password that is still used by the keyring.
Now you cannot change it because you don’t know the old password. What to do now?
In such a case, you’ll have to remove the entire keyring itself. You can do that from the Passwords and Keys application:
Delete Keyring Ubuntu
It will ask for your confirmation:
Delete Keyring
Alternatively, you may also manually delete the keyring files in ~/.local/share/keyrings directory.
When the old keyring is removed and you try to use Chrome/Chromium, it will ask you to create new keyring.
New Keyring Password
You can use the new login password so that the keyring gets unlocked automatically.
Disable keyring password
In cases where you want to use automatic login but don’t want to unlockk keyring manually, you may choose to disable the keyring with a workaround. Keep in mind that you are disabling a security feature so think twice before doing so.
The process is similar to changing keyring password. Open Password and Keys application and go on to change the keyring password.
The trick is that when it asks to change the password, don’t enter a new password and hit Continue instead. This will remove any password from the keyring.
Disable Keyring password by not setting any password at all
This way, the keyring will have no password and it remains unlocked all the time.
If you open some Microsoft documents in LibreOffice on Linux, you’ll notice that the fonts look a bit different. You’ll also notice that you cannot find common fonts like Times New Roman, Arial etc.
Don’t worry. I’ll show you how to install these fonts in Ubuntu and other Ubuntu-based Linux distributions. But before that, let me tell you why these fonts are not available by default.
Why Microsoft fonts are not installed by default in Linux?
Times New Roman, Arial and other such fonts are owned by Microsoft and they are not open source. Many Linux distributions don’t provide proprietary software by default to avoid licensing issue.
This is why Ubuntu and other Linux distributions use an open source fonts “Liberation fonts” to substitute Microsoft fonts by default. The Liberation Fonts were created by Red Hat to substitute Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New as their width is the same. When you open a document written in Times New Roman, the equivalent Liberation Font will be used to keep the document uninterrupted.
However Liberation fonts are not identical to Microsoft’s fonts and in some cases you may need to use Arial or Times New Roman. A very common scenario is that Microsoft’s fonts are the only option is in schools, universities and other public and private organizations. They require you to submit the documents in one of those fonts.
Good thing is that you can install the Microsoft fonts on Ubuntu and other distributions easily. This way, you will be able to increase compatibility of LibreOffice and have the freedom to choose an open source office software.
Installing Microsoft fonts on Ubuntu-based Linux distributions
You can install new fonts in Ubuntu by downloading them on your own. But since Microsoft fonts are very popular (and is provided free of cost), Ubuntu provides an easy way of installing it.
Be aware that despite Microsoft has released its core fonts for free of charge, the usage of the fonts is restricted in other operating systems. You’ll have to read and accept EULA (End User License Agreement) before installing Microsoft fonts in Ubuntu.
Microsoft TrueType fonts are also available via the Ubuntu Restricted Extras package that contains other proprietary media codecs to play files like MP3 etc.
Don’t underestimate proprietary fonts
You may think what’s the big deal with fonts? After all, it’s just a font, not a crucial piece of software, right?
But did you know that for years, Netflix paid millions of dollars for the proprietary font it used? At the end, they created their own custom fonts and that saved them a considerable amount of money.
I hope you find this quick tutorial useful. More productivity tutorials are down the line, leave your comments below and subscribe to our social media for more!
Dimitrios Savvopoulos
Dimitrios is an MSc Mechanical Engineer but a Linux enthusiast in heart. He is well settled in Solus OS but curiosity drives him to constantly test other distros. Challenge is part of his personality and his hobby is to compete from 5k to the marathon distance.
Brief: KDE’s upcoming Plasma Bigscreen project lets you use open source technologies to turn your regular TV into a smart one.
Smart TVs are the new normal these days. Mostly based on Android, these smart TVs let you play YouTube, Netflix, Spotify and other streaming services. You can even use voice commands to control your smart TV.
Plasma Bigscreen: Make your TV smart with open source technologies
You probably already know about the KDE project. It started as a Linux desktop environment project more than 20 years ago. The KDE project grew bigger and this is why they created Plasma desktop environment to make it clear that KDE is no more just “K Desktop Environment”.
The Plasma project itself is quite versatile. You can of course use it on your desktop Linux computer. Plasma also has a mobile version that you can run on Linux-based smartphones like Librem5 and PinePhone.
The Plasma Bigscreen is a new project from KDE that aims to provide interface and features similar to what Smart TVs provide.
Plasma Bigscreen features: More than just a media server
YouTube In Plasma Bigscreen
Though it may look like one at the first glance, but Plasma Bigscreen is not like Kodi and other media servers for Linux. It’s more than that.
Control with your regular remote
You don’t need a new specialized remote control. Thanks to CEC, you can use your regular TV remote control.
Voice control with open source Mycroft AI
Plasma Bigscreen takes advantage of the open source Mycroft AI project. With Mycroft built in to Bigscreen, you can use voice command to play content, check weather and control other aspects of your smart TV. You can further train this AI by teaching it new skills.
Traditional desktop applications
Plasma Bigscreen delivers not only media-rich applications, but also traditional desktop applications redesigned to fit the Bigscreen experience.
Free and open source software
The most important feature is that it is an open source project and it uses other open source technologies to give you the complete control over your data and your smart TV.
Since it is open source, I believe once it is released, there will be a few vendors providing it as a plug and play device.
How to get Plasma Bigscreen?
Plasma Bigscreen is still in beta phase and there is no definite timeline for the stable release.
However, the beta version is also working good on devices like Raspberry Pi 4. Here’s a video by one of the developers working on this project.
If you have a Raspberry Pi 4, you can download Plasma Bigscreen beta version from its official download page and follow the steps here to install it.
Personally, I am really excited about it. I am going to take out some time and try it on my Raspberry Pi 4. What about you? Do you think the project has potential? Will you give it a try?
Brief: SUSE is offering free support for its Linux Enterprise Server and container and cloud technologies to any organization building medical devices to fight the Coronavirus.
SUSE is one of the biggest open-source software companies. The SUSE Linux operating system for enterprise users is their primary offering. In addition to that, they also provide container technologies.
Amidst the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) situation, there’s a lot of things happening across the globe that keeps us worried. In times like this, SUSE’s latest commitment to fight COVID-19 is positive news!
SUSE to help combat Coronavirus with free IT infrastructure support
SUSE’s CEO Melissa Di Donato shared the details of their initiative to support the fight against coronavirus.
In a nutshell, SUSE will be offering free enterprise Linux support to organizations or manufacturers working with medical devices to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
The press release mentions the details for what they plan to achieve with their initiative:
“We are determined to help others as much as we can, doing what we do best. We have cutting-edge open source technology and know-how that can help others in the fight to save lives, and we will share it immediately and without charge. Our customers, partners and communities know of and share our commitment to making a difference – and that extends to our neighbors and fellow human beings around the world.”
The SUSE Embedded Linux is a good choice for medical devices with a minimal footprint. And, free enterprise-grade support to facilitate the use of SUSE Enterprise Linux for medical devices is the need of the hour.
Not just limited to the operating system and its maintenance, there’s more to what SUSE is offering:
Container technologies from SUSE include SUSE CaaS Platform, which allows companies to use Kubernetes to more easily deploy and manage container-based applications and services, and SUSE Cloud Application Platform, which brings an advanced cloud native developer experience to Kubernetes so companies can get applications to the cloud and devices to market faster. These technologies bring security and reliability to any device they run on or manage.
In other words, they will also be making their container technologies available that include the SUSE CaaS Platform, which companies can utilize to deploy and manage container-based apps.
Overall, this will make it easier for companies to enhance security and reliability for their applications on a variety of devices that they potentially manage.
As ZDNet noted, there are already SUSE customer in the pharmaceutical and research space using SUSE Linux Enterprise on their supercomputers (which includes some national laboratories as well) to find solutions to tackle COVID-19.
Wrapping Up
While you can share this amazing news with your friends and family to spread the word about such impressive initiatives being taken by the open-source community in general.
If this is something that is related to your field, you can reach out at CCO@suse.com to get more details on the offer.
It’s really good of SUSE to come up with such an offer. Everyone of us should do whatever we can do in our own capacity to fight this Coronavirus pandemic. SUSE is a good example here. Thank you, SUSE.
Recently, Oracle announced the general availability of Java 14 (or the Oracle JDK 14). If you are someone who wants to have the latest and greatest to experiment and develop stuff – you can try installing Java 14 on your Linux system.
Oracle JDK 14 (or simply Java 14) release includes a couple of new features if you’re interested to preview them. I’ve linked them below:
In addition to the preview features, it packs in several improvements and additions. Quoting the press release, they mentioned the additional improvements as well:
Additionally, the latest Java release adds Java language support for switch expressions, exposes new APIs for continuous monitoring of JDK Flight Recorder data, extends the availability of the low-latency Z Garbage Collector to macOS and Windows, and adds, in incubator modules, the packaging of self-contained Java applications and a new Foreign memory access API for safe, efficient access to memory outside of the Java heap.
Of course, if you want to dive into the exact details, you should check the official announcement.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you the easy way to get Java 14 installed on your Ubuntu system. Read on.
Note: If you opt for Oracle Java 11 or above, you should learn about the new Oracle Technology Network License Agreement to know how it affects personal users, developers, and commercial organizations. Usually, these are free to use for development and testing – but not for production.
How To Install Java 14 on Ubuntu Linux?
For reference, I’ve successfully tried it on Pop!_OS 19.10 where I had the OpenJDK 11 installed as the default.
Here, we are going to use the Java 14 installer (originally based on WebUpd8 Java Package) by Linux Uprising.
Simply enter the commands below in the terminal to get it installed:
This should do the job. And, when it’s done, if you want to make it the default, you can type in the following command to do it:
sudo apt install oracle-java14-set-default
It is worth noting that this is only for Ubuntu-based distributions. If you want to install it on Debian and other Linux distributions, you can follow Linux Uprising’s detailed guide on installing Java 14 as well.
Wrapping Up
Of course, while this is about the bleeding edge features – if you do not want to break things, you might want to hold on to Java 11. If you want to experiment while knowing the risks, go ahead and give it a try!
Feel free to let me know your thoughts on Java 14 in the comments below.
Remote working culture has been booming for past few years in coding, graphics and other IT related fields. But the recent Coronavirus pandemic has made it mandatory for the companies to work from home if it’s possible for them.
While there are tons of tools to help you and your organization in working from home, let me share one open source software that has the features of several such tools combined into one.
Nextcloud Hub: A Suite of Essential Tools for Remote Collaboration
Nextcloud is an open source software that can be used to store files, photos and videos for personal usage like Dropbox. But it’s more than just a private cloud service.
You can add more than one users in Nextcloud and turn it into a collaboration platform for editing files in real time, chat with users, manage calendars, assign and manage tasks and more.
This video gives a good overview of its main features:
You can create workspaces based on user groups and share files in those folders. Users can create private files and folders and share them with selected users internally or externally (if they are allowed to). You can lock files in read only mode as well.
It also has a very powerful search feature that lets you search files from their name or tags. You can comment on files to provide feedback.
Text files can be edited in real time thanks to its builtin markdown editor. You can use OnlyOffice or Collabora to allow editing of docs, spreadsheet and presentations in real time.
It also has version control for the files so that you can revert changes easily.
Text Chat, Audio Chat, Video Chat and Web Meetings
Nextcloud Video Call
With NextCloud Talk, you can interact with other users by text messaging, audio calls, video calls and group calls for web meetings. You can also take meeting minutes during the video calls and share your screen for presentations. There is also a mobile app to stay connected all the time.
You can also create Slack like channels (known as circles) to communicate between members concerned with a specific topic.
Calendar, Contacts & Mail
Calendar Nextcloud
You can manage all of your organization’s contact, divide them into groups based on departments.
With the calendar, you can see when someone is free or what meetings are taking place, like you do on Outlook.
You can also use the Mail feature and import the emails from other providers to use them inside Nextcloud interface.
Kanban project management with Deck
Like Trello and Jira, you can create boards for various projects. You can create cards for each tasks, assign them to users and they can move it between the list based on the status of the task. It’s really up to you how you create boards to manage your projects in Kanban style.
Plenty of add-ons to get more out of Nextcloud
Password Manager
Nextcloud also has several add-ons (called apps). Some are developed by Nextcloud teams while some are from third-party developers. You may use them to extend the capability of Nextcloud.
For example, you can add a Feedly style feed reader and read news from various sources. Similarly, the Paswords addon lets you use Netxcloud as a password manager. You can even share common passwords with other Nextcloud users.
You can explore all the apps on its website. You’ll also notice the ratings of apps that will help you decide if you should use an app or not.
Many more features
Let me summarize all the features here:
Open source software that lets you own your data on your own servers
Seamlessly edit office documents together with others
Communicate with other members of your organization and do audio and video calls and held web meetings
Calendar lets you book meetings, brings busy view for meetings and resource booking and more
Manage users locally or authenticate through LDAP / Active Directory, Kerberos and Shibboleth / SAML 2.0 and more
Secure data with powerful file access control, multi-layer encryption, machine-learning based authentication protection and advanced ransomware recovery capabilities
Access existing storage silos like FTP, Windows Network Drives, SharePoint, Object Storage and Samba shares seamlessly through Nextcloud.
Automation: Automatically turn documents in PDFs, send messages to chat rooms and more!
Built in ONLYOFFICE makes collaborative editing of Microsoft Office documents accessible to everyone
Users can install desktop and mobile apps or simply use it in web browser
How to get Nextcloud
NextCloud is free and open source software. You can download it and install it on your own server.
You can use cloud server providers like Linode or DigitalOcean that allow you to deploy a brand new Linux server within minutes. And then you can use Docker to install NextCloud. At It’s FOSS, we use Linode for our NextCloud instance.
If you don’t want to do that, you can signup with one of the Nextcloud partners that provide you with configured Nextcloud instance. Some providers also provide a few GB of free data to try it.
Nextcloud also has an enterprise plan where Nextcloud team itself handles everything for the users and provide premium support. You can check their pricing here.
If you decide to use Nextcloud, you should refer to its documentation or community forum to explore all its features.
Conclusion
At It’s FOSS, our entire team works remote. We have no centralized office anywhere and all of us work from our home. Initially we relied on non-open source tools like Slack, Google Drive etc but lately we are migrating to their open source alternatives.
Nextcloud is one of the first software we tried internally. It has features of Dropbox, Google Docs, Slack, Trello, Google Hangout all combined in one software.
NextCloud works for most part but we found it struggling with the video calls. I think that has to do with the fact that we have it installed on a server with 1 GB of RAM that also runs some other web services like Ghost CMS. We plan to move it to a server with better specs. We’ll see if that should address these issues.
Since the entire world is struggling with the Coronavirus pandemic, using a solution like Nextcloud could be helpful for you and your organization in working from home.
How are you coping during the Coronavirus lockdown? Like Linus Torvalds’ advice on remote working, do you also have some suggestion to share with the rest of us? Please feel free to use the comment section.
Audacious is an open-source audio player available for multiple platforms that include Linux. Almost after 2 years of its last major release, Audacious 4.0 has arrived with some big changes.
The latest release Audacious 4.0 comes with Qt 5 UI by default. You can still go for the old GTK2 UI from the source – however, the new features will be added to the Qt UI only.
Let’s take a look at what has changed and how to install the latest Audacious on your Linux system.
Audacious 4.0 Key Changes & Features
Audacious 4 Release
Of course, the major change would be the use of Qt 5 UI as the default. In addition to that, there are a lot of improvements and feature additions mentioned in their official announcement post, here they are:
Clicking on playlist column headers sorts the playlist
Dragging playlist column headers changes the column order
Application-wide settings for volume and time step sizes
New option to hide playlist tabs
Sorting playlist by path now sorts folders after files
Implemented additional MPRIS calls for compatibility with KDE 5.16+
New OpenMPT-based tracker module plugin
New VU Meter visualization plugin
Added option to use a SOCKS network proxy
The Song Change plugin now works on Windows
New “Next Album” and “Previous Album” commands
The tag editor in Qt UI can now edit multiple files at once
Implemented equalizer presets window for Qt UI
Lyrics plugin gained the ability to save and load lyrics locally
Blur Scope and Spectrum Analyzer visualizations ported to Qt
MIDI plugin SoundFont selection ported to Qt
JACK output plugin gained some new options
Added option to endlessly loop PSF files
If you didn’t know about it previously, you can easily get it installed and use the equalizer coupled with LADSP effects to tweak your music experience.
Audacious Winamp Classic Interface
How to Install Audacious 4.0 on Ubuntu
It is worth noting that the unofficial PPA is made available by UbuntuHandbook. You can simply follow the instructions below to install it on Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 19.10, and 20.04.
1. First, you have to add the PPA to your system by typing in the following command in the terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
3. Next, you need to update/refresh the package information from the repositories/sources you have and proceed to install the app. Here’s how to do that:
That’s it. You don’t have to do anything else. In either case, if you want to remove the PPA and the software, just type in the following commands in order:
You can also check out their GitHub page for more information on the source and potentially install it on other Linux distros as well, if that’s what you’re looking for.
The new features and the Qt 5 UI switch should be a good thing to improve the user experience and the functionality of the audio player. If you’re a fan of the classic Winamp interface, it works just fine as well – but missing a few features as mentioned in their announcement post.
You can try it out and let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Brief: Shortwave is a modern looking open source Internet Radio player for Linux desktop. We take a quick look at it after its recent stable release.
Shortwave: An Open Source Radio Player Featuring Internet Radio Stations
Shortwave is an interesting open-source radio player that offers a good-looking user interface along with a great experience listening to the Internet stations. It utilizes a community-powered database for the Internet stations it lists.
Shortwave is actually a successor of the popular radio app for Linux, Gradio. Its developer Felix joined GNOME and discontinued Gradio to create Shortwave from scratch in Rust programming language. If you were using Gradio as your preferred Internet radio station player, you can import the library as well.
Recently, Shortwave released its first stable version and seems to push new updates after that as well.
Features of Shortwave
It is a quite simple and useful Internet radio station player for Linux. However, to filter out what it offers, here’s a list of its features:
Utilizes Community-powered Radio Station Listing
Supports importing from Gradio
Features numerous Internet radio stations from across the globe
Supports streaming/casting the radio stations to supported devices (Chromecast support)
Identifies the song playing on the radio station
Offers a dark-mode toggle option (even though it didn’t work while I wrote this, should be an easy fix in the future updates)
Installing Shortwave on Linux
The source code can be accessed on GNOME’s GitLab page. It is already available in AUR for Arch users.
For other distributions, you can grab the Flatpak package. If you haven’t setup Flatpak on your system, simply follow our Flatpak guide to get started.
Once you have made sure to install Flatpak support on your system, you have to type in the command below to install shortwave on Linux via terminal:
flatpak install flathub de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave
You can also choose to install beta/nightly builds by following the instructions mentioned in their official GitLab page.
The user interface and the user experience was quite good. Even though I faced minor glitches while selecting (or clicking) on the channels listed, everything else worked like a charm.
Just for reference, I tried it on Pop!_OS 19.10 and it worked well. You can also easily try the Flatpak package on other Linux distributions.
Feel free to let me know your thoughts on Shockwave and where you tried it on.
Recently I stumbled upon an intriguing Linux project. This project aims to create small live CDs for Debian and Debian-based systems, similar to the Puppy Linux project. Let’s take a look at DebianDog.
What is DebianDog?
As it says on the tin, DebianDog “is a small Debian Live CD shaped to look like Puppy and act like Puppy. Debian structure and Debian behaviour are untouched and Debian documentation is 100% valid for DebianDog. You have access to all Debian repositories using apt-get or synaptic.”
DebianDog Jessie
For those of you who are not familiar with Puppy Linux, the project is “a collection of multiple Linux distributions, built on the same shared principles”. Those principles are to be fast, small (300 MB or less), and easy to use. There are versions of Puppy Linux built to support Ubuntu, Slackware, and Raspbian packages.
The major difference between DebianDog and Puppy Linux is that Puppy Linux has its own package manager [the Puppy Package Manager]. As stated above, DebianDog using the Debian package manager and packages. Even the DebianDog website tries to make that clear: “It is not Puppy Linux and it has nothing to do with Puppy based on Debian.”
Why should anyone use DebianDog?
The main reason to install DebianDog (or any of its derivatives) would be to restore an older system to operability. Every entry on DebianDog has a 32-bit option. They also have lighter desktop environments/window managers, such as Openbox or the Trinity Desktop environment. Most of those also have an alternative to systemd. They also come with lighter applications installed, such as PCManFM.
What versions of DebianDog are available?
Though DebianDog was the first in the series, the project is called ‘Dog Linux’ and provides various ‘Dog variants’ on popular distributions based on Debian and Ubuntu.
DebianDog Jessie
The first (and original) version of DebianDog is DebianDog Jessie. There are two 32-bit versions of it. One uses Joe’s Window Manager (JWM) as default and the other uses XFCE. Both systemd and sysvinit are available. There is also a 64-bit version. DebianDog Jessie is based on Debian 8.0 (codename Jessie). Support for Debian 8.0 ends on June 30th, 2020, so install with caution.
TrinityDog
StretchDog
StretchDog is based on Debian 9.0 (codename Stretch). It is available in 32 and 64-bit. Openbox is the default window manager, but we can also switch to JWM. Support for Debian 9.0 ends on June 30th, 2022.
BusterDog
BusterDog is interesting. It is based on Debian 10 (codename Buster). It does not use systemd, instead, it uses elogind just like AntiX. Support for Debian 10.0 ends on June 2024.
MintPup
MintPup is based on Linux Mint 17.1. This LiveCD is 32-bit only. You can also access all of the “Ubuntu/Mint repositories using apt-get or synaptic”. Considering that Mint 17 has reached end of life, this version must be avoided.
XenialDog
There are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of this spin based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Both versions come with Openbox as default with JWM as an option. Support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ends in April of 2021, so install with caution.
TrinityDog
There are two versions of the TrintyDog spin. One is based on Debian 8 and the other is based on Debian 9. Both are 32-bit and both use the Trinity Desktop Environment, thus the name.
BionicDog
BionicDog
As you should be able to guess by the name. BionicDog is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The main version of this spin has both 32 and 64-bit with Openbox as the default window manager. There is also a version that uses the Cinnamon desktop and is only 64-bit.
Final Thoughts
I like any Linux project that wants to make older systems usable. However, most of the operating systems available through DebianDog are no longer supported or nearing the end of their life span. This makes it less than useful for the long run.
I wouldn’t really advise to use it on your main computer. Try it in live USB or on a spare system. Also, you can create your own LiveCD spin if you want to take advantage of a newer base system.
Somehow I keep on stumbling across obscure Linux distributions like FatDog64, 4M Linux and Vipper Linux. Even though I may not always recommend them to use, it’s still good to know about the existence of such projects.
What are your thoughts on the DebianDog? What is your favorite Puppy-syle OS? Please let us know in the comments below.
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