Up to 65% Off on All Linux Foundation Training & Certification [Cyber Monday Sale]

The Linux Foundation is offering all beginner and advanced training and certification bundle at a discount of up to 65% off. You have a better career prospect as a certified Linux professional.

Linux Foundation is the official organization behind Linux project and the employer of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Their main motto is to maintain ecosystems around open source projects to accelerate development and industry adoption of Linux related projects.

One of their goal is to prepare more individuals to meet the growing demand of Linux professionals in the IT industry today. They have a huge catalog of training courses and certification exams to help people achieve career in Linux.

Linux Foundation also runs limited time sales to make their courses and exams affordable to people. Their latest offer is focused on syadmins.

Linux Foundation Cyber Monday Sale: Up to 65% off on all training and certification courses

The biggest sale of the year is here. You can get up to 65% off on all the training and certification courses offered by Linux Foundation, even their instructor-led courses.

You can get 60% off on all e-learning and certification bundles using coupon code CYBERSAVE60. These bundles are on Linux sysadmin, Linux networking, Kubernetes, Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth, Cloud Foundry and OpenJS Node.js. Instead of paying $499, you just pay $189.

There are more savings on the super bundles that consist of two training and two certifications on the same topic. You’ll have to use the code POWERBUNDLE65 to get the bundle for $349 instead of $998.

You can choose individual courses instead of bundles and get 40% off using CYBERSALE40 coupon code. The good thing is that it is applicable to the instructor-led virtual classes. There are specialized courses on kernel development, device drivers, Linux security and performance tuning.

Linux Foundation Cyber Monday Sale

There is an additional gift as well. A stuffed Tux to flaunt your fondness for Linux. But it has limited stock so order yours soon.

The offer is valid until December 08, 2020 23:59 UTC. You get hands-on labs, downloadable reading material, assignments and online videos. You get the access for one year You have two attempts at exams (if you are opting for certification).

You should also check out these other Cyber Monday deals for Linux users.

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Zotero: An Open Source App to Help You Collect & Share Research

Brief: Zotero is an impressive free and open-source app that lets you collect, organize, cite, and share research. You can also instantly create references and bibliographies for your documents with Zotero.

Usually, you can use any note taking app on Linux to collect and share your ideas. But, here, I want to share something tailored specifically to help you collect, organize, and share your research, i.e. Zotero.

Zotero: Collect, Organize, & Share Research

Zotero is a completely open-source project that you can find on GitHub. It aims to help you easily collect, organize, add notes, and share your research.

And, all of that without being a cloud-based service, it is completely offline. So, your research notes belong to you. Of course, unless you want to sync it for collaboration purpose, for which you may have to refer the documentation.

To give you a head start, you can either opt for a WebDAV storage or just create a Zotero account to sync and share your research easily.

For instance, I created a Zotero account with the username ankush9, you can find my research collections (that I added to my publication) at https://www.zotero.org/ankush9

This makes it easy to share your organized research and you can choose what to share to your publication.

Let me highlight the key features that you get with Zotero to help you decide if you need to try it out.

Features of Zotero

• Ability to add information right from the web in a click using a browser extension
• Add notes for each information
• Supports adding tags
• Supports adding voice recording
• Add video recording as attachment
• Add software as attachment
• Store an email as attachment
• Store podcast as an attachment
• Add Blog Posts
• Add a link to file
• Create bibliography from item
• Offline snapshot storage (you can access the web pages you saved without needing an Internet connection)
• Ability to duplicate items
• Organize items in a library
• Offers a trash bin to delete your items and easily restore them if needed
• Synchronization support
• Ability to export data
• LibreOffice add-on available for integration
• Easily share your research using your Zotero profile link
• Cross-platform support

If you just want to create quick bibliography, you can try their other tool, ZoteroBib.

Recommended Read:

9 Best LaTeX Editors For Linux

Once you get over the learning curve, there is nothing like LaTex. Here are the best LaTex editors for Linux and other systems.

Installing Zotero on Linux

It is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. For Linux, if you are using an Ubuntu-based distribution (or Ubuntu itself), you will get a deb file (maintained by a third-party) to download and install it.

Installing a deb file is easy and it worked just fine on Pop OS 20.04. If you are using any other Linux distribution, you can extract the tarball and get it installed.

You can follow the official installation instructions to proceed with the suitable method.

Zotero

Concluding Thoughts

You get plenty of features to organize, share, cite, and collect resources for your search. With the support for audio, video, text, and link, it should be fit for almost everything.

Of course, I would recommend this to a power user to make the most out of it. And, if you are someone who has previously use tree-view (mind map view) note taking tools, you know what to look for.

What do you think about Zotero? If it’s not for you, what would you suggest as a better alternative to this? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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How to Go Full Dark Mode With LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free and open-source cross-platform office productivity software. If you’re not making the most of it, the LibreOffice Tips article is a must-read.

Dark theme is getting popular even among non-programmers. It is less stressing on the eyes specially for extended use of the screen. Some people believe that it makes the texts looks crisp and clear and that helps improve their productivity.

Some Linux distributions like Ubuntu come with dark mode these days giving your systems a darker tint. When you turn on the dark mode, some applications will automatically switch to dark mode.

LibreOffice also does that except the main area where you write:

LibreOffice semi dark mode matching with the system theme

You can change that. If you want to go complete dark mode with LibreOffice, you just have to change a few settings. Let me show you how to do that.

How to enable complete dark mode in LibreOffice

As I mentioned earlier, you need to enable a system-wide dark mode first. This will ensure that the window color (or the title bar) blends well with the in-app dark color.

Next, open any LibreOffice tool from the suite such as Writer. Then from the menu, click Tools -> Options -> Application Colors and select Document background & Application background as Black or Automatic (whichever works for you).

In case the icons are not in dark colour, you can change them from menu (as shown in the image below), Tools -> Options -> View and my personal choice on MX Linux, is the Yaru icon style from Ubuntu (if you have a dark version of the icon pack, select that).

Of course, you can also try some other icon themes available for Linux distros.

The end result should look like this:

Additional tip for LibreOffice flatpak package

If you’re using the Flatpak package of LibreOffice suite, the header area (or the menu area) of LibreOffice may look white. In that case, you can try navigating to Tools-> Options-> Personalization and then select the “Grey theme” as shown in the screenshot below.

It isn’t completely black but it should make things look better. Hope that helps you switch to a dark theme LibreOffice experience!

Conclusion

Dark themes have slowly started to dominate our desktops, giving a modern taste and reducing the eye strain, especially in low light conditions.

LibreOffice gives you the freedom to switch your working environment to a fully dark theme or to keep light themed elements. In fact, you get a decent amount of customization options to tweak what you prefer. Have you switched to a dark theme on LibreOffice? Which color combination is your preferred? Let us know in the comments below!

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Customize Task Switching Experience on GNOME Desktop With These Nifty Tools

Unless you’re new to Linux, you know that there are several popular desktop environment choices for users. And if you’re that newbie, I recommend you to learn what a desktop environment is along with this tutorial.

Here, I shall be focusing on tweaking the task switching experience on GNOME. I know that the majority of users just tend to use it as is and stock settings are good enough for the most part.

I mean there is nothing wrong with the application switcher that you use with Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut in Ubuntu.

However, if you are a tinkerer who wants to customize the look and feel of your GNOME desktop, including the task switcher and animation effects when launching or minimizing an app — you might want to continue reading this article.

Change GNOME Task Switcher to Windows 7 Style Effect

Switching between running applications using the key bind Alt+Tab is fast but it may not be the most intuitive experience for some. You just get to cycle through a bunch of icons depending on the number of active applications.

What if you want to change how the task switcher looks?

Well, you can easily give it a look of Windows 7 Aero Flip 3D effect. And, here’s how it will look:

It definitely looks interesting to have a different task switcher. Why? Just for fun or to share your desktop’s screenshot on Linux communities.

Now, to get this on your GNOME desktop, here’s what you have to do:

Step 1: Enable GNOME extensions if you haven’t already. You can follow our guide to learn how to use GNOME shell extensions.

Step 2: Once you are done with the setup, you can proceed downloading and installing the Coverflow GNOME extension from GNOME extensions website.

In case you haven’t installed the browser extension, you can just click on the link “Click here to install browser extension” from the notice as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 3: Next, you just have to refresh the web page and enable the extension as shown in the screenshot below.

You also get some customization options if you click on the “gear” icon right to the toggle button.

Of course, depending on how fast you want it to be or how good you want it to look, you will have to adjust the animation speed accordingly.

Next, why not some kind of cool effect when you interact with applications (minimize/close)? I have just the solution for you.

Add Genie Animation Effect While Minimizing & Re-opening Applications

There’s an interesting effect (sort of like genie popping out of a lamp) that you can add to see when you minimize or re-open an app.

This also comes as a GNOME extension, so you do not need to do anything else to get started.

You just have to head to the extensions page, which is Compiz alike Magic Lamp effect and then enable the extension to see it in action.

Here’s how it looks in action:

It would look even cooler if you switch the Ubuntu dock to the bottom.

Exciting GNOME extensions, right? You can play around to tweak your GNOME experience using the GNOME tweaks app and install some beautiful icon themes or explore different options.

How do you prefer to customize your GNOME experience? Is there any other cool GNOME extension or an app that you tend to utilize? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Compare Files and Folders Graphically in Linux With Meld

How do you compare two similar files to check for differences? The obvious answer is to use the diff command in Linux.

The problem is that not everyone would be comfortable comparing files in Linux terminal. And the diff command output could be confusing for some.

Take this diff command output for example:

There is definitely a learning curve involved here. However, if you are using desktop Linux, you can use GUI applications to easily compare two files for any differences.

There are several GUI diff tools available for Linux. I am going to highlight my favorite tool Meld in this week’s Linux application highlight.

Meld: Visual Diff and Merge tool for Linux (and Windows)

With Meld, you can compare two files in side by side view. Not only that, you may also modify the files to make changes accordingly. That’s what you would want to do in most situations, right?

File Comparison

Meld is also capable of comparing directories and show which files are different. It will also show while files are new or missing.

Directory Comparison

You may also use Meld for a three-way comparison.

Three Way File Comparison

The graphical side-by-side comparison helps in a number of situations. If you are a developer, you can use it to understand code patches. Meld also supports version control systems like Git, Mercurial, Subversion etc.

Features of Meld

The open source Meld tools has the following main features:

• Perform two and three-way difference comparison
• Edit files in-place and the difference comparison updates immediately
• Navigate between differences and conflicts
• Visualize global and local differences with insertions, changes and conflicts marked accordingly
• Use regex text filtering to ignore certain differences
• Syntax highlighting
• Compare two or three directories for newly added, missing and altered files
• Exclude some files from comparison
• Support for popular version control systems like Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and SVN
• Support for many international languages
• Open source GPL v2 license
• Available for Linux as well as Windows

Installing Meld on Linux

Meld is a popular application and it is available in the official repositories of most Linux distributions.

Check your distribution’s software center and see if Meld is available.

Meld In Ubuntu Software Center

Alternatively, you can also use command line package manager of your distribution to install Meld. On Ubuntu, it is available in the Universe repository and can be installed using the apt command:

sudo apt install meld

You may find the source code of Meld on GNOME’s GitLab repository:

Meld Source Code

Worth it?

I know that most modern open source code editors come with this feature but sometimes you just want a simple interface without the trouble of installing additional add-ons for comparing files. Meld provides you just that.

Do you use some other tools for checking differences between files? Which tool would that be? What’s your experience with Meld, if you ever used it? The comment sections is all yours for sharing your opinion.

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How to Save the Output of a Command to a File in Linux Terminal [Beginner’s Tip]

When you run a command or script in the Linux terminal, it prints the output on the screen for your immediate viewing.

There will be times when you need to save the output to a file for future references. Now, you can surely copy and paste in Linux terminal but there are better ways to save the output of a shell script or command in Linux command line. Let me show them to you.

Method 1: Use redirection to save command output to file in Linux

You can use redirection in Linux for this purpose. With redirection operator, instead of showing the output on the screen, it goes to the provided file.

• The > redirects the command output to a file replacing any existing content on the file.
• The >> redirects adds the command output at the end of the existing content (if any) of the file.

Use the STDOUT redirection operator > for redirecting the output to a file like this:

command > file.txt

If the file.txt doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically. If you use the > redirect again with the same file, the file content is replaced by the new output.

The example below demonstrates it better. It first saves the output of ls -l command. And then later, it replaces the content of the file with the output of ls *.c command.

Redirecting command output to file

If you don’t want to lose the content of the existing file while saving the output of a script or command, use the redirection operation in append mode with >>.

command >> file.txt

This example demonstrates it better:

Redirecting command output to file in append mode

Even here if the file doesn’t exist, it is created automatically.

Bonus Tip: Save Linux command output as well as error to a file

If your Linux command returns an error, it doesn’t get saved in the file. You can save both the command output and command error in the same file using 2>&1 like this:

command > file.txt 2>&1

Basically, 0 stands for standard input, 1 for standard output and 2 for standard error. Here, you are redirecting (>) standard error (2) to same address (&) as standard output (1).

Method 2: Use tee command to display the output and save it to a file as well

By the way, did you notice that when you send the command output to a file, you cannot see it anymore on the display? The tee command in Linux solves this problem for you.

Like a tee pipe that sends water stream into two directions, the tee command send the output to the display as well as to a file (or as input to another command). You can use it like this:

command | tee file.txt

Again, the file will be created automatically, if it doesn’t exist already.

You may also use the tee command in append mode with option -a in this manner:

command | tee -a file.txt

Let me demonstrate it with some easy to follow examples:

I have used simple Linux commands in my examples. But rest assured, you can use these methods to save the output of bash scripts as well.

Note: Avoid pipe pitfall while saving command output to file

You probably are familiar with pipe redirection. You may use it to combine Linux commands but you cannot pipe the output to a file. It will result in error that filename command not found:

This is because pipe redirects the output of one command to input of another command. And in this case, you give it a file name while it was expecting a command.

If you are new to Linux command line, I hope this quick tutorial added to your Linux knowledge a bit. I/O redirection is an essential concept that one should be aware of.

As always, questions and suggestions are always welcome.

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How to Increase Disk Size for Your Existing Virtual Machines in VirtualBox

Here’s the scenario you may come across sooner or later.

You installed one or more operating systems in VirtualBox. While creating those virtual operating systems, you also created virtual hard disks for them in VirtualBox.

You specified the maximum size of the virtual disk to say 15 or 20 GB but now after using it for some time, you realize that your virtual machine is running out of space.

While there are ways to free up disk space on Ubuntu and other operating systems, a more robust way of handling the situation is to increase the disk size of your virtual machines created in VirtualBox.

Yes, you can enlarge the virtual hard disk in VirtualBox even after creation. Although this is a safe and tested procedure, it is highly recommended to create a backup of your virtual machine before you perform such an action.

How to enlarge VirtualBox disk size

I will show you how to resize disk in VirtualBox graphically and via command line (for Linux geeks). Both methods are easy and straightforward.

Method 1: Using the Virtual Media Manager in VirtualBox

VirtualBox 6 added a graphical option for resizing virtual disks. You can find it at the file tab of VirtualBox home page.

Go to File->Virtual Media Manager:

Select one of your virtual machines in the list and use the “Size” slider or type the size value that you need. Once done click “Apply”.

Keep in mind that though you increased the size of your virtual disk, the actual partition size remains the same if your space is dynamically allocated.

Method 2: Increase VirtualBox disk space using Linux command line

If you are using a Linux operating system as a host, open the terminal and type the following command to resize VDI:

VBoxManage modifymedium "/path_to_vdi_file" --resize <megabytes>

The resize process should finish right after you click the enter button to execute the command.

Note

The commands modifyvdi and modifyhd of earlier versions of VirtualBox commands are also supported and mapped internally to the modifymedium command.

If you are not sure where your virtual machines are saved, you can find the default location from the VirtualBox home page by clicking on Files -> Preferences or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G.

Conclusion

Personally, I prefer to use the terminal on every Linux distribution that I use for expanding disk, the graphical option is a very handy addition to the latest VirtualBox release.

This is an easy and quick tip but a great addition to VirtualBox fundamentals. If you find this tip useful, check out a few features of VirtualBox guest additions.

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How to Write, Compile and Run a C Program in Ubuntu and Other Linux Distributions [Beginner’s Tip]

How do you program in C on Linux? It is indeed very easy and consists of three simple steps.

Step 1: You write your program and save the file with a .c extension. For example, my_program.c.

Step 2: You compile the program and generate the object file using gcc compiler in a terminal like this:

gcc -o my_program my_program.c

Step 3: You run the generated object file to run your C program in Linux:

./my_program

This was just the quick summary on how to compile and run C program in Linux. If you are new to either C or Linux, I’ll show these steps in detail so that you feel comfortable coding C program in Linux environment.

In fact, I’ll discuss how to run C programs in Linux terminal as well as in code editor.

Method 1: How to run C programs in Linux terminal

In order to run a C program in Linux, you need to have a C compiler present on your systems. The most popular compiler is gcc (GNU Compiler Collection).

You can install gcc using your distribution’s package manager. In Debian and Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, use the apt command:

sudo apt install gcc

Switch to directory where you have kept your C program (or provide the path) and then generate the object file by compiling the program:

gcc -o my_program my_program.c

Keep in mind that it is optional to provide the output object file (-o my_program). If you won’t do that, an object file named a.out will be automatically generated. But this is not good because it will be overwritten for each C program and you won’t be able to know which program the a.out object file belongs to.

Once you have your object file generated, run it to run the C program. It is already executable. Simple use it like this:

./my_program

And it will display the desired output, if your program is correct. As you can see, this is not very different from running C++ programs in Linux.

Every time you make a change in your program, you have to compile it first and then run the generated object file to run the C program.

Method 2: How to run C programs in Linux using a code editor like Atom

Not everyone is comfortable with command line and terminal and I totally understand that.

You can use a proper C/C++ IDE like Eclipse or Code Blocks but they are often too heavy programs and more suitable for large projects.

I recommend using an open source code editor like Visual Studio Code or Atom. These are basically code editors and you can install add-ons to compile and run programs directly from the graphical code editor.

I am using Visual Studio Code editor in this example. It’s a hugely popular open source code editor from Microsoft.

First thing first, install Visual Studio Code in Ubuntu from the software center. For other distributions, please check your Linux distribution’s package manager or software center. You may also check the official website for more information.

Start Visual Studio Code and open/create a project and create your C program here. I am using a sample Hello World program.

You must ensure that you have gcc compiler installed on your Linux system.

sudo apt install gcc

Next thing you would want is to use an extension that allows you to run the C code. Microsoft may prompt you for installing its own extension for C/C++ program but it is complicated to setup and hence I won’t recommend it.

Instead, I suggest using the Code Runner extension. It’s a no-nonsense extension and you can run C and C++ code easily without additional configuration.

Go to the Extensions tab and search for ‘Code Runner’ and install it.

Install Code Runner extension for running C/C++ program

Restart Visual Studio Code. Now, you should be able to run the C code by using one of the following way:

• Using the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+N.
• Press F1 and then select or type Run Code.
• Right click the text editor and the click Run code from context menu.

Right click the program file and choose Run Code

When you run the program, it is compiled automatically and then run. You can see the output in terminal that is opened at the bottom of the editor. What could be better than this?

Program output is displayed in the bottom section of the editor

Which method do you prefer?

Running a few C programs in Linux command line is okay but using a code editor is much easier and saves time. Won’t you agree?

I let you decide whichever method you want to use.

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