Installing Packages From External Repositories in Ubuntu [Explained]

You have some ideas about installing packages in Ubuntu with apt command. Those packages come from Ubuntu’s repositories.

How about third-party or external repository? No, I am not talking about PPA here.

Sooner or later, you’ll come across installation instructions that goes in at least four lines. You install something called ‘apt-transport-https’ and then do something with gpg and sources list. After that, you install the package.

Can’t recall completely. Let me share an example for installing the latest version Yarn on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl
curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list'
sudo apt update && sudo apt install yarn

You’ll often come across such installation method while installing programming tools directly from the developers.

Many people just follow the instructions without thinking twice about what’s going on here. Nothing wrong with that but knowing the process actually improves your knowledge on the matter and could also help in troubleshooting.

Let me explain the logic behind those lines.

Understanding the procedure of installation from external repositories

Before you proceed, I highly recommend reading these two articles so that things are a bit more clear to you:

• Concept of repositories in Ubuntu
• Concept of PPA in Ubuntu

To recall quickly, here’s a visual representation of repositories and package manager in Linux.

Illustration of repository and package manager

The entire idea here is that you add a new, external repository to your system. This way, you’ll be able to download and install packages available from this new repository. If the repository provides an update on the package version, you get to update the installed package along with the system updates (apt update && apt upgrade).

So, how does this work? Let’s go through the lines one by one.

Part 1: Getting HTTPS support for apt

The first line is this:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl

Curl is a tool for downloading files in Linux terminal. The main part here is the installation of apt-transport-https and frankly speaking not needed anymore.

Confused? This apt-transport-https package allows your system to access repositories over the secure HTTPS protocol. By design, Ubuntu repositories use http, not https.

Take a look at the screenshot below. The https ones are the external repositories I have added into my system. Ubuntu repositories and PPA use http.

In the older version of apt package manager, https support was not included. apt-transport-https package adds https support to apt. To add a repository that uses https, this package is installed first.

Did I not say it is not needed anymore? Yes because the newer versions of apt (higher than 1.5) support https and thus you do not need to install apt-transport-https anymore.

And yet you see this package mentioned in the instructions. This is more for legacy reasons or for really old distribution versions that might be using an older version of apt.

Now, you may wonder why Ubuntu repositories use http, not https when https is the secure protocol. Is it not a security risk? The next segment will answer that question.

Part 2: Adding GPG key of the remote repository

Linux repositories have this built-in GPG-key based security mechanism. Every repository added its public GPG key to your system’s trusted keys. The packages from the repositories are ‘signed’ by this GPG key and thanks to the stored public key, your system verifies that the package is coming from the repository.

If there is a mismatch between the keys, your system will throw an error instead of installing or updating packages from the said repository.

So far, so good. The next step is to add the public GPG key of the external repository to your Linux system so that it trusts the package from this repository.

curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

In the above command, you download the GPG key from the given URL using curl. The option sS ensures that you don’t see the flooded output (silent mode) but shows the error (if any). The last - tells apt-key to take stdin instead of a file (which is the output of the curl command in this case).

The download key is added to the system with apt-key add command.

You can see the GPG keys added by various repositories in your system using the apt-key list command.

List GPG keys

That’s one way of adding the GPG key to the system. You’ll some other commands that my look slightly different but do the same job of adding the public key of the repository to your system.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9

You’ll notice a warning that apt-key is deprecated. You could still use apt-key command till Ubuntu 22.04 but it will eventually be removed. Let’s not worry about it at the moment.

Part 3: Adding the external repository to your sources list

The next command adds a new entry into the sources list of your system. This way, your system will know that it has to check this repository for packages and updates.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list'

There is a file /etc/apt/sources.list that contains the details of the Ubuntu repositories. This file should not be touched. All the additional repositories should be placed in their own respective file (ending with .list convention) in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory.

External repository should have their own sources list file in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory

This makes package management easier. If you are removing a repository from the system, you just need to delete the corresponding sources file. No need to mess with the main sources.list file.

Let’s look at the command in a bit more detail.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list'

With sh, you are asking to run the command in a new shell, instead of the subshell. -c option tells the sh command to read the commands from the operand instead of standard input. Then it runs the echo command which basically adds line deb https://ift.tt/2n6eGAq stable main to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list file (file will be created)

Now, there could be numerous ways you can create a .list file in the specified directory and add the line with repository details in it. You could use it like this as well:

echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list

You get the gist, right?

Part 4: Installing the application from newly added repository

So far, you have added the GPG key of the repository and the URL of the repository to the system.

But your system still does not know about the package available from this new repository. This is why you need to update the local cache of package metadata first with this command:

sudo apt update

Your system will have the information about the packages available from the newly added repository and you can install the package now:

sudo apt install yarn

To save time, you can run the two commands one after another in a single line.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install yarn

The && ensures that the second command only runs when the previous command completed without any error.

And thus the process completes.

Did it make things clear or confused you even more?

I explained the logic behind the steps for using external repositories in Ubuntu. I hope you have a better understanding of the topic now, but it is also possible that too much detail could be confusing.

If things are still not clear or if you have additional questions, please let me know. If you notice technical inaccuracies, please let me know in the comment section.

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How to Find and Remove Duplicate Photos in Linux

Clicked too many similar photos? Have saved the same photo in different folders? I know that feel.

You click photos on camera, send it through WhatsApp. Now you back up the images and you have two copies of the photos from the gallery and WhatsApp. It is annoying, cluttered and takes extra space unnecessarily.

I came across this issue while going through my father-in-law’s photo collection. Here’s what I did to find the duplicate photos and remove thm.

Find and remove duplicate photos with digiKam

digiKam is a free and open source utility for managing photo collections. It is primarily aimed at photographers but you do not need to be a professional camera person for using it.

Let me show you how you can use this tool for finding duplicate photos and if you feel like it, remove the duplicate ones.

Step 1

First thing first, install digiKam. It is a popular application and you should be able to install it from the software center or using the package manager of your distribution.

Install digikam from the software center

Step 2

When you start digiKam for the first time, it asks for the location of your image collection. Then it creates a SQLite database and then imports the images.

• 

• 

• 

Step 3

Now that you have imported your photos, go to Tools->Find Duplicates from the file menu.

From the file menu, go to Tools->Find Duplicates

Step 4

It will take some time depending on the number of images you have in your collection. After that, you should see all the photos that have duplicate images in the left sidebar. It also shows the duplicate photos for the selected image in the right sidebar.

Duplicate images found with digiKam

In the screenshot above, there are four copies of the same photo that I have selected in the left sidebar. You can see one of the images is labelled as ‘Reference image’. But it is up to you to believe which is original and which is duplicate.

By default, the duplicate photos are divided into sections based on their location, i.e. folders. You may change that by going to View->Separate Items in the file menu.

To delete the duplicate photos, select the image(s) in the right sidebar and then hit the delete button.

You can repeat this by selecting the image in the left sidebar and then delete the duplicates one by one. Too time taking? There is a trick to delete multiple duplicates at a time.

Deleting multiple duplicates images in digiKam

If you want to delete duplicate photos for more than images at the same time, select all the images from the left sidebar.

Now, go to the file menu -> View -> Sort Items and select By Similarity.

Removing multiple duplicate photos

This will put all the referenced images at the bottom. You can select all the images in the right sidebar that are NOT labelled as duplicate and press the delete button.

Bonus Tip: There is a trash bin for restoring deleted photos

Accident happens. It is common to accidentally delete the wrong photos. This is why images are never really deleted by digiKam immediately. Instead, it creates a hidden .dtrash folder in the same folder where your photos are stored and moves the ‘deleted’ photos here.

Even on the application interface, you can see the Trash folder. You can find your ‘deleted’ photos here and restore the ones you want.

Trash folder in digiKam

I hope you like this quick tutorial on finding and removing duplicate images in Linux. On a similar note, you may want to know about using GUI tools for finding duplicate files in your Linux system.

Have questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below.

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Mount Microsoft OneDrive in Linux With OneDriver GUI Tool

On Windows, Microsoft provides a free cloud storage service in the form of OneDrive. It comes integrated with Windows and you get 5 GB of free storage with your Microsoft account.

This works great on Windows but like Google, Microsoft also does not provide a native client for OneDrive on Linux desktop.

You can access your OneDrive data through browser, of course. In addition to that, there are some other ways to access OneDrive on Linux.

You can use a premium service like Insync or opt for a slightly more complicated command line approach with rclone to use OneDrive on Linux.

Recently, I came across another tool that is slightly different and slightly easier to use. It’s unsurprisingly called OneDriver.

OneDriver: Mount OneDrive on your Linux system

OneDrive Linux illustration

OneDriver is a free and open source tool that allows you to mount your OneDrive files on your Linux system.

Please keep in mind that it does not sync files in the same way OneDrive does on the Windows system. It mounts the OneDrive files on a local mount point instead. You access the files over the network.

However, it does provide a kind of hybrid approach here. The files you open in the mounted OneDrive also get downloaded on the system. Which means that you can access the opened files offline as well. The files become read-only if you are not connected to the internet.

If you make any changes to files locally, it gets reflected on the OneDrive if you are connected to the internet.

I did notice that in Nautilus file manager on GNOME, it downloads the images present in the current folder automatically. I was under the impression that they will only be downloaded when I open them.

Another thing is that Nautilus builds thumbnail cache initially. OneDriver may feel a little bit slower and resource consuming in the beginning, but it gets better eventually.

Oh! You can also mount multiple OneDrive accounts.

Installing and using OneDriver

To install OneDriver on Ubuntu 20.04 (and Linux Mint 20 series), you can use this PPA by the developer of OneDriver:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jstaf/onedriver
sudo apt update
sudo apt install onedriver

For Ubuntu 21.04, you may use it by downloading the DEB file from its PPA.

On Fedora, you can add this COPR:

sudo dnf copr enable jstaf/onedriver
sudo dnf install onedriver

Arch users can find it in the AUR.

Once you install it, search for OneDriver in the menu and start it from here.

Search for OneDriver

On the first run, it gives a strange looking empty interface. Click on the + sign and choose a folder or create a new one where you’ll mount the OneDrive. In my case, I created a new folder named One_drive in my home directory.

Click on + sign to add a mount point for OneDrive

When you have selected the mount point, you will be asked to enter your Microsoft credential.

• 

  one drive login

• 

  one drive permission

Once you are successfully logged in, you can see your files from OneDrive in the mounted directory.

OneDrive mounted in Linux

Once you have done that, you can see your OneDrive account on the application interface. Click on the toggle button beside it to autostart OneDrive mounting after restart.

Autostart OneDriver mounting

Overall, OneDriver is a nice free utility for accessing OneDrive on Linux. It may not provide the complete sync facility like the premium Insync service but it works fine for limited needs.

If you use this nifty tool, do share your experience with it. If you like project, maybe give it a star on GitHub.

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Brave vs. Firefox: Your Ultimate Browser Choice for Private Web Experience

Web browsers have evolved over the years. From downloading files to accessing a full-fledged web application, we have come a long way.

For a lot of users, the web browser is the only thing they need to get their work done these days.

Hence, choosing the right browser becomes an important task that could help improve your workflow over the years.

Brave vs. Firefox Browser

Brave and Mozilla’s Firefox are two of the most popular web browsers for privacy-conscious users and open-source enthusiasts.

Considering that both focus heavily on privacy and security, let us look at what exactly they have to offer, to help you decide what you should go with.

Here are the comparison pointers that I’ve used, you can directly navigate to any of them:

• User Interface
• Performance
• Browser Engine
• Ad & Tracking Blocking Capabilities
• Containers
• Rewards
• Cross-Platform Availability
• Synchronization
• Service Integrations
• Customizability
• Extension Support

User Interface

The user interface is what makes the biggest difference with the workflow and experience when using the browser.

Of course, you can have your personal preferences, but the easier, snappier, and cleaner it looks, the better it is.

Brave browser

To start with, Brave shares a similar look and feel to Chrome and Microsoft Edge. It offers a clean experience with minimal UI elements and all the essential options accessible through the browser menu.

It offers a black theme as well. The subtle animations make the interaction a pleasant experience.

To customize it, you can choose to use themes available from the chrome web store.

When it comes to Mozilla Firefox, it has had a couple of major redesigns over the years, and the latest user interface tries to offer a closer experience to Chrome.

Firefox browser

The Firefox design looks impressive and provides a clean user experience. It also lets you opt for a dark theme if needed and there are several theme options to download/apply as well.

Both web browsers offer a good user experience.

If you want a familiar experience, but with a pinch of uniqueness, Mozilla’s Firefox can be a good pick.

But, if you want a snappier experience with a better feel for the animations, Brave gets the edge.

Performance

Practically, I find Brave loading web pages faster. Also, the overall user experience feels snappy.

Firefox is not terribly slow, but it definitely felt slower than Brave.

To give you some perspective, I also utilized Basemark to run a benchmark to see if that is true on paper.

You can check with other browser benchmark tools available, but Basemark performs a variety of tests, so we’ll go with that for this article.

Firefox benchmark score

Brave benchmark score

Firefox managed to score 630 and Brave pulled it off better with ~792.

Do note that these benchmarks were run with default browser settings without any browser extensions installed.

Of course, synthetic scores may vary depending on what you have going on in the background and the hardware configuration of your system.

This is what I got with i5-7400, 16 GB RAM, and GTX 1050ti GPU on my desktop.

In general, Brave browser is a fast browser compared to most of the popular options available.

Both utilize a decent chunk of system resources and that varies to a degree with the number of tabs, types of webpages accessed, and the kind of blocking extension used.

For instance, Brave blocks aggressively by default but Firefox does not block display advertisements by default. And, this affects the system resource usage.

Browser Engine

Firefox utilizes its own Gecko engine as the foundation and is using components on top of that from servo research project to improve.

Currently, it is essentially an improved Gecko engine dubbed by a project name “Quantum” which was introduced with the release of Firefox Quantum.

On the other hand, Brave uses Chromium’s engine.

While both are capable enough to handle modern web experiences, Chromium-based engine is just more popular and web developers often tailor their sites for the best experience on Chrome-based browsers

Also, some services happen to exclusively support Chrome-based browsers.

Ad & Tracker Blocking Capabilities

As I have mentioned before, Brave is aggressive in blocking trackers and advertisements. By default, it comes with the blocking feature enabled.

Firefox also enables the enhanced privacy protection by default but does not block display advertisements.

You will have to opt for the “Strict” privacy protection mode with Firefox if you want to get rid of display advertisements.

With that being said, Firefox enforces some unique tracking protection technology that includes Total Cookie Protection which isolates cookies for each site and prevents cross-site cookie tracking.

This was introduced with Firefox 86 and to use it, you need to enable a strict privacy protection mode.

Overall, Brave might look like a better option out of the box, and Mozilla Firefox offers better privacy protection features.

Containers

Firefox also offers a way to isolate site activity when you use Facebook with help of a container. In other words, it prevents Facebook from tracking your offsite activity.

You can also use containers to organize your tabs and separate sessions when needed.

Brave does not offer anything similar but it does block cross-site trackers and cookies out-of-the-box.

Rewards

Unlike Firefox, Brave offers its own advertising network by blocking other advertisements on the web.

When you opt in to display privacy-friendly ads by Brave, you get rewarded with tokens to a crypto wallet. And you can use these tokens to give back to your favorite websites.

While this is a good business strategy to get away from mainstream advertising, for users who do not want any kind of advertisements, it may not be useful.

So, Brave offers an alternative in the form of rewards to help websites even if you block advertisements. If it is something you appreciate, Brave will be a good pick for you.

Cross-Platform Availability

You will find both Brave and Firefox available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Mobile apps are also available for iOS and Android.

For Linux users, Firefox comes baked in with most of the Linux distributions. And, you can also find it available in the software center. In addition to that, there is also a Flatpak package available.

Brave is not available through default repositories and the software center. Hence, you need to follow the official instructions to add the private repository and then get Brave installed in your Linux distro.

Synchronization

With Mozilla Firefox, you get to create a Firefox account to sync all your data cross-platform.

Brave also lets you sync cross-platform but you need access to one of the devices in order to successfully do it.

Hence, Firefox sync is more convenient.

Also, you get access to Firefox’s VPN, data breach monitor, email relay, and password manager with the Firefox account.

Service Integrations

Right off the bat, Firefox offers more service integrations that include Pocket, VPN, password manager, and also some of its new offerings like Firefox relay.

If you want access to these services through your browser, Firefox will be the convenient option for you.

While Brave does offer crypto wallets, it is not for everyone.

Similarly, if you like using Brave Search, you may have a seamless experience when using it with Brave browser because of the user experience.

Customizability & Security

Firefox shines when it comes to customizability. You get more options to tweak the experience and also take control of the privacy/security of your browser.

The ability to customize lets you make Firefox more secure than the Brave browser.

While hardening Firefox is a separate topic which we’ll talk about. To give you an example, Tor Browser is just a customized Firefox browser.

However, that does not make Brave less secure. It is a secure browser overall but you do get more options with Firefox.

Extension Support

There’s no doubt that the Chrome web store offers way more extensions.

So, Brave gets a clear edge over Firefox if you are someone who utilizes a lot of extensions (or constantly try new ones).

Firefox may not have the biggest catalog of extensions, it does support most of the extensions. For common use-cases, you will rarely find an extension that is not available as an addon for Firefox.

What Should You Choose?

If you want the best compatibility with the modern web experience and want access to more extensions, Brave browser seems to make more sense.

On the other hand, Firefox is an excellent choice for everyday browsing with industry-first privacy features, and a convenient sync option for non-tech savvy users.

You will have a few trade-offs when selecting either of them. So, your will have to prioritize what you want the most.

Let me know about your final choice for your use case in the comments down below!

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Zathura: A Minimalist Document Viewer for Keyboard Shortcut Pros

Every Linux distribution comes with a document viewer app that lets you read PDF and other documents.

Most of the time, it is Evince from GNOME that is displayed as Document Viewer in Ubuntu and some other distributions. Evince is a handy tool and supports a wide variety of document formats.

However, there are other applications for reading documents. Take Foliate for example. It’s an excellent application for reading ebooks on Linux.

I recently came across another document viewer called Zathura.

Enjoy a mouse-free document reading experience with Zathura

Zathura is a highly customizable document viewer based on the girara user interface and several document libraries. girara implements a simple and minimalist user interface.

Zathura sure feels to load fast. It is minimalist, so you just get an application window with no sidebar, application menu or anything of that sort.

Zathura Document Viewer Interface

You may open its command line prompt by pressing the : key. You may close the CLI prompt with Esc key.

If you want to create a bookmark, type :bmark and then provide an index number to the bookmarked page.

Bookmarking in Zathura

You may highlight all the links by pressing the F key. It will also display a number beside the highlighted URL and the command line prompt will appear at the bottom. If you type the URL number and press enter, the URL will be opened in the default web browser.

Highlighting and opening links in documents

Zathura also has automatic reloading feature. So if you make some changes to the document with some other application, the changes will be reflected as Zathura reloads the document.

You may also install additional plugins to improve the capabilities of Zathura and use it for reading comics or PostScript.

The problem with Zathura is that you won’t see any documentation or help option anywhere on the application interface. This makes things a bit more difficult if you are not already familiar with the tool.

You may find the documentation on the project website to learn about configuration, but I still found it confusing. There is no information on default keyboard shortcuts or if there is, I could not find it.

I discovered a few on my own:

• R: Rotate
• D: Toggle between single and double page viewing mode
• F: Highlight all links on the current screen
• HJKL: Moving with the Vim type keys
• Arrows or PgUp/PgDown or the mouse/touchpad for moving up and down
• / and search for text, press n or N for moving to next or previous search (like less command)
• Q: Close

This is something that must be improved by the Zathura developer(s).

Installing Zathura on Linux

Zathura is available in the repositories of the most Linux distributions. I could see it available for Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch and Debian, thanks to the pkgs.org website. This means that you can use the package manager of your distribution or the software center to install it.

On Debian and Ubuntu based distributions, use this command to install Zathura:

sudo apt install zathura

On Fedora, use:

sudo dnf install zathura

Use pacman command on Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -Sy zathura

And if you want to have a look at its source code, you may visit its GitLab repository:

Zathura Source Code

Conclusion

I’ll be honest with you. I am not a fan of mouse-free tools. This is why I prefer Nano over Vim as I cannot remember so many shortcuts.

I know there are people who swear by their keyboards. However, I would prefer not to spend time learning to configure a document viewer. This is more because I do not read too many documents on my desktop and for the limited PDF viewing, the default application is sufficient.

It’s not that Zathura does not have it usage. If you are someone who has to deal a lot with documents, be it PDF or LaTex, Zathura could be your next favorite tool if you are a keyboard love.

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UVdesk: A Free and Open-Source Helpdesk Ticket System

There are countless open-source solutions (including website creation tools and forum software) that power the web, and a helpdesk system is one of the vital areas that can benefit from it.

UVdesk is a free and open-source PHP based support ticket system with impressive options that you can start for free.

Here I shall mention more about it and how you can set it up for your business.

UVDesk: Open-Source Customer Support Solution

UVDesk is a helpdesk system built on Symfony (PHP framework for web development). An exciting alternative to proprietary ticketing systems like Zendesk.

It is another open-source offering from the same company responsible for Bagisto (an ecommerce platform that we’ve covered before).

UVDesk is primarily free but offers paid options if you want extra features and added security for your business.

You can respond to customer queries, create documentations, manage the support tickets, and do a lot of things from a single place. This is especially helpful if you have an eCommerce platform setup.

To explore more about it, let me highlight the key features it offers.

Features of UVDesk Helpdesk System

In addition to the basic abilities of a support system, it also offers some interesting features.

Here’s an overview of the features offered:

• Ticket management and administration
• Task management options to assign tickets and set a deadline for support agents
• Email management to convert emails to support tickets
• Ability to create documentations (knowledgebase) to guide customers for self-help
• Theme customization of the support system/portal
• Multi-channel support (aggregating support requests from different platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Website)
• Automated options for customer follow-up reminders
• Improve the workflow with the ability to automate tasks and how they’re handled
• Progress Web App support
• Social Media App integration
• Ecommerce multi-channel integration
• Form builder
• Monitor agent’s support performance
• Easy migration options when switching from a different support system to UVdesk
• Self-hosting

Do note that some of the features will be limited to the paid option. But the essential features should be available completely for free.

Get Started Using UVdesk

You can directly download the zip package from the official website. It can be deployed using Docker as well.

For installation instructions, you can check their GitHub page and the official documentation to check the system requirements. In either case, you can also opt for a one-click setup on your Linux server using Softaculous installer.

UVdesk

Quick Impressions on the Demo

They offer you the ability to try a live demo before you consider using it.

I’ve never worked on a support system before, but limited to eCommerce projects using OpenCart, which is one of the best open source eCommerce platforms.

But I found the back-end system to be pretty simple and accessible. It is not a breathtaking experience on the back-end side, but ranging from the branding customization options to managing the knowledge base, it is an easy-to-use experience.

I also found the ticket management good enough.

Wrapping Up

Overall, UVdesk is a flexible, open-source helpdesk system that you can try and use for free. Of course, if you have a sizable business, you may need to opt for the paid plans available.

What other open-source helpdesk systems do you know of? How important do you think a helpdesk portal is? Let me know in the comments below!

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