Belajar Agar Berkembang

Rabu, 03 Januari 2024

FOSS Weekly #24.01: Linux in 2024, GDM Customization, Distros You Missed Last Year

New year, ~~new~~ same old me 😄

What do we have in the first edition of FOSS Weekly in 2024? Some year end special articles.

But an important and surprising development came from Gentoo just before 2023 ended. That could take away the pain of compiling each and every package.

Other than that, I have noted down suggestions from readers like you on topics It's FOSS should cover in 2024. You shall notice the work on those topics this year.

💬 Let's see what else you get in this edition of FOSS Weekly:

Starting off 2024 with new app/distro releases.
GDM login screen customization
Year end round ups
And other Linux news, videos and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux news

Scribus 1.6 has arrived with plenty of improvements across the board.
Rhino Linux 2023.4 was one of the last distro releases of 2023, adds an Auto-Tiling feature.

Gentoo is embracing binary packages, software installations will be a whole lot quicker now.

🛒Linux book deals

Start the new year by learning new Linux skills with this Humble Book Bundle.

Explore Humble Bundle Offering

🌐 Follow us on Google News

By the way, if you use Google, follow It's FOSS on Google News to get trusted It's FOSS content before other websites in Google search.

🧠 What we’re thinking about

Linux comes to the rescue of your old computer

How Linux rescues slow computers (and the planet)

🎈 Year end specials

Just a glance back at 2023 before it is forgotten for good:

Interesting distros you may have missed in 2023
Defining moments in the Linux and Open Source World in 2023
Unknown distros that made a splash in 2023 (was mentioned in the last newsletter)
Exciting apps we discovered in 2023 (also mentioned in the last newsletter)

And it's time to look forward to the year 2024 with some 'fortune telling':

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials and More

Did you know you could modify the login screen in GNOME?

Or how about ways to check whether you are running systemd?

📹 What we are watching

Ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when you fire up a Linux system?

✨ Project highlights

We started off 2024 with an interesting Arch-based distro that is lightweight in nature.

🧩 New quiz unit

Time to solve some riddles.

💡 Quick handy tip

Usage of Super Key in Ubuntu (and other distros with GNOME):

Press Super and use the Mouse Scroll Wheel to switch workspaces.
Press Super and Right-click anywhere on a window to open the window menu, you can then take screenshots, hide the window, change window behavior and more.
Press Super and drag anywhere on any window to move it. (No need to grab the top bar to move)

🤣 Meme of the week

Windows and macOS users, come join us! Don't lurk in the dark.

🗓️ Tech Trivia

Will you believe that people bought personal computers just to run a spreadsheet software? Back in 1979, a spreadsheet software, VisiCalc was released for Apple II. People could use personal computer for business thanks to the spreadsheet software. The software sold over 100,000 copies and also boosted the sale of Apple II and forced bigger players like IBM to enter the personal computing market. The company behind VisiCalc, Software Arts, was formed on 2nd January 1979.

By the way, Blender turned 30 on 2nd January. The first release was in 1994.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 FOSSverse corner

Here's what FOSSers can expect from It's FOSS in 2024. I am excited to see how it goes.

❤️ With love

Share it with your Linux-using friends and encourage them to subscribe (hint: it's here).

Share the articles in Linux Subreddits and community forums.

Opt for It's FOSS Plus membership and support us 🙏

Enjoy 2024 with Linux 😄

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/wrWvyKI
via IFTTT

Selasa, 02 Januari 2024

How to Check if Your Linux System Uses systemd

Every mainstream Linux distro including Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and Arch uses systemd by default.

But there are many non-systemd distros like Alpine Linux that uses lightweight runit for better performance or Devuan that uses sysvinit on principal basis.

The problem comes when you are trying to follow some tutorial or documentation and it has commands specific to systemd or some other init service.

And this is where you have to check if your Linux system uses systemd or something else.

One way would to be check the process with PID 1 (after all, an init system is the first process to run on a Linux system).

ps 1

But its output could be misleading as often it shows /sbin/init which is just a soft link to actual init process.

If you follow that symbolic link, you can get the init system information. There are two ways of doing that:

Using the stat command
Using the readlink command

So let's start with the first one.

📋

These methods were tested with 6 init systems: Systemd, OpenRC, SysVnint, Busybox, runit, and s6.

Method 1: Check if systemd is in use with the stat command

Here's how you can use the stat command to find out what init system you are using:

stat /sbin/init

If you are using a systemd-powered distro, then it will show you the following output:

But if you are using anything else than systemd, it will show the init name unless you are using SysVnit which will only show you init instead of sysvnit:

Method 2: Check the init system using the readlink command

Unlike the previous method, when you use the readlink command, it will only print the name of the init system.

So if you want to know if you are using Systemd or not, simply use the following command:

readlink /sbin/init

If you are using the OpenRC init service, then it will show the following output:

But if you are using SysVnit, then, it will show you the following output:

Tiny 'script' I wrote for you

Another way is to check if the /run/systemd/system directory exists or not.

Well, the easiest way to find out is to use an if-else bash command in your terminal which will check if you are running a systemd-powered distro or not:

if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then echo "System is running systemd"; else echo "System is not running systemd"; fi

Tweaks using GDM Settings tool

Let's first see the kind of changes you can make with this awesome utility.

1. Change shell theme, icon, and wallpaper

You can change the theme, icon and wallpaper of the login screen. Here's an example.

Using GDM Settings to Customize Login Screen in GNOME

To change the theme, you should download it first. Get one from the GNOME Look website.

Next, ensure that the theme is in /usr/share/themes. Themes stored in ~/.themes are not visible to the GDM settings app.

In the GDM Settings tool, go to the Appearance tab and select the themes/icons/cursors.

If you want to set a wallpaper, change the Backgrounds to “Image” and then browse a picture from the file browser.

Once finished, click Apply. This will ask for the password. Give it when prompted.

You will be notified to log out to apply changes. When logged out, the changes will be visible.

💡

You can change all the settings and then click apply, or click apply each time after a setting. If you press Apply, it will prompt you to log out, and you need to log back in and open the settings app again each time.

2. Change fonts

Before you change the font, you need to have that fonts installed on your system for all users.

To ensure that, paste the downloaded custom font file to /usr/local/share/fonts and then make a font cache using:

fc-cache -f -v

Now, open GDM Settings and go to the Fonts tab. There, you can set the fonts, anti-alias settings etc.

You can see that the new font is now set to your log in screen.

3. Change color of top panel

To change the top panel color, go to Top Bar option in the sidebar. Under Tweaks, enable the "Change Background Color" button and then set a color you want.

It is equally important to change the text color of the top bar to a convenient color to the background you have selected.

4. Change the time display format

Change the clock to 24 hr or 12hr format using the dropdown menu.

Furthermore, you can make seconds visible on the top bar, by toggling the corresponding button.

On most distros, this is the default behavior. Even if you have tap to click enabled in the system, the GNOME login screen need you to use left mouse click.

To change that, go to the Mouse and Touchpad section and enable the Tap to Click button.

On the same menu, you have an option to tweak the mouse cursor size, if it looks small to you.

6. Enable night light

You can enable a scheduled night light to the GDM.

Go to Display, toggle the Night Light button on. Now, Schedule either sunset to sunrise or to a convenient time of your choice.

7. Add a logo and welcome Message

Go to the Login screen tab and then enable the "Enable Logo" button. This will give you a button to browse for the image.

Add a Logo

Select the Image and press Apply.

📋

On my system's monitor, an image of the size up to 128×128 pixel looked acceptable, and beyond that look huge for me. So, select the size accordingly.

After the image is applied, to set a welcome message, enable the Welcome Message button and then add the text you wanted to show.

This will display the message, when you selected a user to enter the password.

8. Export and import settings

If you want to apply the same settings on some other system, you can export the settings and import it on the other system running GDM Settings tool.

Click on the top-left hamburger menu, and select Export to file.

Name the .ini file and save it somewhere safe. You can import it later.

9. Reset all settings

Don't like the changes you made? There is an easy way to revert to default.

To reset the tweaks, click on the top-left hamburger menu and select Reset.

Now, press Apply. It will ask for your password. Once provided, you will be prompted to log out.

You can see that, all the changes have been reverted.

10. More settings

There are other tweaks available too, like:

Show battery percentage on the top bar, through Top Bar ⇾ Power ⇾ Show Battery Percentage.
Disable or enable the user list on the login screen through Login Screen ⇾ Disable User List.
Change the screen off time, suspend time and other power settings through the Power tab.

Installing GDM Settings Tool

Now that you know what tweaks this tool can do, you may want to try it on your own. Let's see about installing it.

📋

The GDM Settings tool didn't work for me on Ubuntu/Pop!_OS. I am using it as a Flatpak App on Debian 12 Bookworm.

GDM Settings Tool can be installed as a Flatpak.

flatpak install flathub io.github.realmazharhussain.GdmSettings

Or, It is available as an AppImage.

For Arch Linux users, install using any AUR Helper from AUR.

yay -S gdm-settings

Conclusion

Login screen is not something that everyone customizes. Other than the "tap to click" change, most other changes are just cosmetic changes.

Overall, it is good to have such options available for people who love to customize every nook and corner of their settings.

🗨️ Are you one of those Linux users who are obsessed with customization? Will you be trying GDM Settings?

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/9OheDaE
via IFTTT