dpkg-repack to the rescue!

In my need to back up debs from my installed system (trying to fix Brostrend's idiotic mistake) I found a very useful tool!

For years I would just backup /var/cache/apt/archives to my storage drive, and call it a day.

This doesn't work anymore for Ubuntu because not all the debs that are installed are in that folder anymore.

Using the great info I found at AskUbuntu, i first used apt-get to install dpkg-repack, then made a folder on my boot drive named repack, changed directory to that folder, and then I ran the command dpkg-repack `dpkg --get-selections | grep install | cut -f1`.

In just a few minutes I had a folder named repack with every single deb package i had installed in the folder.

For me this is very very useful.

According to the AskUbuntu article, sudo dpkg -i *.deb launched from inside the repack folder will re-install every debian package in that folder.

I haven't personally tried this yet, but when I do, if this goes other than planned, I will update this article.

I'm not 100% certain whether it handles all my dependencies yet, but I will let you know once I have confirmation.

-Denny

The stupidity of Brostrend wifi adapters

I bought an ac1200 from them. Let me first say in all fairness, if you can get it to run, it's very nice. I am writing you via it right now.

The stupidity comes in when they give you a wifi adapter for Linux that by their own admission, needs a driver FROM THE INTERNET.

They told me via email that the driver on the cd is not recommended for use.

This is the stupidest possible issue you could ever have with a device that you use to gain access to the internet (kind of like having a gasoline driven car in the 1600's, gasoline doesn't exist yet.)

If I buy a wifi device, i expect that it will come with EVERYTHING i need to gain access to the internet, including a driver that does NOT need a internet connection to be installed.

Secondly, I know this can be done. (Brostrend said it was impossible, they are either completely clueless, or lying, or both).

How do I know this? I own several wireless N devices that come with a driver that has worked from Ubuntu 10.04 until today, (yes, they run on 20.04 lts beautifully).

I would still be using them, but they are dramatically slower than the ac1200.

The moral of my story: either don't buy a Brostrend device for Linux at all, or also buy a model known to work with Ubuntu as well, without needing a internet connection, so you can install the blasted drivers for the Brostrend device.

All I can say is thank goodness I have those older wifi n adapters lying around, or I would be internet-less.

 Thanks for being serious screw ups, Brostrend.

-Denny

 

Fishing Planet fix for Ubuntu

If you are like me and you like to catch a few fish now and then on fishing planet but have had no satisfaction with getting it to work on Ubuntu (or other Linux distro's) via steam lately, then look no further.

Thanks to a person on the steam discussion boards, we have a fix that will let you play again.

It seems the problem is a missing file.

I have compiled a visual walk through of the installation process of these folders and files: (click photos to enlarge)

Here I am extracting the file via right clicking the file in my downloads folder and choosing "extract here".

Once this is done, you should have this folder. We need a folder inside it that is labeled "Fishing Planet".

Copy the "Fishing Planet" folder. 

Now we need to go to the Fishing Planet folder in steam. We start by making the .steam folder visible with control-h. Then enter the folder by double clicking it.

Next enter the steam folder. I know this may be confusing to some. For some reason there is a steam folder inside the .steam folder.

Then we enter the steamapps folder.

Now we enter the common folder.

Inside the common folder should be a folder that already exists. If you right click anywhere below the folders here, and choose paste, you will then get the next few screenshots:

Make sure to click "merge" on all of these messages.

and click merge again

and this is the finale "merge" we need. Fishing Planet should now run. You can now close these windows, and delete the files you downloaded if you wish.

One side note, for some reason Fishing Planet now has a white screen for a couple of seconds.

It still runs after this... and I am not certain why it's there.

The game plays fine for me, I hope this works for you as well.

Here is proof that it worked for me:

Here's the download link from my own personal Google Drive account:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hdJuXF-s78CyYWeJoQ7cS8TZsLe2e4qw/view?usp=sharing

Google Drive will try to "preview" this link for you. It can't because it's a zipped file. Instead, just click the little "down arrow into a box" looking download button on the top right of the browser window to download it.

Happy fishing!

-Denny

Ubuntu versus Arch

 

Now before I begin, I know there is going to be some arch guy telling me just how wrong I am. Save your breath for somebody else. 20 plus years experience makes me absolutely certain I am right.

And this is not some shot across Arch or Manjaro's bow. Because they have a solid place in the Linux community, and the have earned that place.

But the truth is that for the great majority of Linux users, something like Ubuntu is the best choice for them. Why?

If you are not a car person, you might not get this, but Ubuntu is a Subaru forester. It's not going to go 300 miles an hour. It's not the sharpest thing on the road. It's not ugly, it's practical. And I love it.

Ubuntu is the car you buy that 20 years later, if you've kept the maintenance up on it, it's run without a hiccup continuously. A car you can give to the kid at 20 years of age and know it's not going to be dead on the street somewhere. Reliability is it's name.

Arch (especially Manjaro, but this fits most archs)... are that sweet 72 Plymouth road runner with the holley double pumpers, 440 hemi in competition orange. The car that has been tuned to perfection by her owner. When it's tuned right it's formidable, beautiful...

But in a week's time the timing is off, the carb is screwed up, and the tank is nearly empty because Plymouth's purpose was not fuel economy.

The Arch users car doesn't want to turn over, and he spends an hour and a half getting it running again. 

The Ubuntu user walks up to his car for 20 years straight, and it has turned over every time. Yeah, it needs a oil change every 3k miles. Yeah, once every 5-7 years she needs new tires. And yes, the Ubuntu machine has never blown the doors off the competition. But the Ubuntu user isn't yelling at his machine because it just won't start. 

This is, for the most part, a very accurate statement. Their have been outliers over the years, but as a whole this description is spot on.

To sum this up for non car people. Ubuntu is rock solid and reliable the great majority of time. Arch is not reliable, but if you get it tuned right, it's a beautiful thing to behold. But you will be fixing it far more often.

There's a reason none of the companies I work with are running Arch on their servers. It's usually fedora, red hat, Ubuntu or Debian.

One strange last thing to note... And in truth I never understood this.. most of arch is identical to Ubuntu, fedora, Debian, etc... Their is different tweaks in the UI or GUI, there are different package managers, but in truth in the guts of the machine, they are running the same kernel with the same set of gnu utilities, and either the exact same programs, or ones that serve the same purpose.

For the life of me, I have never understood why arch and Ubuntu run so very differently...

-Denny

Flameshot - My favorite screenshot utility for Linux

A friend of mine by the name of Peter Brown introduced me to Flameshot, and I love this screenshooter.

I always have been a fan of xfce4-screenshooter, simply for the fact that it was "just enough" of a screenshooter utility. And it still is, but... Flameshot has very useful tools and is just so handy I am now a Flameshot man.

Any screen capture utility can take the entire screen. Where Flameshot shines is all the extra tools that are available for you when you select a section of an image.

Before I show my own screenshots of this awesome app, I wanted to add this great gif from https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot. It does a lot better job than my own work below.

I had to share that, the team made such a great showing of their useful works. These next shots are of the tools I love the most.

Here is Flameshot's menu. There are some great options here, like sharing to imgur, pinning it to the desktop, and stuff like that. But my favorite options are those below the image.

First off, holding right click gives you this quick color chooser. I usually pick the red or blue because those seem the most visible, but it's nice having the options.

These screen captures are out of sync, so forgive me, but I love the draw arrows utility, which is what this one is showcasing. The arrow on the bottom tool set here is so useful for pointing out details of screenshots you capture.

Scrolling the mousewheel will let you choose the size of your text. (and other tools). This is so useful for adding info quickly to images. (Yes, this software is awesome.)

There's a lot going on here, but what I am trying to point out is the blur tool. As you can see in the middle, I was able to blur out some of the text. The tool that does this is the one that looks like a bunch of dots together, on the bottom bar.

This is me showing the addition of circles, open boxes and filled boxes. I use these tools often to highlight specific portions of my images.

This is me just showing the useful right click menu (once you launched flamshot) in your window manager's running apps section.

These tools prove useful for me very often.

For help in installing this software, go here: https://flameshot.js.org/#/getting-start

Here is their homepage: https://flameshot.js.org/

I think you'll be glad to add this app to your app tool belt. :)

-Denny

MX Linux 19.2 - antiX on steroids

 

With the release of MX Linux I just had to try it out. I've been a fan of antiX for some time, and MX Linux being a child of antiX in many ways, I have also had an affinity for it as well.

There are a few "flavors" to choose from, XFCE, KDE and a fluxbox option.

I tried the XFCE option. The first thing I have to say is, for a lightweight distro, it's rather beautiful. I also like the amount of tools that were readily at my fingertips.

So, whenever I take one of these jaunts through a new Linux distro, the first thing I notice is what the major tools are that I would use every day. This is usually the browser, the text editor, the file manager, the media manager, and the terminal app.

MX comes with firefox browser, vlc media player, thunar file manager, a text editor that I have never seen before called featherpad text editor, and good ole' xfce4 terminal.

I have to say, two things I loved immediately, tons of tools and a quick button to get to the guts of what hardware is installed. These two things might make MX my standby usb key distro for pc problem solving.

Here are the screenshots I grabbed while strolling through the live boot: (click to enlarge)

This is a great starter screen. Tons of information at my fingertips, all the tools i could ever want for tweaking, codecs for my media.. quick access password info for checking out the distro... This is simple and genius, I love it.

This is just a vanilla shot of the distro. clean, simple, beautiful. And that conky is simple, beautiful, and gives me the info I want now. There are a lot of conky options pre-installed for those conky lovers out there. (I monked with it for a bit, see one of my other conky setups below)

I found this and I like it. Quick access through "mx tools" for nvidia driver install, codecs install, and so much more.

MX isn't the lightest distro I've seen. Peppermint OS (still my fave lightweight) is gentler on ram than this. But still, MX is no slouch.

There were a lot of beautiful wallpapers, this one is my fave.

This was the text editor available. I've never heard of it, but it is gentle on resources and runs well enough.

This (and this screenshot below) are one of the things that got special attention from me. This is a very useful tool if your use for MX is to diagnose a computer's issues through live boot.

This is the quick system info screen i show above in menu. Again, I love this idea. Quick info at my fingertips.

This definitely hearkens back to MX's old school antiX heritage. I haven't seen a PPP connection in a very long time. If you have one, you are good to go.

This was just me messing with one of the many conkey pre-installs. There are a lot of other options. Very nice indeed.

All in all this is a very well rounded distro. And MX seems to get better with age. If you would like more information, I am including MX's website and distrowatch page URLs below.

Homepage: https://mxlinux.org/

Distrowatch: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx

-Denny

Bunsen Labs Lithium review - August 2020

I have been keeping an eye on BunsenLabs since it's inception. To say I was a fan of it's predecessor,, CrunchBang, is an understatement.

So when lithium came out, I wanted to delve into it and see how things have progressed.

It's not bad for a lightweight Linux distro. I have seen lighter, and my current favorite "light" Linux distro is Peppermint Os. 

Bunsen does an excellent job though. Very clean, sharp looking (for using openbox) and very straight forward.

If you prefer Debian over Ubuntu clockworks, then this is the better choice over Peppermint. Peppermint is easier on ram, there's no doubt. But Bunsen is no hog.

Here are some screenshots of my romp through this unique distro: (Click on them to enlarge them)

This is the vanilla Bunsen start up feel. I am not a fan of this color scheme, but it's not ugly. And I do like the quick info conky on the right side.

This is my tweaking to add color and mess with the options.

This is a screenfetch with firefox running a youtube video, to see how much ram it ate. This is not bad at all, quite reasonable on the ram here. I was quite pleased.

This is a screenfetch with the system at rest. Not bad, but Peppermint likes to sit at about 280 or less ram used. I'm not certain why Peppermint sits so wonderfully low. Still, this is very good. My bloated Ubuntu 20.04 install likes to hover at twice this ram at rest.

The default installed apps were Firefox for browser, Geany for a text editor, good ole' Thunar for file manager (I love Thunar, it's so rock solid and reliable.), and VLC for the media player.

If I were making Bunsen, i'd probably choose the same apps.

Bunsen is the easiest to configure light weight openbox set up I have ever seen. You can tweak everything with config files of coarse, but BunsenLabs goes one step further, and has GUI's (visual menus) for everything.. meaning you don't have to hunt down where that specific config file is to make changes. I love that feature.

I would not suggest bunsenlabs for a new linux initiate. But if your an old hat at Linux, love tweaking things, and especially love light tight distros or have a bit of nostalgia for ole' CrunchBang, this distro is for you.

-Denny

If you want to read up on and/or download the distro, you can do that here: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

If you are like me and like to peruse the DistroWatch page on a distro, that's here: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bunsenlabs

 

Talkatone - Turn your no service android phone into a wifi phone

"Talkatone is the best option for replacing your native phone to call and text for free without using cell minutes. By contrast, Skype, Viber and Facetime are only free if the recipient has also already installed the app. Download the app on App Store or Google play." -https://www.talkatone.com/

A friend needed a phone for making local calls. Budget was non existing, and I only had an older Kyocera Durascout running android 4, but thanks to Talkatone he can now make phone calls wherever he can get wifi now.

I was so impressed with the service that I wanted to share it with the world.

It's available for android or iPhone systems, and it's free.

Not only was it easy to set up, but the call quality was exceptional. He can call any local number as long as he has WiFi access now.

It also comes with free texting, so win win.

Give it a try if you are just trying to save money by not using your cell minutes or cell text services as well.

But for finding a new purpose for "service dead" phones, it's stellar.
-Denny

Talkatone is the best option for replacing your native phone to call and text for free without using cell minutes. By contrast, Skype, Viber and Facetime are only free if the recipient has also already installed the app. Download the app on App Store or Google play.

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