James'Techblog

Now that everything ubuntu has finally reached a point where 17.10 is as good as stable, It’s time to see what is new, what packages got upgraded and how many desktop improvements have been made. I usually don’t spend a long time testing distros, partly because I only have a low end device at the moment and don’t typically run Vboxes on it. However, with Ubuntu in the past, I usually find issues within a couple of hours of running, usually because I knitpick, but also because in the past, it seems that from 14.04 to 16.04 something was missing. I’m looking forward to testing 17.10 and editing in my results here. I normally side with Arch-based distros personally. Ubuntu Mate is a good place to start. Ubuntu Mate seems stable when other instances seem less than pleasant to work with. Linux Mint is a close second in this regard, as it takes the best of Ubuntu and Mate and puts its own stability into it. Linux Mint adds some nifty graphical skins to features that Ubuntu actu...

Firefox 56 was a really big improvement to Firefox 55. I thought surely it couldn't get any better, it restored my faith in Mozilla as a company. I previously wrote an article about how Firefox was becoming Google and what you can do to get around it. I knew very little about just what Quantum was bringing us then, now it appears that they are almost on par with what Google Chrome has been about for a while now. Faster load times, better handling, and improved tab management is the cherry on top. There are some caveats though, Firefox as we now know it is changing, meaning that after this release, Firefox will not work on XP dated systems anymore. Support for that was ended. There is a good chance that older Linux distributions won't be bothered by this restriction though. Also, if you're like me and you kinda like older software, the way things used to look, feel, act, you're probably going to want to hang on to your version as long as you want. For those who want the...

Tor the multi-platform Mozilla Firefox based browser developed to run on the Tor Overlya network, was recently in the news again, having been the headline of several other articles among tech enthusiasts and reporters. TorMoil is the new term for a recent potential leak in the software that leaks personal ip addresses, much like a WEBRTC type of leak, only difference is, secure WebRTC works by covering your inner network addresses and only display your outter network address to servers. I.E, it only releases the address of your router. Tor has been in the news a few times for being somewhat less than secure, because IT people know that it’s too easy to let a slip through and that no system is perfect. The Tor problem is no surprise as Tor has been in the news for potential holes in the past. Many of the potential holes before allowed people with special skills to spy on certain web traffic of consequence. Tor was developed with the Armed forces in mind, Tor knows network ...

Bodhi Linux was founded by lead developer, Jeff Hoogland. Jeff is an avid player of Magic the Gathering and a rather skilled python programmer and math wiz, among other things. He started the distribution during the time of E-17, an Enlightenment distribution which features the pantheon desktop. Hoogland was tired of the lack of effort being put into the project from the developers of Enlightenment, so many bugs and issues that he thought should have already been fixed, so he started Bodhi Linux, a lightweight distribution that gets a lot of its code from what Hoogland deemed good portions of that distribution, while utilizing the Ubuntu repos. Bodhi gets many Bodhi specific applications through the online app store. Bodhi is a still young distribution, I spent years using it back during Ubuntu 14.04. Bodhi uses its own interpretation of the E desktop called Moksha. Moksha is derived from a Hindu word meaning liberation. Bodhi Linux doesn’t rely on Enlightenment as much, but is ...

I wrote an article about some of the usefulness of bash scripts, I also told you where to find some scripts for setting up Linux systems. The link is still good and will be included again. I’ve recently updated a few things about the maintenance scripts and added aliases to the setup. Aliases are a feature that allows you to use a single keyword that you create to run certain commands that take a minute to type out. To place an alias, you just need to follow a simple syntax, alias NameOfAlias=”What the alias does”. To add these aliases to the .bashrc file, which is the only way to make them permanent, you simply type that out as echo ‘alias NameOfAlias=”What the alias does”’ >> ~/.bashrc. While aliases make things easier, for new users who are trying to learn, nothing can replace actually typing the commands out in the terminal from time to time. Several youtubers have talked about scripts in the past, a couple of such youtubers are Joe Collins and Quidsup. Quidsup has his ...