James'Techblog

Manjaro’s last stable release posted on their homepage was 17.06. Since this time, the team have worked hard on yet another stable release code named Hakoila and is set to be released soon. So far, the release has recently hit the stable channel as of time of this writing. 17.1 rolls out a new kernel amongst many other package changes. The new kernel is linux414. The team recently fixed a network regression as well as other issues. The kernel is not considered technically LTS yet, but as of this month it should roll out as one. The team also fixed several issues with Calamares, their installer. I have also fixed a few more issues I found in my scripts not working the way I wanted, I added a list of packages to potentially be installed and a loop which allows the user to install one and then see the list again until each package that he or she wants is installed. The loop will discontinue once the user types the number 27. I also added a prompt that asks the user if they want to uninst...

Thunderbird, the well known email client by Mozilla, was found to have issues. Issues were discovered to be unpatched in both the client and the addon enigmail that is often used with it to encrypt emails. These vulnerabilities could have allowed any emails sent using their encryption to be read anyway. Researchers supect that they will be updated soon. I rarely use Thunderbird unless I’m testing something anyway. I am slowly but surely getting all my emails moved to protonmail anyway. This being Manjaro unstable, I’ll no doubt receive the updates when they are released. Like I said, I trust protonmail and it’s great! It is based in Switzerland and was created by CERN personnel. Protonmail follows strictly the laws of Switzerland when it comes to privacy and encryption. The rules in Europe about that are way more appropriate than they are here in the states. Yes, the gene pool for politicians in this country are spread pretty thin, so is the intelligence. There are plenty of othe...

I recently was inspired over the holidays to work on my masterpieces on Github when I noticed some errors and discrepancies with my code. I replaced a few things that weren’t very clear, I gave the Arch-based scripts a face lift with a couple of new features, I even managed to wrangle up at least a temporary way to make the hosts file updater to restart the network manager service based on which distribution you were on. This isn’t a very good or convenient way, but it did help to show me just how to do that in a way that will work with multiple Ubuntu derivatives as well as Arch Linux derivatives in the future. I also came up with some ideas for making installing and uninstalling software even easier for new users. The future looks bright for this year, however, I did run into constant hurdles with Linux Mint. It just did not want to cooperate with me. Yes I have been testing with 18.3. I finally got the distro to boot on my device and everything is now working on it. One of many fea...

A rather simplistic and minimalist text editor, Geany has plugins and language formats which far surpass its tiny footprint. Geany is great for programming and code editing in Python, Java, C, HTML and even bash, but it is also great for editing text files too. Geany is pronounced as genie, as in Djinn or even magical lamp genie. It comes with a lamp icon in Linux at least. It is a cross platform editor. Geany relies heavily on the GTK toolkit. You can download Geany via www.geany.org . Geany was meant to be an independent editor meaning it had few dependencies and didn’t rely on a single desktop environment. It also was meant to be fast and oriented for work. Most people underestimate this editor. You can also change the theme of the editor from solid white to black or inverted if you like. It has the ability to auto-complete and close brackets, etc. When you open Geany you’ll get a big tool bar and side bar as well as a message window at the bottom. These are mainly used for ...