James'Techblog

Hot on the heels of Antergos Linux’s demise, EndeavourOS, a distribution based directly on Arch Linux, is a distribution that offers an easy Calamares Installation to put Arch Linux on most systems. The distribution comes with YAY(AUR helper) by default and it works in much the same way as Pacman, the official package installer for Arch. Pacman and Yay are both CLI tools that use almost perfectly parallel syntax. Yay can be installed from git cloning the repo from github and reinstalling it can be done from Pacman. Endeavour also installs with literally bare minimum packages and lets the user build his/her own system in accordance with their needs. Endeavour sports the XFCE4.14 desktop by default, this is a much needed update to XFCE as a whole as it offers many features and changes that previously weren’t available(more on this later), and helps Endeavour put its best foot forward as it were. Endeavour is a tweaked and polished xfce with nothing really installed out of

TLP AND POWERTOP Linux by default doesn’t offer a lot in the way of battery saving as of yet. This isn’t as bad a problem in Android and IOS devices as they have built these platforms around a battery as a power source rather than the desktop version the operating systems are partially based on as these were designed for desktop computers. That’s not to say that Linux hasn’t come a long way with their kernels, that said, there are a few utilities and tweaks that can really help in regards to squeezing an extra hour or so out of that battery. TLP allows the user to recalibrate the battery reading within the OS for optimum percentage reading. This sounds more complicated than it really is, but in Androids there is a file that gives the system the percentage of the battery which may or may not be correct sometimes for different reasons, this file gets corrupted and can no longer give optimum battery readings. The same is somewhat true in Linux for Laptops. Linux u

VLC, a popular open source media player for multiple platforms including Linux, was said to have a vulnerability that was left unpatched from about a year ago by a German researcher. The vulnerability was supposedly not even published to the VLC bug tracker itself but rather a third-party and it appears now that the vulnerability is actually a case of sensationalism. The president of VLC or VideoLan, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, stated that the vulnerability patched a year ago and thus could not be reproduced by him and his team in the latest release. The application version is at 3.0.7.1 at time of writing. Kempf also stated that the researcher was possibly using an outdated version of Ubuntu, citing a possible flaw found in a third-party library relating to VLC several months ago. This too was patched. Multiple articles and youtubers have commented on the hype , none of which seem to add anything new, however, an article on Slashdot says otherwise. The full article will be below.  The

Pale Moon, a browser forked from older Firefox code, has released a security fix release for their recent 28 series browser version. This update fixes multiple issues with security and bypassing blocking of ftp authentications if necessary. The release also fixes a multitude of DiD(Defense In Depth) vulnerabilities or those vulnerabilities which are not currently being exploited or are not active in Pale Moon at the moment. Note that DiD does not mean that such vulnerabilities are not still active in other Mozilla forks. Pale Moon also updates NSS to the latest. Pale Moon is a fork of earlier versions of Firefox. As such, it is not to be mistaken as a Firefox clone or an insecure Firefox. Pale Moon’s engine Goanna, and the UXP-based browser are both forked from Gecko and Firefox 4 consecutively. The browser is meant to give users the customization and feel of earlier releases of Firefox without any insecurities that would result in modern use of such a version of software. Pale Mo

In a recent tweet on the project’s twitter page, the team behind Antergos recently announced that they would be discontinuing the project. While this came as a big shock to the community, the developers described this is a bit of a long time coming as things in their lives became hectic and the project has become somewhat stagnant, not seeing much in the way of features or major improvements above standard Arch based software packages. The project was founded directly on Arch Linux and thus the Arch specific packages will be updated forever, however, many changes are soon to take place to make this a smooth transition. The Antergos repository will be the first to go, moving many packages over to AUR and making the repository itself obsolete. It is unclear as to whether the project will cease to install for new users, but that is a safe bet. Antergos started as Cinnarch and has always been mainly an arch installer with many extra bells and whistles, but it appears that this ever evo

Solus is one of the most interesting Linux operating systems. Initially coming from a Debian-based background, Solus offers a rolling release model for updates in a simple and clean desktop-focused distribution. Solus is developed independently from other distributions and flavors of Linux and has three main desktop environments to choose from with a fourth one on the way in Plasma. As of May 3 2019, Solus has updated their Gnome desktop and the Gnome stack that Budgie uses. In this release, a major release, Solus adds the upstream Gnome-Shell and Mutter performance and security improvements as well it has removed many apps and libraries which are no longer being maintained and or updated from its repository. Another change, albeit a disappointing one, Deja-Dup which allows you to sync files to the cloud in the form of backups will stop working with this feature. It’s a real bummer, however, Solus developers decided that a certain library involved in this client to server exc

An article popped up recently on the register, a United Kingdom based tech news site. Google’s new API has been in the news for a while now. The new API will limit or restrict third party code from accessing URLs in time to do anything about them. This kind of new behavior is especially tough for content blocking extensions in the Chrome browser. Google has yet to fully implement the newest API which is called DNR for short. WebRequest API is soon to be deprecated to make way for a new way of doing things. This shouldn’t be a big surprise as Google makes a lot of its overall revenuse from advertising. Gorhill, a developer of a very popular content blocking extension known as Ublock Origin, has stated adamantly that his extension would cease to function correctly if the new API takes precedence. Third party content blockers are closer to the browser than they are the net, this is not necessarily the case within Opera as their content blocker is built in. DNR API means that con

Lately, I’ve been working on improving my scripts and their Help feature. This feature includes leaflets on basic functionality of some of the features held within the script. I layout basic details about what is being done in each more clearly, but still there are things missing here. I removed as many lines previously as possible to allow for some added lines of information. I realize that it doesn’t seem like a lot at the moment, however, I have also mirrored my repository on Github and moved a copy of it to Gitlab. I’ve made that repo almost completely independent of Github. There is still a bit of work to be done and so I will be doing that soon. I’ve also made my Gitlab publicly accessible now. My mind and my sleeping have been sort of a wreck lately, I’ve been trying to make minor improvements around the house with all this going on, I feel my time and energy has been largely divided, though not in equal parts. I’m hoping that by the end of this week, things will be a littl

Solus, an operating system with a rather colorful history as Solus OS, having been based on Debian at one point, is now released as a rolling distribution, most recently in the form of Solus 4.0 Fortitude. Solus 4.0 took a while to reach release due to changes in project management and various other matters. Solus 4.0 uses the latest software packages and updates in a timely fashion. The software that comes preinstalled is very sparse, meaning that users should go into Solus expecting to install other software. The package manager is a forked version of Pisi which is called Eopkg. Eopkg is not based on deb or rpm package managers so getting deb files to work might be a bit of a hassle, nevertheless, most software that newer users might find useful should be either within the standard Solus repository or the ever growing third-party repository. Snapd is also preinstalled and readily available for those who want software that isn’t in either of these. Solus 4.0 also uses one of the

We all know about the speed and efficiency of Linux, the security is unmatched as well. Linux is by far more secure than Windows and Mac as the Open Source community behind Linux is always eyeballing the code and subsequently fixing bugs thereafter. Linux and Unix are about as secure and as efficient as running a computer operating system gets, but there are some issues and bugs that don’t always get fixed or noticed in a timely fashion and one of the jobs of a System Administrator would be to check for these issues to make sure they’re not a problem in a business environment. SSH is a big gap in security that gets updated frequently, however, there is nothing that can be done to prevent it from being an inherent security risk as it is facing the internet and is a hole with which data travels through from device to device. Businesses and administrators use SSH to tunnel through from their devices to effect changes in files on other machines remotely and this, along with Telnet(wh

Fare thee well to the misused ideas of others. Coinhive, a crypto-mining operation being used in the place of embedded javascript ads on websites is closing its doors for good. Coinhive was a nifty idea, but sadly, it was abused and was really easy to abuse. After a while on the net, the service was used by malware developers and ad writers to harness users’ hardware in an attempt to mine for bitcoin. Bitcoin is a lucrative piece of virtual currency that costs bundles more than the name appears to be worth. With one coin equating to a whopping $3,854.92, it is little wonder why someone would attempt to cash in on this platform. Many honest or at least semi-honest people mine for currency on the web with no ill intentions, however, this misuse of the ads platform is just another reason that people use ad-blockers. Malwarebytes already blocked this type of advertising, (or should we say malvertising)? Along with the misuse and mistrust, Coinhive also mentioned other reasons as to wh

The Linux kernel recently had a 5.0 release. This is the newest kernel signed off by Torvalds and friends. Linux 5.0 includes a plethora of changes and security fixes as is the case with any major release for the kernel. 4.20 was released around the holidays. That was a good release and I’ve been using it without issue for a while now, but Linux 5.0 has some things that might interest you. According to OMGUBUNTU, Linux Mint is getting a logo revamp as well. This is actually not something new to me, but before I assumed they were mere rumors. The new Linux Kernel’s changes are mostly hardware stack related with Raspberry Pi and Intel getting some support among other systems. This according to OMGUBUNTU. The newest kernel is already available on kernel.org, but you’ll have to compile it yourself. It is recommended to stick with the latest kernel with your distribution to retain support. Kernels are those pieces of the overall operating system that don’t really need to be updated jus

Pale Moon is a web browser once forked from Mozilla code. As such, the browser shares many similarities with Firefox as far as style and feel. While built around older Firefox code, it is actively maintained and patched with security fixes that pertain to Pale Moon and only Pale Moon, which decreases the chances of incompatibilities and improves on code that is no longer being maintained by Mozilla anymore. Mozilla went a different direction and while on XUL they may have implemented some of the same features that Pale Moon does as of now, it is now up to Moonchild(MC Straver), to maintain this project himself with his team of developers. Pale Moon works with XUL and XP COM, both technologies no longer being supported by Mozilla, so much of the underlying code that gets implemented as security fixes in big updates, gets separated from other Mozilla code by Moonchild himself and instead he adds his own workarounds and code to patch other portions of the browser. Most people fail t

Vivaldi recently released a new snapshot, and though I don’t often comment on the development of that version, I saw a brief overview of it on Ghacks and thought what the heck?! I’ve been using the snapshot build within Linux for some time now. I’m currently running it on Solus Mate and it feels a bit faster than Google Chrome on that particular desktop environment. I have mentioned updates from Vivaldi’s stable branch before, even did a review on the browser in general, but nothing to do with the snapshot version as it is beta software and most general users probably won’t even bother with it. The snapshots were the first to include Vivaldi’s own sync engine and a host of other features which now are included in the stable. Vivaldi recently added user accounts to their browser which allows multiple users to use separate profiles in the same browser tied to separate accounts to the sync server. This would allow users to have guests over to surf the web for a research pro

The Swap partition is something that is debated by computer enthusiasts today within Linux. The Swap partition allows the system to suspend when not in use, hibernate, and it is instrumental in swapping out pages when RAM space is sparse. Swap is the block of space reserved on a hard drive/solid state drive that allows caching when the memory is filled during heavy read/write jobs or during normal use when such an event occurs. Regardless of how much RAM you might have, it is a good idea to at least have one an half times that in swap, however, it is possible to run your computer just fine with the bare minimum of 2GB of swap. Swap is reminiscent of the Windows Page file, however, Windows usually creates a separate file for hibernating and suspend called Hiberfil.sys.  Swap is also known as virtual memory. Swap files are small portions on the hard disk which do not count as a separate partition, however, they are bits of space cordoned off by the command fallocate –length swap

By now, most people have probably read the articles on OMGUbuntu, if you haven’t, go check them out at omgubuntu.co.uk . It talks about 5 big improvements coming to the browser Epiphany that might just make people reconsider it as a daily browser. The browser is based on Webkit or Webkit 2 as it is now known. The rendering engine Webkit is used by Midori and Apple Safari to just name a couple. Webkit is still in development, however, many developers broke off from that years ago to fork it into the now well known Blink engine used in Chrome and many others. QTWebEngine is another fork that is more a fork of the Blink engine than direct fork of Webkit. QTWebEngine does offer more advanced features, however, Webkit has recently been getting better and better at handling newer web standards. The browser itself offers similar look and feel to Safari, also a native integration with Gnome or GTK environments much as Safari integrates with MacOS. Epiphany is a browser based on the

As of Linux Mint 19.1, the new panel layout is more Windowsesque and similar to KDE’s icons-only-task-manager. The new layout increases the size of the panel to a more readable setting and gives users grouped applications. When you open an application, it will show up on the panel as an icon only and will be highlighted to alert the user that it is in use. This is a nice feature that reminds me of Windows 7. Before, you could set this up in Cinnamon, but as of Cinnamon version 4.0.8 Cinnamon has made the setup for you. Prior to this, you have a more Windows XP or older layout which is fine, but for most users who have the screen real estate, this new layout will work better. As I said, you can also get this functionality in KDE by going to panel options > Task List > Right click > click alternatives and click on icons-only-task-manager. Booting up Cinnamon in Manjaro live right now offers Cinnamon 4.0.1. You can still set that feature up by adding grouped applicatio

Solus, a descendant of SolusOs, is a Unix-like operating system focused for newer users who want a truly rolling release model. Being independent now(was previously forked from Debian), it offers an Arch-like experience having to only be installed once for most users. It aspires to be a one stop shop for its user base and promises to not constantly have major point releases to get the latest software like in other distributions. The current version is 3.9999 at time of writing this. Solus uses the Adapta-gtk theme by default with Papirus as the icon set. Users who wish to change this in Gnome will have to go into Gnome-tweaks which is readily available and installed on the Gnome desktop version by default. It should also be noted that the default desktop is Budgie and Budgie itself is a derivative of Gnome. Solus uses current packages at least up to the last point version. I noticed on a recent Arch build that I was using kernel 4.20.3 whereas this build was using 4.20

Antergos, a Spanish produced, Arch-based, Unix-Like operating system, is a modern marvel to say the least, when compared to Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro, etc. Antergos works similarly to a standard build of Arch in that it doesn’t really offer many bells and whistles itself, whereas Manjaro uses its own repos, and seems self aware of what it is doing in the way it manages SSDs and partitioning schemes. Antergos is a more bare-bones system, which is not to say it doesn’t add something over vanilla Arch, but it does so in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the user, doesn’t effect the user’s ability to use the operating system in any way. As I previously mentioned, partitioning is different between Antergos and other Arch-based distros like Manjaro in that Antergos pays close attention to detail whilst installing. It creates a separate root and boot partitioning schema on the drive with swap taking the rest. It seems to use a more logical and advanced method that I can only a