Skip to main content

Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
Post a Comment

SOLUS 4 FORTITUDE RELEASED

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 latest lts branch kernels. The distribution has three main desktop environments, including Mate, Gnome and Budgie with KDE Plasma in development. One of the most notable changes is the new standard dark theme in this new release. As a rolling distro, Solus doesn’t require existing users to reinstall, simply running updates should suffice, however, if you feel like you need to refresh an existing partition with a new piece of eye candy, this release will definitely cater to that. With budgie being bumped to 10.5, there is better usability and more customization to Raven and the panel. The team behind the distro released this version to tie into the new Budgie version 11 coming later this year. Budgie 11 will be a complete rewrite using qt elements in place of Gnome or gtk ones. For those Gnome lovers out there, don’t be worried, Gnome will upgrade to 3.32 by then as well. As with the previous release, the default browser of choice in this distro is Firefox, however, users who want to use an optional one may choose from either Epiphany, Falkon, Vivaldi, Vivaldi-Snapshot, Google-Chrome or Google-Chrome-Beta which are all present in the repos, but also you can install unsupported browsers like Waterfox, Basilisk and Pale Moon. The distribution is based out of Ireland and is independent and from scratch. Users of this distro will be happy on Intel and AMD cpu’s and gpu’s as these are directly supported. Nvidia in my own experience, especially older systems, are harder to install to, but don’t let that discourage you from trying. Solus is a great distribution and is off to a really good and fresh new start with all the changes taking place.

UPDATE: Correction, it appears that Solus has decided to abandon the idea of moving from gtk over to qt, at least entirely, as this would require more man power and time than desired, however, they are bumping gtk up to version 4 a bit ahead of everyone though. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NOSCRIPT CONFIGURATION FOR PALE MOON SPECIFICALLY

I wrote an article before about making Pale Moon more private. I covered a few of the settings and back end changes I make each time I install it. I mentioned Noscript, but I didn’t give any details about how I set it up. First though, you have to get the version already marked for your version of “Firefox” or in this case, Pale Moon. If you went to https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/ you would probably find the Pale Moon addons page devoted to the newest possible Noscript being marked specifically for Pale Moon. Other versions may work, but these are hybrid addons and the closer we get to Noscript 10, the less I trust it to work with Pale Moon specifically. I just opt to stick with 5.0.6. There have been people asking about what happens when Maone, the developer stops supporting the hybrid versions of Noscript, “Will it work with Pale Moon?” Why yes it will. Noscript blocks scripts, that’s its main function and it will do that as long as Java script exists on a page.
Post a Comment
Read more

SSD PARTITION ALIGNMENT

I was searching for more information regarding SSDs last night as that is what I now use, I found an interesting little tip that most users will never have to worry about, but people using Arch Linux, Manjaro or Windows that was cloned from another drive may want to consider checking this. The Partition manager within Linux normally takes good care to ensure that you have some free space to be used by the SSD in the event that a cell becomes worn out or corrupted. Also, Linux generally ensures that a proper amount of unallocated drive space is set aside preceeding the partition. However, on my own image of Manjaro, I discovered that this was not the case. The partition was “out of alignment”. To fix this situation, I found an article on  Lifehacker that went into instructional detail about how to solve this from a live environment or an image of Gparted . Gparted is a separate live environment of Linux that is based on Debian and uses Gparted as the main tool to manage par
Post a Comment
Read more

PALE MOON PRIVACY SETUP

I did a review of Pale Moon back when 27.6.2 came out in linux. I had mostly great things to say about the browser then and my feelings towards it have not changed. Pale Moon is a very useful tool for scowering the net. It has privacy at its core with a few implementations made by Moonchild, the lead developer, built in. I also mentioned the point that Pale Moon has a canvas poisoning feature in the backend, however, I wasn’t very clear about how to turn it on. I thought in this tutorial, I’d show with a series of screen shots, some of the useful settings and preferences that I change to make Pale Moon a bit more private. I also thought I’d take this time to rant a little more about some of the not so savory issues with Firefox which have recently come under scrutiny by various people in the the Linux world. First order of business, if you haven’t heard, Mozilla recently added an extension into their browser which gave people ads. That’s right, they were ads for a specific t
Post a Comment
Read more