James'Techblog

On April 25, 2018, Opera Software launched their new concept browser. This new browser would theoretically revolutionize the way mobile and PC users browse the web. New technology that the team call Flow would sync data from your PC browser directly to your phone without the use of Opera sync services. Opera also has a new search feature called Instant Search that relies on the keyboard shortcuts of Alt and Space bar to activate. This search feature allows the user one search to manager both web requests and tab look ups all in one. Instant Search goes hand in hand with Flow as you can share and comb through tabs and searches between PC and mobile device at the same time. Opera also released a new mobile browser dubbed Touch as a continuation of the Neon project. The interface and other components work the same way in the PC browser with the exception that in my case, the ad blocker got a rework and reset itself somewhat. The only new things that I found were the Flow...

When setting up a new system, or even an old one, installing themes can be tricky on Linux as there aren’t seemingly enough in the repositories. You could spend hours combing through the software installation tool for your distribution, but a better way to find exactly what you prefer is to use a couple of sites called  xfce-look and gnome-look . Both sites contain gtk2 and 3 themes as well as instructions on how to install the themes to your system once you’ve downloaded them. The thing they don’t explain to you is how to open the tarballs or zip archives via terminal, but most systems come with an archive manager by default. In this tutorial, I’ve chosen the Abrus-dark theme found at xfce-look. The Abrus theme is a dark gtk3 theme which converts every window to a pleasant, dark background. I prefer dark colors as it is easier on the eyes. Installing any theme can be this easy; as easy as unpacking a zip and moving the extracted data to another location. In the past, I...

Almost every device today has some sort of preferred file-system that it works with. A lot of the common file-systems do some form of logging(journaling) to record events that effect the stability of the file-system. This has benefits. If one were troubleshooting reasons for a recent failure, it might be easy enough to look in the logs. There are a few exceptions to this, however. Older Windows systems for instance. Windows has gotten better with their choice of file-systems and structure, but this wasn’t alwas the case. Windows is also very well known for almost monthly having to have some sort of maintenance rendered on the host machine. Linux makes things a lot easier in that the file-system is well structured and like is organized with like content across the drive. This makes for faster read times and less fragmentation as a result. Below are a few common file-systems and a bit of information about each one. Btrfs Linux has a lot of different file-systems on w...

Manjaro released a new stable build version 17.1.8 recently. As of April 17, 2018, the release focuses mostly on updating and rebuilding certain packages to improve performance and compliance, however, GNOME did get a big refresh to version 3.28. Deepin did get some attention as well, apparently there were some CPU load issues previously, but those appear to have been fixed now. Still stays true to prior look and feel in XFCE. For those who do not know, Manjaro now ships with their own interpretation of Microsoft-Office-Online. This is a suite of tools which allows users to remotely work on cloud-based documents for work on the go. The suite is meant to be completely compatible with Microsoft Office. Also, Manjaro is currently working on a new desktop project called JADE which is supposed to be more developer friendly. The new project makes heavy use of keyboard shortcuts and gestures. Manjaro developers also have a new line of hardware for sale. The Spitfire appears rather nice ...

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...

Thunar, one of the lighter options in terms of file managers, recently updated to version 1.6.15 in Manjaro. Thunar uses a wrapper library to handle volume management using udev rules in Linux. Recently I noticed that the last two or three versions were actually throwing up notifications falsely about how they could not properly eject removable flash drives within Manjaro. I noticed this on multiple installations across multiple drives. I also noticed this behavior on other machines as well. While the system actually ejects the drive normally, the notifications persist.  Even after the initial eject, I get a delayed error window stating that the drive could not be ejected, however, lsblk clearly states that that is false. Right now, the easiest workaround that I have found is to just use a distribution independent file manager such as PCManfm. Also, running the command sudo eject /dev/$drivename  works equally as efficient. I don't believe that it's strictly a problem wi...

In Linux, there is no right or wrong answer. There are plenty of choices. Don’t like a window manager? Usually you can change that. Don’t like a desktop environment? There is something for everyone. This same amount of choice even bleeds through to the very software applications that you use on a day-to-day basis. Even Windows uses the Aero window manager now, but you don’t really get a choice with that unless you choose to turn off all the visual effects. This will only skim the surface, however, I will cover the multiple choices in desktop environments and window managers in this part one and the upcoming part two of this series. I will briefly explain their strengths and a few of their weaknesses as well. MATE is a modernized fork of GNOME 2 after the advent of G NOME 3. Much to the shugrin of many Linux users at that time, Gnome 3 has had a consistent history of adding things which didn’t need to be added and stripping out things that should have been kept. Most...