James'Techblog

  Solus Linux is a really innovative distribution in how it handles its curated list of packages and third-parties. Solus also has a ground-up project of Budgie desktop which is very modern and stylish. EOPKG is the preferred package management across all of their desktop offerings which is forked from PiSi package manager originally created for Pardus Linux. Solus has not only forked the original package manager, they have made great improvements in its built in feature list as well. Solus Linux is an independent distribution and so is the EOPKG package management system as Pardus no longer caters to PiSi. EOPKG has many features now that weren’t included in earlier releases of Solus; One such feature is the ability to easily roll back updates with a single line command. EOPKG stores history of every operation done since system installation. This includes updates and updates to the repositories. To view the history of the package management, simply enter sudo eopkg history in the ...

Arch Linux is one of the most up-to-date Linux distributions out there, and no doubt one of the most enigmatic with all of the Snaps vs. Flatpak arguments going on in the Linux world today. Ubuntu no longer compiles Chromium to be packaged on apt repositories anymore. For this piece of software your choices are limited to a snap package. In direct opposition with this, Linux Mint have decided to not allow Snapd or Chromium to be installed on their system through apt by default, but rather give users documentation links on how to go about compiling or installing Chromium through some other means on their systems instead. While this can be annoying, there is Arch Linux which still gives users a pre-compiled and easily installable version from their repos. Arch Linux is also fast and very privacy conscious as there is no software preloaded to track users, nor is there any other software than what the user might want on his or her system. While Arch Linux isn’t for beginners...

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.  ...

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...