Introducing the Linux Mint Devuan Edition

The Mint project has been a long-time favorite among Linux users who are mainly home users. Its friendly and common sense approach to a distribution appeals to many people who want to run something with the Linux kernel on their desktop. There's ample testimony of this, from the inception and creation of the Cinnamon desktop as common sense, traditional but still sleek and modern alternative to the evolving desaster and dumbing-down assault from other desktops at the time to coming up with great little tools like the Warpinator for file sharing on a LAN, the Hypnotix IPTV app and other little improvements to make things just a little easier, for the average Joe and the Techie who just wants to get things done alike.

Staying Anonymous with Tor: How to Specify Exit Nodes by Country

This update draws on an older article but is pared down to the basics of specifying exit nodes when routing traffic through the Tor network for people who for various reasons want to be in control of where they seem to come from. As you will be aware, Tor bounces traffic between three different nodes and randomly rotates exit points. You may prefer to appear to be located in a particular country.

Installing MATE as an Afterthought: How to avoid icon clutter and set the desktop to $HOME/Desktop?

Things have been rather busy with non-tech related stuff, completing my dissertation and writing an article for a journal so apologies for the very infrequent postings. However, we've got a small update today. You might have come across the same problem when adding the MATE desktop environment to a pre-existing install, instead of just using Point Linux or the Salix Mate spin which already come all set up for you and polished. If you install yourself, small niggles may remain.

Youtube-dl: Download Videos from the Command Line

Try youtube-dl to download videos to hard drive and watch them later when not connected. It uses the MIT licence. Youtube-dl is a command line tool and thus has to be run from the terminal.
Enter youtube-dl, the -t switch, the username and password for your account, and then the URL of the resource you wish to download which you can get from your browser's location bar, like this:

youtube-dl -t -u username -p password http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2S9rwyQkJE

The -t switch means use the title of the video we're downloading. Enter 'man youtube-dl' for more options.  The application also prints the size of the video and the estimated time it will take, the ETA, to the terminal. Wait for it to finish and enjoy.

Adding LXDE to Slackware 13.37

Slackware does not come with LXDE on the CD/DVD so how do you get it? The hard way is to go to Slackbuilds.org and do a search. This will come up with a package list that needs to be built in a particular order. Nothing too dramatic as it is a relatively small number of packages, and dependencies are well documented on every page.

Compiling the Kernel in Slackware

One of the reasons why I chose Slackware is that the kernel and other included software is presented vanilla and unpatches, as intended by the developers. That makes recompiling a lot easier in my experience than in some of the other major distributions, no finger pointing, where one first has to track down and apply distribution specific patches.

Building Chromium for Slackware64

Chromium, the browser, can sometimes seem a bit evasive on the Slackware64 platform. For a start, the binaries more commonly distributed are either deb or rpm files, and although Slackware with the 13.37 release has gone the extra mile to accomodate a new browser and added a build script for Google-Chrome under extra/ in the repositories, there is none for Chromium.

From ArchBang to SlackBang

If you looked at the ArchBang website over the last few days you would have read that founder WillXtreme is retiring from the project leadership due to changes in real life and other pursuits. A few people also involved in the development and who were quite active in the forum for example and with tips on their own blogs, like pablokal, will continue the project.

Step-by-Step Vinux 3.2.1 Install Guide

The Vinux distribution has been optimized for users to be able to operate a computer, surf the internet etc. all via text to speech tools and the keyboard. It is geared towards disabled users and in particular towards people with VI needs. I have written about it recently and am now making an install guide for the latest version available to help ease the transition for people not familiar with installing a linux system, as additional aid to the instructions on the project website.

Overclock Your New and Cheaply Bought HP Touchpad

If you were one of the lucky, or organized, people to get a HP webOS tablets for £89/£99 respectively for the 16 and 32 GB editions. here's your chance to get more put of it with the so-called Uberkernel to 1.5 GHz and even up to 1.9 GHz apparently. This should get rid of any lag on this device. Or perhaps just install one of the many Linux distributions?

Using Tor to View Restricted Video Sites Internationally

Disclaimer: Streaming movies and videos over the Tor network can slow it down significantly as capacities are donated and bandwidth varies hugely. You may get better performance by investing in a VPN.

How many times have you been stuck in another country unable to watch your favorite shows and channels? Or perhaps you don't reside there and want to watch them anyway, expat or other? Hulu, Spotify and BBC iPlayer all check IP addresses to ensure you are connecting from the country they are serving, in the BBC's case because they don't want you to get a free ride without a TV license.

How to Enable Broadcom Wireless on Slackware 13.37

This one has got a lot easier over the last releases. There is now a build script on slackbuilds.org that allows you to build a package with the latest driver from staging as kernel module. Choose the first one on the list, unless you want to mess around with fwcutter. I don't, and I always found broadcom-sta to work perfectly for me in Slackware and Arch. It's different in Debian and related distros though where it's called brcm80211. This package supports chipsets including but not limited to BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4321, and BCM4322. Mine is a BCM43225.

Prettyfying Your LXDE

LXDE, the Lightweight X11 desktop environment, has gained quite a following over recent years seemingly coming from nowhere, and many distribution spins are now using it for their user interface. This is really a follow-up to my previous post about beautyfying Xfce. Because both are using gtk+ the same themes will work and the same engines are needed to make them look as intended.

Beautifying the Xfce Desktop

Regular readers will know Xfce is one of my favorite environments, and the one I have been using for the longest period of time, since early 2006 to be exact. It already comes with a large selection of themes and typically all you need to do is get a few icon sets to spruce up your desktop and you're done. Or keep using Tango, nice and simple.

Arch Linux: How to Make Resume from Hibernate Work

I usually don't use the Hibernate function much, but lately I have been wondering why it was that my Arch installation did not resume from swap when my new Slackware 13.37 on the same laptop had no such problems.
Two things. I found I didn't actually have a swap partition in Arch as through some fooling around a while ago the UUID of the swap partition had changed, and Arch identifies partitions by this ID by default.

Installing LXDE on Slackware & Salix 13.37

Slackware 13.37 is out. So what do you do if you need or want a light weight desktop environment for an old machine and LXDE is your favorite? You could wait for Salix to catch up and release their own spin as they always do because they are fully compatible and you could just pull it in with slapt-get from their repos. You could build it yourself using the scripts at SlackBuilds.org, but they need a bit additional work and you need to figure out the build sequence.

Linux Mint: Getting Debian via the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) - and making it more Debian-like

A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to have at least one copy of all the major branches of Linux distributions on this laptop, if only for troubleshooting and having a reference point. Debian or something derived from it has been missing from all my machines for a while now, so with the release of "Squeeze" it seemed like a good time to put a copy back on.

I've tried Linux Mint 7 in the past, and, while nice, it wasn't for me. It was choc full of mono apps with everything from Gnome-Do to the more ubiquitous F-spot and full of somebody elses choices I did not agree with. More work to make it work my way than it`s worth.

How to Change the Default Theme in SLiM (Login Manager)

Archbang and a few others use SLiM, the Simple Login Manager, by default, which keeps things lean because SLiM does not have the dependency requirements of GDM or KDM. Actually the only dependencies are X11, libpng, libjpeg and freetype. It´s a great manager for desktop environment/window manager independent login, but does not support remote login functionalities. Themes however are supported and several are included from the start.

How to add Broadcom 43xx wireless to Scientific Linux 5.5

This one is a bit more involved than getting Broadcom wireless support in Fedora 14, but not that hard either. It should also be valid for CentOS 5.

First of all, if you haven't already done so, ugrade to the latest kernel, at present 2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 .

First you will have to add the EPEL repository because when getting the relevant broadcom packages they rely on this to be enabled for dependency resolution.
EPEL provides add-on packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x and 4.x releases and compatible derivatives (and also for 6.x in view of the upcoming release). EPEL packages are in most cases built or derived from the equivalent ones in Fedora repository and maintained by the same people. You can read more about the whole project here to find out more about the quality of packages etc, or just skip ahead to add the repository.

Currently, what you want is this command:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm'

Enter it into a terminal and hit enter. Yes, epel-release-5-4 is correct, there is no 5.5 yet.

Then in Yum Extender or whatever your package manager of choice in Scientific Linux you should already have the Atrpms repository listed. Enable it and the EPEL one and refresh the package listing. Make sure you're looking at available packages through the filter, not updates or installed. Search for broadcom and the correct packages available for your architecture should show up.

Choose broadcom-wl and one of the available kernel modules and install, chances are you want the first  

broadcom-wl-kmdl-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 kernel modules for the Linux kernel package:

kernel-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5.x86_64.rpm

and not the centos.plus or xen ones.

Reboot, see your new interface detected, enter your credentials into the NetworkManager applet and be online wirelessly! The connection will probably be a bit slower than in Fedora 14.

I installed SL 5.5 a few weeks ago on this laptop to see how it would fare, but there seems to be no guide like this around, only half finished threads and recommendations to use ndiswrapper, which for some reason did not work for me. Setting this up in Fedora got me thinking and it wasn't more than a few minutes after that I had set it up in Scientific Linux as well.

Did others before figure this all out on their own? Going by some threads, not everybody did.

In SL/RHEL/CentOS 6 it shall be more straight forward, probably more like in recent Fedora releases (I hope).

How to add Broadcom 43xx wireless to Fedora 14

This one is easy, I've never had to do so little fiddling and searching:

Go to http://rpmfusion.org/ and add both the free and the non-free repositories unless the latter one is against your philosophical stance.

You can do this via graphical setup, installing a small rpm file that will set this up for you, or at the command line where you can basically just copy the commands into your terminal (you have to become root for this).

Update your repositories and install all updates prior to proceeding.

Search for broadcom-wl, install the package and reboot.

Voila, there you are. Enter network credentials into NetworkManager or Wicd if you prefer that and you're online. It's never been easier.

And here you can find the respective page on the fedora community website, with links to more wireless solutions.