Tag: Linux

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Talking about Linux and open source

Yesterday I collaborated with long time friend and fellow Linux enthusiast Phil Shapiro. Recently we had been exploring open source solutions for video conferencing. There are two platforms with which we had some experience and those are BigBlueButton and Jitsi. They’re both great platforms but for slightly different audiences. I have used Jitsi recently to collaborate with local librarians and to meet with friends. BigBlueButton is a platform that really is designed to support online education. It has a tools like a whiteboard that Jitsi doesn’t have. Although you can share your screen on Jitsi and you can record to the cloud if you would like.

Yesterday we planned to collaborate on BigBlueButton but had technical difficulties and switched to Jitsi. Phil used screen capture software and published our conversation on YouTube. It was a good experience. Today I decided to invest in a portable video background so our next effort will look a bit more professional and I need to be a little less wooden.

Phil and I met about ten years ago on Twitter over a common love of Linux and open source software. In the video we discuss our experiences with the Linux Terminal Server project and the advantages of using Koha supported by ByWater Solutions in public libraries. I hope you enjoy the video and our conversation.

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Pandemic is good for Linux

A month or so ago after receiving calls from friends that their Windows machines were having troubles and needed attention I thought this is the perfect time to switch to Linux. Apparently I wasn’t the only person thinking that way. Jason Evangelho who has a regular column at Forbes shared a tweet today that said Ubuntu enjoyed a 599% uptick in users. That’s a very significant number.

https://twitter.com/killyourfm/status/1257932439370039296?s=20

With more and more people working from home and a growing segment of the population videoconferencing in education and other sectors of the economy Linux just makes sense. I’ve been doing a lot of videoconferencing lately to stay in touch with friends and colleagues. Besides great open source conference platforms like Jitsi and BigBlueButton there is Linux support for BlueJeans, Zoom, Skype and Google Hangouts.

You can go purchase a new Linux laptop from System76, Purism, Dell and other vendors but more importantly you can easily refurbish an older system and run Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS or any other Linux distribution and be reasonably productive at a fraction of the price. I have a number of laptops and only one is not running Linux.

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Pop!_OS 20.04 Window Tiling

One of the really useful and neat features of Pop!_OS 20.04 and what sets it apart from the standard Ubuntu 20.04 release is window tiling. It’s quite amazing and I know that I’m going to find this really useful going forward. I really have to hand it to the UX team at System76 who thought of this in the first place. Jason Evangelho has a great article about Pop!_OS and shared this video from System76 about the new UX feature.

If you’re not familiar with Pop!_OS and or new to Linux you really ought to give it a try.

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Upgrade Day

Pop_OS 20.04 was released a couple of days ago and for whatever reason my System76 laptop wouldn’t upgrade to the latest release. I had rebuilt the computer is February after outsmarting myself one day. Learning the hard way is frequently the best way to learn. In any event I had been running Pop_OS 19.10 and the automatic update just wouldn’t work even after following the excellent documentation on System76’s website. I followed the link to download Pop_OS 20.04, burned the ISO to a USB drive, backed up my system with Cronopete and did a fresh install on my Darter Pro. It all went well and now I’m back in business and blogging. I installed Ubuntu 20.-04 earlier this week on a 2015 MacBook Air that I own. Earlier today I installed a Chromebook for a friend and she returned a Dell 7470 that I had loaned her last year. After getting home I installed Pop_OS on that computer too. This has been upgrade day at the house. I’m eager to explore the nuances of Pop_OS 20.04. What version of Linux are you using? Be sure to leave a comment. Some of my favorite Linux apps are Gnome-Tweaks, GnuCash, KSnip and Cronopete. What are your favorite Linux apps?

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Relearning Moodle

I’m going to write an article about how Moodle can be used by teachers forced to be socially distanced from their students during this pandemic. Eleven years ago I set up a Moodle server which I used in a class on digital citizenship. I can’t remember what version of Moodle that was. I liked Moodle because it fit the curriculum I was teaching and the students could access the server from home. It was a virtual machine that I downloaded from Turnkey Linux. My latest install of Moodle is also a VM but it’s running in Virtualbox on a MacBook Pro. I’m running it within my home network.

I wrote an article several years ago about MoodleBox which was a implementation of Moodle with a Raspberry Pi. It was a great implementation of Moodle. One of the new developments for me is that it doesn’t seem to be possible to download ready made courses for Moodle anymore. That used to be a feature. If anyone reading this blog can point me in the direction of pre-made Moodle content I’d appreciate it

I’m also looking for good videos that explain the nuances of Moodle Administration and content creation. Please feel free to comment.

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Linux Mint on MacBook Air

I have an early 2015 MacBook Air that developed problems a couple years ago when it’s battery gave up the ghost after an upgrade to MacOS Mojave. Then last fall the SSD drive gave out. I ordered a new battery and installed it and ordered a 240 GB NVMe drive for the unit and installed it also. I couldn’t get MacOS reinstalled on it. An internet search revealed that I needed a firmware upgrade. Interestingly enough Linux recognizes the SSD without difficulty.

I experimented with Ubuntu 19.10, Fedora and eventually settled on ElementaryOS which worked the best. I wrote an article about how to “Give and old MacBook new life.” Since then I have used the machine as a test platform for various projects including another article about “Why I use WordPress.” I set up WordPress in a virtual machine on that box.

Fast forward to last week when Ubuntu 20.04 was released. I wanted to see how this latest version of Ubuntu would work. I downloaded the ISO on my daily driver which is a System76 Darter Pro running Pop_OS and created a bootable USB with “Popsicle” which is a great tool. I tried a live session and determined that out of the box the new version didn’t support the BroadComm 4360 wireless chipset in the MacBook Air. I did some research and decided I’d try the full install and add the Broadcom software after the fact. I connected to the ethernet port and performed the installation. All went well and then I added the Broadcom drivers later. All seems to be working well now except the FaceTime camera.

Much to my chagrin the next time I started the computer it just would not get past the startup screen and after a number of trials I decided to try Linux Mint XFCE . I had already installed Mint on another PC in February and had the ISO already to burn. I used Popsicle again and then installed Mint on the MacBook Air. After the install was complete and I had rebooted Mint found the Broadcom 4360 in the MacBook and invited me to install the drivers. Linux Mint quickly found my HP printer and installed the necessary software. If anyone reading this blog has suggestions for how to solve the FaceTime camera issue I’d appreciate any suggestions. Once again Linux has extended the life of a five year old computer.

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Linux News

Today was a big day in the Linux community with the release of Ubuntu 20.04. A long time friend of mine reached out to me a couple of days ago asking me to familiarize him again with how to create a bootable USB drive so that he could update his laptop with the latest release of Ubuntu Linux. I sent the directions and today he sent me a text to let me know that the install went great and that he’s very happy with it. You can download your own copy of 20.04 which is called Focal Fossa. My friend Dave said it made his computer faster. What’s under the hood of this latest release. I’ve been a Ubuntu user for fifteen years now. I got my first copy of Ubuntu 5.04 at the Portland Linux User Group (PLUG) while I in Portland on business. I’d been a solid Fedora user up until then. I left the world of RPM for .deb files. At first it all seemed a bit foreign .

$ sudo apt-get install. Now, that’s changed to $ sudo apt install and Fedora is using sudo too. A lot has changed in fifteen years in the Linux community but one thing hasn’t and that is the rock solid reliability of the kernel and the innovation of the communities that support Linux distributions.

Tonight I was working on an installation of WordPress in VM with Virtualbox. I downloaded the .iso from TurnkeyLinux. and built a test WordPress server. I’m writing a “how-to” for H5P which is a great plugin that supports creating, sharing and reusing interactive content in your browser. I was having some problems getting H5P to work properly on this machine. I had to update and upgrade the PHP on the Debian image to get everything working properly. My experience as a Linux Sysadmin came in handy and now H5P is working well.

Are you a Linux user? Do you have any projects your working on? I’d love to hear what you’re doing.

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What is a Happiness Manager?

I’ve been listening to Linux for Everyone since its inception almost two years ago. I’ve been a Linux user for almost twenty years and it’s my daily driver for most of the last fifteen years. Prior to December 2018 most of my LInux machines were repurposed Dell computers. That changed following a trip to Denver in 2018. I was the guest of System76. I was their for the rollout of their Thelio line of Linux desktops. One of the first people I met at the factory was Emma Marshall. She’s the Happiness Manager. Emma is one of the happiest and zaniest people I’ve ever met. I remember walking in the door of the factory and seeing Emma and her team. Hanging from the large LCD display of her computer was a rubber fish. I told her how much I liked the fish as it reminded me of friend I used to teach with. Emma offered to give me the fish as a keepsake. Following the day long factory visit System76 took us to downtown Denver for a wonderful meal and socializing. When it came time for me to leave and hail the Lyft driver who would take me back to the hotel, Emma made sure that I made the right connection. She’s a wonderful person and I was pleased to see that Jason Evangelho had a nice interview with her on his podcast today.

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What would you like to learn?

I’ve been involved with Linux and open source software for almost twenty years now. I’m writing this post using a Linux laptop from System76. I’ve been writing a lot of thought pieces lately which come my heart. Linux and open source is also from my heart.

I was introduced to Linux around 1997. I bought a book with a CD in it and tried to install on an older 386 PC. I could only get a command prompt. A year later I bought Red Hat 6.1. I installed it on an HP Vectra that had been upgraded to 233 MMX with a Cyrix chip. I got the GUI and it ran well. A couple of years later I built my first Linux server which was for web filtering using Squid, SquidGuard and later Dansguardian. One thing led to another and soon I built a web server, a network attached storage and began to try it on older laptops that were in sitting in closets where I worked.

I started distro hopping around then too. I moved from Red Hat to Suse to Mandrake and then back to Red Hat and later Fedora. I 2005 while on a trip to meet with K12 LTSP team in Portland, Oregon I got introduced to Ubuntu. We had been invited to the PLUG (Portland Linux User Group) and they were handing out Ubuntu 5.04 CDs. I took it home and installed it on a laptop I had been using. I didn’t like it at first but it did support the wireless card I had in the laptop.

Over the years I’ve run many different Linux distributions. I’ve run Centos, Red Hat, Fedora and Ubuntu on file servers and desktops. In the past six years I’ve been toying with the Raspberry Pi and Raspbian.

There are lots of great open source applications that I use everyday. WordPress is one of them. It’s my favorite blogging platform. I use GnuCash. I used to use a proprietary solution until I made the switch four years ago. I’ve learned Python in the past five years and although I’m just a beginner I’m keen to learn more and share with others.

Are you a Linux user? Would you like to learn? Let me know in the comments.

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Here are some great reasons you should use Linux

This video was shared on Twitter and Facebook today by System76. If you’re not familiar they are a company based in Denver, Colorado that builds and sells computer systems that run Linux. These systems feature their own version of Linux which is called Pop!_OS or you can opt for Ubuntu 18.10. I recently visited their facility and was very impressed with their entire operation. This video sums up very nicely a half dozen reasons why you too should consider Linux for your computer operating system.