Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

One way or another, this is the equation: Linux/BSD use + time = You're an expert.

As a Ruby user and programmer, I thought that Linux distributions and BSD projects offered packaged versions of Ruby gems to add sanity and stability to a computer. However, the consensus is that the reason Linux distributions and BSD projects package Ruby gems is to satisfy the dependencies for other Ruby software they package.

I knew from the release notes that Debian 10 included “driverless” printing, but I couldn’t find any printers in GNOME Setings, even though I have a wireless printer on my local network.

I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.

Am I the only person to notice that comic book shop-owning Stuart (Kevin Sussman) on the "The Big Bang Theory" is wearing an Ubuntu T-shirt on the episode airing Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017?

How could I have missed ONLYOFFICE? If not for a How to Forge article on installing it, I would have never known that it existed as a hosted alternative to Google Docs/Spreadsheets or that you can self-host the software, though I’m not sure how functional the roll-your-own version is at this point.

After saying I wouldn’t jump into a Fedora 21 upgrade, I rather quickly had a change of heart and mind, ran a Fedup upgrade and am now running Fedora 21 on my go-to HP Pavilion g6 laptop. With Wayland.

Demand for Fedora 21, the project's first release in at least a year, and the first to offer distinct Workstation, Cloud and Server products is so high, it's overloading many of the project's services. As the message on the Fedora Infrastructure Status page says, "High traffic due to F21 release, try again later"

Even though Node.js is an open-source project, its direction is largely guided by the for-profit Joyent. And that doesn’t sit so well with some Node users/developers. A group of them just started a fork of Node.js called io.js, which is now living on GitHub and prepared to take the Node code in a community-driven direction.

I needed to do a bare-metal install of Fedora 21 today, and I used the beta image for the live Xfce Spin. I didn’t do anything special. The whole disk was devoted to Fedora. I encrypted everything.

Through the GNOME Tweak Tool, I discovered the GNOME 3 Adiwata Global Dark Theme, which makes GNOME 3 looks so good, I find myself leaving Xfce aside for the time being.

The good news is that I can run X in OpenBSD 5.6 on my AMD A4 APU-equipped HP Pavilion g6 laptop. Before now, starting X would cause a kernel panic. The bad news is that the laptop runs very, very hot. But there's a way to shave 20 degrees C right off the top with a single command.

As much as I've praised the Debian installer in the past, and I'll praise it a little bit right now, I will also drop it in a hole and throw a shallow layer of dirt over it just because.

My AMD Catalyst (aka fglrx) trouble in Fedora is well-documented. Biggest of the big at this point is that the proprietary AMD driver DOES NOT work with GNOME 3. So I did a test install of Debian Jessie last week, and the same thing happened: GNOME 3 runs fine with the open-source Radeon driver, not at all with the closed-source fglrx.

There was a time when Nux, developer of the best CentOS spin for desktops, was game for producing a Stella 7. But looking at the Stella forums today, that doesn’t seem likely. No matter, with the Nux 'dextop' repo, you can have a CentOS desktop with most of the packages that are hard to find anywhere else.

Dropbox just dropped a bomb in the cloud-storage race, upping the amount of space for customers with its $99/year “Pro” account from the not-nearly enough 100 GB to a very-comfortable 1 TB. That’s 1 terabyte, as in 1000 GB, for those counting along at home. It makes Dropbox that much more compelling. And it had to happen.

I still see people installing new Linux distributions, one after the other, on their "production" laptops and desktops. I don't. Sure, I fire up live images via USB or old-timey CD/DVD fairly regularly. But I almost never do full, bare-metal installs on hardware I'm actually using.

Fedora‘s motto is “Freedom. Friends. Features. First.” I’m here to tell you Fedora lives up to that billing. Why do I say this now? I’ve just had another positive experience with Fedora, this time in finding a bug in my system, adding my information to an existing bug report and now seeing updated packages pushed to the Fedora 20 stable repositories and onto my system, where the problem has been fixed.

Jordi Mallach details in a post I found via Google Plus why GNOME should remain the default desktop environment in Debian Jessie despite the usual switch to Xfce prompted by a desire to keep the ISO image at CD size. You might be surprised at how I arrive at the same conclusion despite not using GNOME due to my own personal technical issues.

Problems on the Linux desktop happen. Despite everything, I’ve been very happy with Fedora. Especially with Xfce. With the help of RPM Fusion and other savvy Fedora users, I’ve been able to run every kind of multimedia I want. Just about everything works most of the time. And despite the constant newness, things seem remarkably stable.