Admin, Author at Linux Tips

Linux History: A Reminder!

I’ve nearly finished Wiley’s 10th Edition of the Linux Bible and it’s a wonderful book. In it, way back near the start, there’s this gem – and it really tells us how far Linux has come.

Some histories of Linux begin with the following message entitled “What would you like to
see most in minix?” posted by Linus Torvalds to the comp.os.minix newsgroup on August
25, 1991, at
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA/SwRavCzVE7gJ

Linus Benedict Torvalds

Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional
like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting
to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS
resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical
reasons, among other things). . .Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise
I’ll implement them 🙂

Linus (torvalds@[redacted].fi)

PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT
protable[sic] (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support
anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

Anyone reading this site will not need elaboration. Man, how far has Linux come? How far will it go? Will there someday be a small project that takes off and supplants Linucus Rex?

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A Good Weather App For Linux?

Over the years, weather applications for Linux have come and gone. Finding a good one is a pain in the butt. I’ve generally used the same application, inasmuch as possible, for quite some time.

The name of the application is My Weather Indicator and it can be found here.

It allows you to have a couple of locations, provides forecasts, updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, is really minimal, has notifications that you can actually disable, sticks to the system theme just fine, and even has automatic location discovery based on your public IP address.

Most importantly, it works and stays out of your way unless you want to use it. You can look in your system notification and see the temperature and conditions at a glance. You can click on either of the locations, or just the single location if you prefer, and know what to expect.

It’s also trivial to install, especially if you’re using a system that supports PPAs.

{!{code}!}czo5OTpcInN1ZG8gYWRkLWFwdC1yZXBvc2l0b3J5IHBwYTphdGFyZWFvL2F0YXJlYW8NCnN1ZG8gYXB0IHVwZGF0ZQ0Kc3VkbyBhcHR7WyYqJl19IGluc3RhbGwgbXktd2VhdGhlci1pbmRpY2F0b3JcIjt7WyYqJl19{!{/code}!}

Then, you can start it from your application menu, set the preferences to start at boot, and not have to worry about that again. From there, just go ahead and configure your location(s) and other settings, offering both imperial and metric measurements and the ability to blend them, as well as even a variety of icons.

It’s small, it’s simple, it does one thing – and it does it well. It tells you the weather.

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Microsoft Edge for Linux?

I wanted to test it out to see how well it works. With just one tab open, there are 13 instances of ‘msedge’ tasks running. It’s consuming quite a bit of CPU for being so idle. It also lags a bit visually. It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s there. Opening menus has a small lag, for example. As does typing this text – though it’s not using an insane amount of CPU cycles.

It’s definitely a dev build, and I’d expect the final product to be more polished. I am unable to login to the browser, so I can’t share settings and a profile across multiple instances. That doesn’t yet work, but it does give you a helpful message that lets you know that it’s not yet supported.

I do not see me using this as my daily driver, nor even one of my many browser instances that I have configured for different tasks, but here we are. It has a nice dark mode available by default. I haven’t tried to install any extensions or anything. It’s an intuitive browser to use, as would be expected as a Microsoft product.

It was trivial to install. They provide a .deb or an .rpm. So, you shouldn’t need to work hard to install it on quite a variety of distros. You can find it packaged here. This is, interesting, the first MS product I’ve used in a very long time. I don’t even us VS Code, though I probably should give that a try.

I suppose that I’d keep running it, if I actually cared. After all, my running it would report my uses back to the mothership and they’d theoretically improve the browser because of it. Alas, I really don’t care. It’s great to see MS releasing opensource software. It’s great to have another browser alternative. I just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

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When Did I Install Linux

Find Linux Installation Date

If you can’t remember when you installed Linux, you can try this:

ls -lt /var/log/installer

The output will be similar to this:

$ ls -lt /var/log/installer
total 6796
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 431 Jul 4 16:25 telemetry
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 60 Jul 4 16:25 media-info
-rw------- 1 syslog adm 6548069 Jul 4 16:25 syslog
-rw------- 1 root root 386671 Jul 4 16:16 partman
-rw------- 1 root root 2867 Jul 4 16:15 debug
-rw------- 1 root root 18 Jul 4 16:07 version
-rw------- 1 root root 1812 Jul 4 16:04 casper.log

As you can see, it was installed on the 4th of July. Note that it doesn’t give the year. You should probably already know what year it was installed.

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How to Sanitize EXIF Data From Your Pictures

Linux Exif Data and Personal Security

When you take pictures, be it with your cell phone or with your digital camera, the software adds data to the pictures. This data is called the Exif data. If your camera supports it, and if you have it enabled, it will encode all sorts of private data along with your image data.

Needless to say, this is a potential privacy nightmare and people have not only been doxxed this way but people have ended up in jail because of leaving the data in their photos. Now, frankly, if you’re taking images that’d get you tossed into jail, I’m pretty much okay with that. For the rest of you, read on…

First, install exiftool from your default repositories. If you’re using apt, it’s quite simple and almost certainly in your default repositories.

sudo apt install exiftool

Now, let’s make it work. Open your .bash_aliases file, assuming you have one, and add the following line:

alias picclean="exiftool -overwrite_original -all= *.png && exiftool -overwrite_original -all= *.jpg && echo $PWD 'images cleaned for privacy sake!'"

Now, reload your aliases with:

source ~/.bash_aliases

To use this, open the directory that houses the photos you want to share with your terminal and just enter:

picclean

That will clean all your .png and .jpg files. That’s also enough information for you to customize it for your system, should you have a different configuration than I.

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