LINUX

Every so often I find myself with an idle hour and decide to use that time to package some new software for Linux. A common activity among nerds, I’m sure ;). This blog post is a write up of what I did, and why, which may be useful to others with time on their hands.

I keep meaning to live stream when I do, but on this occasion I had a bad hair day was also listening to and engaging with a podcast, so it wasn’t practical. In leiu of that, while the information is fresh in my head - the morning after - I thought I’d write down some notes here.

In the mid-90s I was an avid user of online conferencing system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange). CIX was built using the CoSy Conferencing system from the University of Guelph, which has since been open sourced. Think of it like a dial-up or telnet-accessed forum or message board with a nerd-heavy userbase.

Each day I’d dial-up to download messages, then read & respond offline. Later in the day I’d re-connect to send my responses and download more messages. The graphical desktop application AMEOL (A Most Excellent Offline-Reader) presented the topics and threads in an easy-to-read way.

Like many in development-oriented roles, I’m frequently running long-executing tasks on my workstation, while I get on with a sword fight, or making a cup of coffee.

More seriously, I do often leave a software build, or packaging script running, while I context-switch to answer support requests, proof-read a blog post, or prepare for a meeting. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded when that long-runner finishes, otherwise I might forget it’s sat there, all lonely in another workspace somewhere on my computer.

I currently run Ubuntu 20.10 on my main desktop PC. GNOME Shell is the default desktop, and while it’s great, one very useful feature is the ability to supplement or alter the default behaviour with extensions and other add-ons. Ubuntu ships with a couple of extensions by default, but I’ve added a few on top, and this blog post details what they are and how to get them, in no particular order…

As you may or may not be aware, I work for Canonical on Snapcraft and Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu as my daily driver, and spend a lot of time maintaining snap packages, and listening to developers and users talk about software packaging, publishing, delivery and use.

Over time I’ve collected a bunch of virtual notes in my head. Much of it has been turned into documentation, but often the information is rather spread out. I wanted to “brain dump” a bunch of notes, for common things people ask me about snap, snapd and snapcraft. Here’s the first set, about snap / snapd. A later post will focus on snapcraft.

Some years ago I switched my blog from Wordpress to Nikola. I wrote a blog post about the move, but within a year or so, I’d pretty much stopped blogging completely.

More recently I discovered Hugo, and used it for a couple of other sites I own. popeyspades is a simple blog to promote a game server I was running at the time.

Make A Linux App is a single-serving site that seeks to promote app development for Linux and discourage the proliferation of Linux distributions.

This article previously appeared on listed.to. I’ve moved it here to consolidate my blogging

About 10-15 years ago, back in the heady days of Hampshire Linux User Group, we had a Wiki. It ran a heavily patched version of UseModWiki that we’d modified to add anti-spam and anti-abuse protection. We’d affectionately called it “AbuseMod”. It’s still kinda there, but I don’t think the content is ever touched. We used it to co-ordinate meetings, take notes, and some other fun sillyness. One such fun was Hugo’s Random Benchmark (Note: Not a benchmark). It was a single line we’d each run on our computers to see whose was fastest (Note: Again, not a good benchmark). It did this by counting to 100 Million in Perl. It’s a super simple single-line shell script which just times how long the computer takes for perl to go from 1 to 1e8 (100 million).

I recently took delivery of a new HP ProLiant MicroServer which I wanted to use for various small/home office server type tasks. It’s a cracking little server, ideal for small offices and home users who want a small, low-power server. With only one fan in the case it’s fairly quiet with most noise coming from the hard disk supplied, and any more you put in it.

The reason I got it was because HP are currently giving £100 cash-back (until end of January 2011) on the ProLiant MicroServer. Given how cheap it already is the cash-back makes it even more attractive! It’s not super powerful and certainly not “pro server grade” kit, but perfect for my needs.

As regular readers of my blog may recall, I recently gave my brother a PC running Ubuntu Linux. He uses it for surfing the web, getting email and chatting online. He also has an HP PSC 1610 printer/scanner/copier which works under Linux pretty well. He has a Dlink WAP/Modem/Router providing his ADSL connection via wired ethernet.

I had a phone call from him a week or so ago telling me the PC was broken. To cut a long story short he had difficulty getting a disc removed from the CDROM drive and eventually resorted to pulling the power cable out. This resulted in filesystem errors when he rebooted. I’ve not had many of these types of problems so don’t have a huge amount of experience in the area. So I talked him through removing the hard disk (which was easy because the PC he has is very modular) and he sent it to me.