Criteria to Choose a GNU/Linux Operating System To Help You and Organization

There are many choices of GNU/Linux operating systems like from A to Z including Arch and Zorin. These criteria are subjective and my own opinions but you may find these useful to you and organization to consider one for long time use by eliminating many of not needed or unfit ones. You can see mine at Hardware page.

Mass Production

Has a distro been mass produced, or not? A mass produced distro is like standard operating systems, such as Windows and Android, which all of them are delivered to the end-users preinstalled on computers and not as separate things. Please not forget that Windows and Android adopted by people because of mass production, otherwise, they would be extremely far less popular. Mass production is a sign of luck of an OS, also seriousness of its developers, which would upgrade it into a platform which people could look into and rely upon. If a distro is/has not mass produced, then it is a distro you can consider not to choose. Excellent examples of mass produced distros are, among others, PureOS (Librem), Ubuntu (Dell, Lenovo), Kubuntu (KFocus), KDE Neon (Slimbook), Ubuntu MATE (Entroware), Pop_Os! (System76), elementary OS and Zorin (Star Labs, LaptopWithLinux), Manjaro (PineBook), Trisquel (Respects Your Freedom, ThinkPenguin), openSUSE (Tuxedo), and Fedora (Lenovo).

User Interface User Can Use

Does a distro have user interface end-user, including kids and grandmas if any, can immediately use, or not? You would not want distro without appearance (black and white like MSDOS) or with appearance but poor in what end-user’s needs, or with appearance end-user cannot use. This means mostly familiarity based on prior experience for the end-users and how good it reduces teaching effort to the teaching users. You would not want distro that resembles no one, not similar to anything, or not clear to use/teach, as it would waste your own time and organization that you want to help. There are several hints, and one of them is, check if the file manager supports file searching like standard search one can do with Google Search, Windows and Android. This criteria involves selecting by considering end-user’s situations. For most computing users are familiar with Windows, and if you are, it is wise to choose KDE (Kubuntu), Cinnamon (Mint), or MATE (Mint and Trisquel). For most mobile device users who are familiar with Android more than Windows, and if you included here, it is wise to choose GNOME (Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian). For completely new users without prior computing experience, and if you are in this group, it is wise to choose KDE.

Survive and Early Birth Date

Is a distro old and surviving, or not? Check your distro’s initial release year. 15 years is a minimum age of a long living, old-enough distro. If one is new, or discontinued, then it is a distro you can consider not to choose. It is wise that you do not tend to choose newly launched distros. You would not want a distro that would be discontinued next year or is in an unclear development state or is already discontinued. Dormant development, lack of developer team members, or even being officially discontinued is not a luck sign you should be aware of. Surviving, matured distros are not many, among them are Slackware and Debian (1993), Red Hat and SUSE (1994), Fedora (2003) and openSUSE (2005), Ubuntu (2004) and Trisquel (2007), Kubuntu (2005) and Linux Mint (2006).

Teacher

Do you have a teacher who teach you the distro, or not? Please not forget that at our earliest days, we receive computing though teachers speaking in our own language, for years, so that we can operate Windows or MacOS. Learning computing is not automatic, not instant either, but is a process. A teacher could be your father, like most other people, your school teacher, or a community, either local or online, or your fellow user friends. It is even better if the teacher really teaches that distro as part of students computing for years at school either local or online. If a distro does not have a teacher you can find, or a community, or a fellow friend that use it near your place, then it is a distro you can consider not to use. You would not want a distro where nobody helps you, nobody you can talk to, nobody to teach you, or nothing you can read from. (On the other hand, if you are a teacher who has been teaching a distro for years to students, then it is wise to choose that distro to end-users and organization you want to help. This is exactly why Mass Production criterion is important. And this is exactly where Practice what you preach! really matters. If you want other people to use a product, you teach them how to use it, not just leaving them alone in the dark.) For your information, the excellent example, real worldwide community here without doubt is Ubuntu family.

Security Team and Advisories

Does a distro have a security team (the people) and a security advisory (the security updates bulletin), or not? If one does not, then it is a distro you can consider to not choose.  You would not want a distro not serious enough to not have its own dedicated security team and advisories. Most distros except just a few does not have these, among them which have are Arch, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

You can consider a distro that fulfills all or most of these criteria to be the one you choose.

Comments? Please kindly send me email or message it to my XMPP or Matrix as comments are off here.

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Install GNU/Linux on External SDCard with Btrfs

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Some reviews I’ve written on UbuntuBuzz lately about Bionic Beta 2 flavors, are, all installed on a 16GB SanDisk SDCard using a USB card reader. Not only Bionic, but Trisquel prerelease version is also installed there. One common problems among all systems I’ve installed there is they are all broken after one or two times of using. Broken here means failure in the filesystem, aka, corrupted, aka fsck checking needed. And in all systems after I did fsck on each of them, all the data inside the partition are gone (deleted, or removed into lost+found/ directory). So this breakage was the problem.

I want to solve this problem, however. And finally I think “how about changing the filesystem to btrfs?”. Yes, as you could see on UbuntuBuzz, all my tutorials recommend EXT4, because I myself only use EXT4 in all time. So this time I tried to change it to BTRFS. I installed Trisquel 8.0 Final Stable two days ago and yes! The problem seems gone. I can use the SDCard with Trisquel over BTRFS there without breakage, without fsck checking too, and without corrupting the partition! Then it is solved for now. This way I can continue my review to the new Trisquel and more. Ah, yes, I should say that installing with EXT4 into SDCard takes 30 minutes, while with BTRFS I found it takes 1 hours.

However, I don’t know if the same problem could happen again in next time. Walhamdulillah.

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Install Zekr Quran Reader Program on Ubuntu 18.04

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

I find today this Zekr’s mailing list article Running Zekr on Ubuntu 18.04 by brother Mashaal M Alghamdi (may Allah bless him). To sum it up:

• You install Java Runtime Environment (JRE) by the command line sudo apt-get install default-jre
• You download the Zekr package file either 32 bit or 64 bit version from Sourceforge
• You extract the package, and you get a zekr.sh shell file
• You execute the zekr.sh by the command line ./zekr.sh and finally Zekr Quran Reader running

For KDE Plasma users, and some Ubuntu users, you may find Zekr experiencing error about Java saying “org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)]” and so on. To solve this error, just install a package: sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 and Zekr should running without problem anymore.

Zekr with Amiri Quran font on Kubuntu 18.04

Notes:

• About font: on Kubuntu, I find the best built-in font to be Amiri Quran.
• About font size: on Kubuntu again, I find the best size to be 23. The default is 33, anyway.
• About how to change the font: go to menu Tools > Options > View > see quran_fontName > select the value > press Space bar > put the font name in front of the line > click Apply > click OK > right-click on the ayat > Reload. You will do this one very often.
• About looking for the best font: just compare your Zekr window with your LibreOffice Writer window showing same ayats, and, change the font on the Writer so you find the best one for you.
• For Trisquel users: these instructions should work on Trisquel 8.0 as well.

 

May Allah bless us all in this Ramadhan 1439 Hijriyah. Walhamdulillahi rabbil ‘alamin.

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This article is licensed under CC BY-Sa 3.0.

Using Trisquel Everyday – Day 1

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

I’m using Trisquel GNU/Linux version 8 codenamed Flidas since March 2017. I decided to write my daily experiences with Trisquel in a series, particularly at the most technically usable things. This ‘Day 1’ at the title doesn’t represent my first day, but, the first article of this series. I won’t write each day except the days when I feel it’s the time to write it and I have no particular order of events. This article is inspired by Didier Roche’s article series about Ubuntu Artful Day 1 until Day 8 from the days when Artful was still pre-release version.

What I remember to write now is:

7 December 2017: Ruben Rodriguez is back at Trisquel Forum with the plan to release Trisquel 8 and plan to plan Trisquel 9. This is a long awaited thing for the forum members. Ruben is the leader of Trisquel Project.

Startup Items: I placed redshift command at startup so now it runs every time Trisquel boots. Redshift is my real treatment for sleeplessness (hard to sleep disorder), a disorder caused by blue light. I say thank you for Redshift developer!

apt-daily.service: apparently, I still need to disable permanently anything related to packagekitd, unattended-upgrade, and apt-daily-blablabla because I found 2 days ago it eaten up (again!) my bandwidth as 100+ MB without my concern.

Desktop Icons: yes, desktop icons (like on Windows) feature is really helpful. Trisquel supports this by default so Windows users can adapt themselves into Trisquel faster. Personally I dislike GNOME 3’s approach (or any other desktop) that doesn’t permit the user to easily put icons on desktop area. However, actually my most used icon there is only IceCat Web Browser.

I follow Trisquel forum via email not via web.

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

KDE neon Repo, Sources.list, and plasmashell 5.10.95

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

I am using KDE neon currently. To be specific, it’s neon dev-unstable (instead of neon dev stable), OS version 5.10.5. As a not technologist, I simply want to try Plasma 5.11 beta that’s just released 14 September ago. So I downloaded the 17 or 18 September (sorry, I forgot the date) built image. I assumed that all dev versions of neon must have 5.11 already at 17 September, so I tried it and … no. I didn’t found the plasmashell binary at 5.10.95. Instead, it’s still 5.10.90. Hey, so, where is the 5.10.95? This is written because I find problems while writing Plasma 5.11 article at UbuntuBuzz.

Warning, packagekitd and snapd Eat Bandwidth!

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Now I know for sure why each distro I ran eats my bandwidth extremely a lot without my permission, that’s because of PackageKit’s packagekitd daemon doing automatic updates in stealth. Not only that, but also Snappy’s snapd daemon eats my bandwidth without my permission too. Those two packagekitd and snapd are serious problems for limitedly-bandwidth users! These happened on neon, my favorite KDE distro, and also Ubuntu, Kubuntu, even openSUSE, and even Fedora. Tonight I do some searching and I finally understand packagekitd action is a part of GNOME Software or KDE Discover automatic update.

I Need To Write More GNU/Linux Reviews

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Recently (since 2016) I write GNU/Linux OS reviews on UbuntuBuzz. From those I understand I lack English writing skills. I lack the power of describing. I need more trainings, I need more vocabularies. So I need to write more reviews as many as possible here and on another blogs. I wish I have enough time.

What I Do After Installing Trisquel 8 GNU/Linux

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

4 April 2017

For web browser:

1. Install addons: uBlock Origin, Google search link fix, DownThemAll!, Disconnect, Zotero.
2. Install new browser: Qupzilla.

Bleeding Edge Style Posting

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

I maintain about a dozen of blogs, both in Indonesian and English, and all of them talk about GNU/Linux. As a real newbie, I have written probably more than 500 articles (including ebooks) about GNU/Linux within them and outside of them. Recently I found many of my GNU/Linux friends in Indonesia excited about using Archlinux. They love Archlinux bleeding edge style of distributing software packages, they said it is rolling release. Apparently I was excited too in the way of AUR, where my friends can get newest version of same program I use directly. Archlinux gave them more advantages than Ubuntu (official or PPA) in this case. Archlinux’s bleeding edge style, I describe it personally as forever LTS, not waiting (not freezing) for stable package to release a new package. I take that concept into my new writing style. I call it bleeding edge posting. This article is also a bleeding edge post.

Advantages

After seeing bleeding edge way of Archlinux, recently I thought I must take that way to write. So I fire up my old blog (restava) to bear my new style of writing. I call this style bleeding edge posting. I don’t wait my writing for long-time editing. I post my posts directly. A bleeding edge post of me is an article which is containing at least a title and a sentence. But every post contains exactly one single idea, any new idea I find, so I don’t need to be frustrated when I find an idea and I must post it quickly. A bleeding edge post is usually finished in one time sitting duration. The main advantage of bleeding edge posting is I don’t need to wait to post any new idea where waiting is a very frustrating thing for a writer like me. It is a big win, where I can provide myself ideas collection in one place so I can make more long-editing posts in another blogs based on bleeding edge posts in bleeding edge blog. It is just similar thing between Fedora (bleeding edge*) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (conservative edge**). My restava blog is “Fedora”, and my another blogs are “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”. Another advantage is I will never forget any of new ideas anymore. Another advantage of doing bleeding edge posting is I can fill my blog with more posts every month. If you are a writer, especially in GNU/Linux scope, bleeding edge posting saves your time so much.

Examples

• If I find something important about apt, I can write it directly. I don’t need to compose a complete writing draft, do a little research first, experience errors, fixing errors, making conclusion, etc. I write what I find, although it is just a title. Example.
• If I find something important about Scribus and Inkscape, I can write it directly. Example and example.
• If I find something important about Slackware and Archlinux, I do it. Example.
• Every time I try a new GNU/Linux distribution in a live session, I always take many screenshots of it. If I have many screenshots of gNewSense, Trisquel, openSUSE, new version of Ubuntu, I can be frustrated if I don’t post them. So bleeding edge posting saves my frustration. Examples.
• Then outside of this scope, I can write more polished post based on bleeding edge blog on another blogs. I can spend time writing long posts there, after I collect enough bleeding edge posts here. For example, after posting a post about screenshots collection of recent Ubuntu, I can write a proper Ubuntu review based on screenshots collected. Example.

It Spreads

Well, I coined my own style bleeding edge posting about one year ago. It starts with my restava. I proofed I like this style so much. It gives me more convenient way of writing. I felt comfortable so much with this style. So, I began to spread this style into my another blog. Not just restava. I did it on desaininkscape, I did it here and inside this article too.

How About Tutorial Articles?

Yes, I admit that tutorial needs more times to write. So basically I can’t write tutorial in bleeding edge style. I must write tutorials in a very careful way, very comprehensive way. Every tutorial should be correct, should be free from errors. Yes, I place my tutorials in my conservative edge blogs especially my main blog. My main blog is just one. But because I have already accustomed with bleeding edge style, I can write long articles as technical GNU/Linux tutorials. Actually they are intended to be personal notes only but anyone can consider them as tutorials. I have few examples here and here. Yes, bleeding edge style can be used as a way to write comprehensive tutorials. Surprise.

I Know It’s Funny

If you are a distribution developer, you probably will laugh at me. I know it’s funny, though. But truly Archlinux bleeding edge style is the source of this style. Probably you have more proper terms than bleeding edge posting and have using it before me. Please, you can let me know.

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*) I describe Fedora as bleeding edge to compare quickly, to make sense quicker. I know Fedora prefer to be credited as leading edge. To sum it up, bleeding edge = risky while leading edge = not risky. Thanks for alunux @ #ubuntu-indonesia to point me.

**) I describe Red Hat Enterprise Linux as conservative edge just because I don’t know the antonym of bleeding edge. I don’t find it anywhere. If you know, please let me know.