Is United Kingdom a leading country in the FOSS world?

There is no secret that I am a born Russian living in the United Kingdom. I travel to my motherland for different reasons from time to time.

I must admit that I am not that fond of the current Russian government. They more often talk about the use of free open source software than make any practical steps toward applying it. I even wrote several critical articles about this a few years ago.

Nevetherless, there are some distributions that are developed by Russian teams. Just to name a few that I reviewed: ROSA, Simply Linux, ALT Linux, Agilia Linux (now defunct).

Are they actually in use anywhere? I cannot answer this question as I have never witnessed that. But I have seen two examples of Linux use in different Russian organisations recently, and both cases are very close to the public funds. It means that Linux is something that Russian near-Government organisations actually use.

Yandex.Disk - an alternative to Google Drive with native Linux support

Google Drive is a powerful tool. It is a cloud-based file storage and sharing service from the well-known software company. It is fast, reliable and popular. But there is a limitation for Linux users: the Google Drive client is not available for any Linux distribution.

There are a number of unofficial clients for Google Drive, and I have even written a how-to guide for one of them: Jdrivesync. However, unofficial clients are not something you can trust, especially if they are supported by a "one-man-band" team.

What is the alternative then? It is an alternative cloud-based storage. There are many alternatives for file sharing, but today I will speak about Yandex.Disk. This is a cloud storage solution by a Russian-based company Yandex that also provides search, email and several more services. Yandex.Disk has a native Linux client.

Let me show how you can use that service in your Linux operating system.

Installing MythTV and Brother HL-2230 Laser Printer on PCLOS 2016

I want to share with you my thoughts, good and bad points, problems I had with installing MythTV, and the Brother HL-2230 Laser Printer on PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) 2016. I'll also include step by step fixes it took me to resolve these two issues.

Emmabuntus Debian Edition 1.0: the new story begins

Emmabuntus is no stranger to Linux notes from DarkDuck blog. I have reviewed this distribution several times and even interviewed their team member.

All the previous versions of Emmabuntus were based on Xubuntu. But there was a new release recently, and Emmabuntus Debian Edition 1.0 saw the light. As you understand from the name, this distribution is based on Debian. To be specific, on Debian 8.0 Xfce.

I downloaded the image from the official Sourceforge web page of this distribution. It is 3.9 Gb in size, which is quite a lot. Only 32-bit image is available. I "burnt" the ISO image onto a USB stick using the dd command in my Xubuntu operating system.

The USB stick is in the port of my Toshiba laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

The best review article by DarkDuck in 2016

This is the 2nd part of 2016 already. I have counted that there were 10 Linux reviews this year so far.
What is your favourite? Let's vote!

• CentOS 7 KDE
• Korora 23 KDE
• Ubuntu MATE 16.04
• gNewSense 4.0 GNOME
• Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon
• ROSA Desktop Fresh R7 KDE
• Zorin OS 11 Core
• PC Linux OS 2016.03 KDE
• Manjaro 15.12 KDE
• Xubuntu 16.04

 

Korora 23 - is it an alternative to Linux Mint?

Cinnamon is a desktop environment that is widely promoted by the Linux Mint team. Linux Mint Cinnamon is their flagship distribution. In its turn, Linux Mint is a leader in the world of Linux distributions, especially for the newbie-oriented part of it. Unfortunately, the recent release of Linux Mint 18 made things worse, and many Linux bloggers wrote about this.

There was a comment on my recent post about Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon that asked me to look into the Korora distribution.

Korora is a distribution that is based on Fedora, similar to the way Mint bases on Ubuntu. Korora's task is to make things "just work". Let's see if this is true.

You can download Korora from one of their many mirrors when you use a special tool on their web site. Cinnamon, KDE, MATE, GNOME and Xfce flavours of Korora are available.

The ISO image of Korora 23 Cinnamon 64-bit is 2.1 Gb in size. I downloaded it and "burnt" onto a USB stick using the dd command.

The stick is in the port of my Toshiba laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

How to configure keyboard layouts in Cinnamon 2 and higher

Desktop Environments are not something set in stone. They develop and change their design.

Linux notes from DarkDuck published an article some time ago where you could learn how to configure keyboard layouts in Cinnamon Desktop Environment. That article was written in 2013 when Cinnamon 1 was available. That How-to is relevant to that release and its sub-releases only.

Cinnamon 2&3 were released since then. Cinnamon 2 is a part of Linux Mint 16 and, more importantly, Long-Term Support version Linux Mint 17. Cinnamon 3 became a part of recently published Linux Mint 18. These version of DEs have a different approach to keyboard layout settings. Let me show you how to set up different keyboard layouts in Cinnamon 3 in Linux Mint 18 and later, and in other operating systems that use Cinnamon Desktop Environment of version 3 and higher. Cinnamon 2 has a very similar approach with slightly different look of the windows.