Linux notes from DarkDuck: August 2016

30 Aug 2016

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.

23 Aug 2016

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.

18 Aug 2016

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.

9 Aug 2016

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!

2 Aug 2016

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!