Technology Tales

LinkBlog

There are times when I just need to share some links outside the fleeting environment of Twitter, and this is where they might appear. The practice is very much in the spirit of the original weblog idea when it was about link sharing and not about writing down one’s thoughts as it subsequently became before sharing of photos, videos and other multimedia content became a mainstay of (legal) sharing for some people.

UNIX

The world of open UNIX variants may not be as vibrant as the Linux one, but UNIX predates Linux by decades so it might be put down to its much greater maturity. BSD seems to predominate here, but the reason may be because of Sun keeping a tight hold on Solaris for so long. Now that Oracle has gone and been more restrictive again, it is the breakaway projects to which we have to look for OpenSolaris successors now. However, the partially free availability of Solaris 10 & 11 may draw some away from the open-source community of the alternative.

BSD

In the world of BSD UNIX, it often is difficult to see what is different between the various projects and some are based on technical excellence using the sort of reasoning that would be inaccessible to many computer users. Though many see the operating system as being one for servers alone, there are PC-focussed versions with PC-BSD being the most notable. The existence of those projects is in start contrast to a mantra that keeps BSD for servers and Linux for desktop systems.

DragonFlyBSD

This was a fork of FreeBSD and it seems to have been done for very technical reasons, such as handling of cluster computing and larger disc drives. If the reasons make sense to you, then it could be an option, but it doesn’t sound like one for the masses, though BSD UNIX hardly is at the best of times.

FreeBSD

When someone turns to creating a desktop variant of BSD, FreeBSD seems to be a starting point for so much of the time. Even Debian, itself the foundation of so many Linux distributions, bases its own BSD variant on FreeBSD and Gentoo apparently has been looking at doing something similar. FreeBSD does give away a bias towards servers in that the default installation does not include a desktop environment. However, if you do the work, you can get one like GNOME 2 or XFCE on there and the process does remind me of the thinking behind Arch Linux. Until recently, I had FreeBSD 10 installed in a VirtualBox virtual machine until a software update broke it and that does sit well with the BSD culture of stability. Of course, it could be another sign of a focus on server computing too. Nevertheless, it ran well until then and fared no worse than the aforementioned Arch Linux, though it probably should have done better.

GhostBSD

Apparently, this is FreeBSD with a choice of MATE (a fork of GNOME 2 for those not fancying the idea of using GNOME 3 and its GNOME Shell), XFCE, LXDE or OpenBox desktop environments. A recent look demonstrated that the desktop environments are turned out very nicely too. All in all, it looks like an interesting counterpart to what you would find with a Linux distro.

HardenedBSD

Given the troubled state of the online world because of cybercrime and cyberwarfare, it hardly comes as a surprise that computer security has a higher profile than it ever has. It then is hardly surprising that someone decided to create a more secure spin of FreeBSD. For added context, here is what the project had to say about its goals:

HardenedBSD aims to implement innovative exploit mitigation and security solutions for the FreeBSD community. Security is like an onion--it’s made up of layers. To be successful, attackers must peel back each layer. HardenedBSD takes a holistic approach to security by hardening the system and implementing exploit mitigation technologies. We will work with FreeBSD and any other FreeBSD-based project to include our innovations. Our primary goal is to provide a clean-room reimplementation of the publicly documented parts of the grsecurity patchset for Linux.

MidnightBSD

According to the website, this is a derivative of NetBSD developed with desktop users in mind. At first, it had a feel that would have been more widely available with UNIX and Linux systems in the middle of the 1990’s. Since then, XFCE was chosen as a desktop environment and that has modernised the feel.

NetBSD

Since I last had a look, the focus of this project has become portability. What they mean by portability is have versions of NetBSD that run on all sorts of hardware and I even thought I saw a mention of Sony PlayStation (PS2) if my eyes did not deceive me and ARM-based systems also appeared, hardly a surprise with the rise of tablet computing. Other more conventional computing platforms are served too, but the others make NetBSD stand out from the others more than I once thought it did.

NomadBSD

To some, portability is about running software under different hardware architectures. That is not what is meant here since we are talking about the ability to run an installation off a USB drive plugged in to any computer, more likely with Intel and AMD processors. The underlying basis is FreeBSD with OpenBox being the chosen desktop environment, assuring a friendly user interface as well.

OpenBSD

With a strap line like “Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!”, you’d have to suspect that security and stability are the key attributes of this operating system. The security aspect certainly crops up a lot so I think that a spot of exploration is in order, especially when various system types (x86 and SPARC are just two of them) are supported anyway. The ongoing furore about intelligence service monitoring and increasing numbers of attacks on different systems over the web do make the whole subject more relevant now than it ever was and it never was irrelevant.

OPNsense

When m0n0wall was discontinued in 2015, OPNsense was forked from pfSense, a move that has left tension between the two projects. The newcomer gave the following reasons for its actions: code quality, regular releases, security issues related to the web UI being run as root, source code for the pfSense build tools is no longer publicly available, concern regarding transparency, new ownership of the pfSense brand, using the brand name to fence off the competition and several licence changes for no apparent reason. These have been contested by the pfSense while OPNsense now uses HardenedBSD as its basis and has stuck with a frequent release model.

pfSense

This was started in 2004 as a fork of the now defunct m0n0wall with the first public release coming in 2006. It is based on FreeBSD and can be installed on physical or virtual appliances for added network security. It seems to add a BSD installation for a firewall and other security functions, but there clearly is a place for this in the enterprise market by all accounts.

TrueNAS

Network-assisted Storage (NAS) has blossomed in recent years for home users and anyone with a DIY mindset might be tempted to go and build things themselves using PC parts and it is for those that this FreeBSD-based distro would be an asset. When I went looking at the possibility, the inability to boot the installation disk that I was using put paid to the attempt. Then, I was left wondering if my use of AMD’s CPU’s was part of the problem, though I since have realised that building a low-power system might be a better option than reusing a full PC. There has been an incursion into the world of NAS drives in the form of a 3 GB Western Digital My Book Live, so any return to DIY ways could be a better informed.

XigmaNAS

Like TrueNAS, this another BSD for use when making an old PC into a NAS file server. In fact, this came into being when part of the FreeNAS community took exception to the direction in which iXsystems were starting to take it after 2011. It also is based on FreeBSD and has a different web interface. That makes it an alternative if TrueNAS does not do the deed for you.

Solaris

One of the casualties of Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems was the community-based OpenSolaris project. The more proprietary Solaris 11 Express became Oracle’s answer to the need that OpenSolaris fulfilled back then. Since, Solaris 10 & 11 became available without charge with support contracts becoming the revenue earner.

OpenIndiana

The demise of OpenSolaris saw a major new project emerge. Its basis is Illumos, itself a fork of the now defunct OpenSolaris, and a recent look revealed that it is maturing rather nicely. MATE is the chosen desktop environment so it should not be that unfamiliar to those coming from the Linux world. Initially, there is not so much software installed, but Firefox does get included and there is a graphical package manager, so there is little point in complaining.

OmniOS

The enterprise focus of this offering is plain on the website since virtualisation and the storage platform get a strong showing. Discussion of desktop environments and such like are conspicuous by their absence. Seemingly, this is infrastructural software above all else and there are support contracts available too.

Tribblix

The website for this Illumos distro has a retro, so it is easy to believe that the operating system could be similar. Since MATE, XFCE and Enlightenment are the available desktop environments, anyone coming from Linux should be thrown off very much once they figure out how to get things started.

Triton SmartOS

With a moniker like “Converged Container and Virtual Machine Hypervisor”, this clearly is not a desktop computing offering. There is more than a hint of cloud computing about it and that hardly is a surprise given the age in which we work.

Installing FreeBSD in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine

With UNIX being the basis of Linux, I have a soft spot for trying out any UNIX that can be installed on a PC. For a while, I had OpenSolaris on the go and even vaguely recall having a look at one of the BSD’s. However, any recent attempt to install one of the latter, and there are quite a few around now, got stymied by some sort of kernel panic caused by using AMD CPU’s. With the return to the Intel fold arising from the upgrade of my main home PC last year, it perhaps was time to try again.

The recent release of FreeBSD 10.0 was the cue and I downloaded a DVD image for a test installation in a VirtualBox virtual machine with 4 GB of memory and a 32 GB virtual hard drive attached (expanding storage was chosen so not all the allocated space has been taken so far). The variant of FreeBSD chosen was the 64-bit x86 one and I set to installing it in there. Though not as pretty in appearance as those in various Linux distros, the installer was not that user unfriendly to me. Mind you, I have experience of installing Arch Linux so that might have acclimatised me somewhat.

Those installation screens ask about the keyboard mapping that you want and I successfully chose one of the UK options. There was limited opportunity for adding extras though there was a short list of few from which I made some selections. User account set up also was on offer and I would have been better off knowing what groups to assign for my personal user account so as to have to avoid needing to log in as root so often following system start up later. Otherwise, all the default options were sufficient.

When the installation process was complete, it was time to boot into the new system and all that was on offer was a command line log in session. After logging in as root, it was time to press pkg into service in order to get a desktop environment in place. The first step was to install X:

pkg install xorg

Then, it was time to install a desktop environment. While using XFCE or KDE were alternatives, I chose GNOME 2 due to familiarity and more extensive instructions on the corresponding FreeBSD handbook page. Issuing the following command added GNOME and all its helper applications:

pkg install gnome2

So that GNOME starts up at the next reboot, some extra steps are needed. The first of these is to add the following line into /etc/fstab:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0

Then, two lines were needed in /etc/rc.conf:

gdm_enable=”YES”
gnome_enable=”YES”

The first enables the GNOME display manager and the second activates other GNOME programs that are needed for a desktop session to start. With each of these in place, I got a graphical login screen at the next boot time.

With FreeDSB being a VirtualBox Guest, it was time to consult the relevant FreeBSD manual page. Here, there are sections for a number of virtual machine tools so a search was needed to find the one for VirtualBox. VirtualBox support for FreeBSD is incomplete in that there is no installation media for BSD systems though Linux and Solaris are supported along with Windows. Therefore, it is over to the FreeBSD repositories for the required software:

pkg install virtualbox-ose-additions

Aside from the virtual machine session not capturing and releasing the mouse pointer automatically, that did everything that was needed even if it was the open source edition of the drivers and their proprietary equivalents. To resolve the mouse pointer issue, I needed to temporarily disable the GNOME desktop session in /etc/rc.conf to drop down to a console only session where xorg. conf could be generated using the following commands:

Xorg -configure
cp xorg.conf.new /etc/xorg.conf

In the new xorg.conf file, the mouse section needs to be as follows:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier  “Mouse0”
Driver      “vboxmouse”
EndSection

If it doesn’t look like the above and it wasn’t the case for me then it needs changing. Also, any extra lines from the default set up also need removing or the mouse will not function as it should. The ALT+F1 (for accessing GNOME menus) and ALT+F2 (for running commands) keyboard shortcuts then become crucial when your mouse is not working as it should and could avert a panic too; knowing that adjusting a single configuration file will fix a problem when doing so is less accessible is not a good feeling as I discovered to my own cost. The graphics settings were fine by default but here’s what you should have in case it isn’t for you:

Section “Device”
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: “True”/”False”,
### <string>: “String”, <freq>: “<f> Hz/kHz/MHz”
### [arg]: arg optional
Identifier  “Card0”
Driver      “vboxvideo”
VendorName  “InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH”
BoardName   “VirtualBox Graphics Adapter”
BusID       “PCI:0:2:0”
EndSection

The next step is to ensure that your HAL settings are as they should. I needed to create a file in /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy called 90-vboxguest.fdi that contains the following:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<!--
# Sun VirtualBox
# Hal driver description for the vboxmouse driver
# $Id: chapter.xml,v 1.33 2012-03-17 04:53:52 eadler Exp $
Copyright (C) 2008-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
This file is part of VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE, as
available from http://www.virtualbox.org. This file is free software;
you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software
Foundation, in version 2 as it comes in the “COPYING” file of the
VirtualBox OSE distribution. VirtualBox OSE is distributed in the
hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY of any kind.
Please contact Sun Microsystems, Inc., 4150 Network Circle, Santa
Clara, CA 95054 USA or visit http://www.sun.com if you need
additional information or have any questions.
-->
<deviceinfo version=”0.2″>
<device>
<match key=”info.subsystem” string=”pci”>
<match key=”info.product” string=”VirtualBox guest Service”>
<append key=”info.capabilities” type=”strlist”>input</append>
<append key=”info.capabilities” type=”strlist”>input.mouse</append>
<merge key=”input.x11_driver” type=”string”>vboxmouse</merge>
<merge key=”input.device” type=”string”>/dev/vboxguest</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

With all that set, it is time to ensure that the custom user account is added to the wheel and operator groups using this command:

pw user mod [user name] -G wheel operator

Executing the above as root means that the custom account can run the su command so that logging in as root at the start of a desktop session no longer is needed. That is what being in the wheel group allows and the anyone in the operator group can shut down or restart the system. Both are facilities readily available in Linux so I fancied having them in FreeBSD too.

Being able to switch to root in a terminal session meant that I could go on to add software like Firefox, Libreoffice, GIMP, EMACS, Geany, Netbeans, Banshee and so on. There may be a line of opinion that FreeBSD is a server operating system but all of these make it more than passable for serving as a desktop one too. There may be no package management GUI as such and the ones that come with GNOME do not work either but anyone familiar with command line working will get around that.

FreeBSD may be conservative but that has its place too and being able to build up a system one item at a time teaches far more than getting everything already sorted in one hit. So far, there is enough documentation to get me going and I hope to see where else things go too. So far, the OS hasn’t been that intimidating and that’s good to see.

Assorted Desktop Packages

Here is some desktop software that is either commonplace in the world of Linux or needs a bit more publicity, at least in my opinion. The list is sorted alphabetically, in case you are left wondering at its first entry. As with everything in this place, it may grow or contract, but change certainly is a feature of the world of Linux anyway. That’s never a bad thing, even if it upsets some from time to time.

Calligra

This suite comes from the KDE project and includes office and graphical software. The latter includes Krita, which is described separately below, so this is an interesting collection of software.

Choqok

Linux does have a choice of Twitter/X clients and this is one of them. It’s a KDE application that also supports Pump.IO, GNU Social and Friendica instances. There are others on the support list too, though Mastodon is a surprising absence given the recent furore surrounding Twitter/X.

Darktable

The name is a play on that of Adobe’s Lightroom, and that gives you an idea of what it is about. This too allows non-destructive editing of images with the added information being kept in associated files with XMP extensions, one for each image. What the software does not have though is an image management interface like that of Lightroom or digiKam.

digiKam

This is more than an organiser, and may be the KDE project’s counterpart to Adobe’s closed source Lightroom. Its photo organising doesn’t mean automated folder creation from EXIF information like F-Spot, Shotwell or Rapid Photo Downloader. It is for that reason that I combine digiKam with the last entry on the preceding list, since I jumped ship from Shotwell. The image processing part of the application is something that I have to explore.

Eclipse

Other IDE’s have taken over me these days, but this had a use for editing PHP scripts once upon a time. It is better known for what it offers Java developers, though.

Emacs

A long-standing UNIX/Linux text editor that has been doing battle with Vi for longer than many can remember. Like the alternative, it has keyboard shortcuts that do anything but make concessions to Windows conventions, add needless steepening of any learning curve unless you find the appropriate option (CUA) that allows for some emulation of mainstream keyboard shortcuts. Nevertheless, there also is a GUI variant that makes life easier, and I have to concede that it has a history that is longer than even Microsoft itself. As if that weren’t enough compensation, it is a powerful piece of software whose functionality goes much further than text editing, whose surface I have only barely begun to scratch. The logic of the interface may differ from that to which many are accustomed, but it is consistent and well-thought-out nonetheless.

F-Spot

For a while, this was my photo organiser of choice, but it has not seen a new release since December 2010. Maybe that’s because it works well enough as it is, yet you cannot help thinking that a project with no new releases is a dead one, even if that sometime reflects how right they got things at the time.

FileZilla

Before my quest for added automation took over, this was my FTP client of choice, and its advent has made the need to buy such software extinct. That it works on both Windows and Linux is a bonus.

GIMP

The ubiquitous Photoshop challenger is maturing nicely, though its interface may not please some.

GraphicsMagick

This is very like ImageMagick (see below) with its main selling point being that it’s faster than its parent for the purpose of command line image editing; my own testing seems to support this so far. The commands that you use are similar to ImageMagick too, apart mainly from adding the gm command before the likes of convert and others. Speaking of convert, the GraphicsMagick version has yet to support the -annotate switch, so -draw needs to be used in its place.

ImageMagick

Using a command line tool for image processing may seem counter-intuitive, but there are operations where you need not have much user intervention. Included among these is image resizing and conversion between file formats, and yours truly has done both. Processing many files at a stroke comes naturally to this very useful and talented piece of software, too.

KODI

Software media centres lie largely beyond my purview, but this seems to be one of the better known of the breed. It overlays the desktop when it is running and caters for consumption of music, movies, TV, photo slideshows and games. Controversially, there even is PVR capability for recording live broadcasts as well.

Krita

For those with a more artistic bent, this is a digital drawing and illustration package that will work not only on Linux but also on Windows or OS X. The results can be striking, so it looks as if your talent may be the only limitation with this tool.

LibreOffice

Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems meant that some feathers were ruffled in the open-source and free software community, and one example of a change coming from this is the forking of OpenOffice. It is that act that has brought LibreOffice into being, and it then gained so much ground that it eclipsed its parent.

LibreWolf

Mozilla may promote their wares as bing privacy-friendly, yet others are not sure, so Firefox has been forked to give LibreWolf. This removes telemetry, adds a content blocker along with other enhancements.

Mozilla Firefox

There’s no way that I could not include what once was the de facto standard web browser for Linux, though there’s competition from Chrome/Chromium now too. There is also a mobile version for phones running the Android OS.

Mozilla SeaMonkey

The original Mozilla suite still lives on, and this is what it’s called nowadays.

Mozilla Thunderbird

This has replaced Evolution on Linux systems that I use, and it comes close to eclipsing Microsoft Outlook everywhere else, too.

MythTV

The main function of this piece of software is to record broadcast TV, hence that part of the name. It also has media playback capability, and that is what makes it more of a media centre than the digital video recording functionality may suggest.

NEdit

UNIX/Linux offers plenty of text editors, so here’s another of the less well-known ones that I have encountered. Syntax highlighting is part of the offer and some menu customisation is possible too. In essence, it is a straightforward text editor that works with Windows keyboard shortcuts, but that can be no bad thing.

NetBeans

You cannot feature Eclipse in a software listing without having NetBeans too. In fact, it was NetBeans that I first encountered, and that was many moons ago. There is a PHP variant available, but that seemed very sluggish when I tried it and turned back to Eclipse, with which I have stuck ever since. That poor performance may have been caused by the variant of Java that was available to it, so I may give it another ago when I have the time.

OBS Studio

Here, OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software, and that somewhat says what it does. In essence, we are talking about video recording and live-streaming. With the increasing pervasiveness of video like what once was the case with photography, it is easy to see the use case for this kind of software.

OpenOffice.org

Is this the office suite of choice for Linux? It certainly felt that way before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and upset a few open-source developers. Now, the appearance of LibreOffice is going to make things look a little more interesting.

PlayOnLinux

This is a far more user-friendly way to run Windows software on Linux, using the WINE libraries in the background. The name seems to originate from game playing, though web browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari are available too, along with a selection of other software. For the adventurous, there also is the possibility of installing something you have yourself.

Privoxy

Here’s the description from the website:

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.

It’s available for a number of platforms, including Linux and UNIX, and offers a way of blocking ads in Google Chrome, which is how I got to hear about it. Ubuntu users can snag a copy from the usual repositories too.

Configuration is by editing text files, but the default settings have sufficient so far. Setting a browser to use it means searching through settings for the means of making it use IP address 127.0.0.1 and port 8118 for ordinary and secure HTTP connections.

Rapid Photo Downloader

When Shotwell, started to fail to download photos from ever larger memory cards, it was time to look at something else and this became the replacement. You can use it to copy images from any card reader into the directory structure of your choosing. It does nothing more than downloading, and it does it so well that it merits a mention on here.

Shotwell

This was my photo library manager of choice until its limitations when it came to handling large data volumes came to light. It is written for the GNOME desktop environment and worked well for a few years before technology overtook it. Still, it also offers limited photo editing capabilities to go with its organising skills.

UFRaw

This reader and manipulator of raw digital camera image formats acts either alone or as a plugin. It can be used via the command line or using a GUI. That makes it flexible for those times when you need things to happen without much input from yourself.

VirtualBox

All in all, this is an excellent piece of virtualisation software that makes you wonder why you’d pay for something like VMware Workstation. There is a closed source variant, but the open-source equivalent has what you’d want for personal use anyway. Windows 11 support took a while to come into place because of its TPM requirements, but that is steady these days.

VSCodium

Since the widely used VSCode is so available and appears to be open-source in nature, one does wonder why this project exists. Here is their take on that conundrum:

Microsoft’s VSCode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS licence and contains telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When Microsoft builds Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. They clone the VSCode repository, they lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft-specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under their licence.

When you clone and build from the VSCode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customisations, which is by default licensed under the MIT licence.

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download and build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s VSCode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT licence. Telemetry is disabled.

If you want to build from source yourself, head over to Microsoft’s VSCode repo and follow their instructions. VSCodium exists to make it easier to get the latest version of MIT-licensed VS Code.

Waterfox

This is a fork of Firefox that claims to be faster and more private. From my brief test, it certainly feels faster, though I was not as able to test things on the privacy end.

Free Software Foundation Approved Distros

Not all software in Linux distributions necessarily is free or libre software. After all, most of us want to play MP3 files and I am as guilty of this as many. Then, some proprietary drivers are included with some of them baked into Linux kernels as well. All of this may make Linux easier to use but it will not please some. Hence, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has a list of distros satisfying their guidelines and some of these are below.

Dragora

Simplicity is the apparent hallmark here.

Dyne:bolic

This is a free-software-compliant multimedia distro that proves that such things can be done without the use of proprietary codecs.

Guix System

It now appears that the GNU project now has its very own Linux distro built around the Guix (pronounced “geeks”) package manager and using the Guile programming language. The website and the screenshots look swish so it might be worth trying this out for real, and there may be a version using the Hurd kernel yet, though Linux-libre is the only option for now.

Hyperbola

This project is working with two bases: Linux-libre and BSD. The first is a derivative or Arch Linux that roots out so many non-free packages that you wonder if they might go too far. It also takes the long-term support approach so they do not have to adjust things every time something changes in Arch.

libreCMC

This results from the combination of two distinct projects that shared one common characteristic: use in embedded devices like routers, not for installing on PC’s. That may seem like a minority interest to me but we all have different needs.

Parabola

Here, Arch also is the basis with freedom as the byword. While the basis is a rolling distro, this is a long-term support offering.

ProteanOS

What we have here is another Linux distro that can be embedded on different devices and is kept lightweight to ensure universality.

PureOS

The social purpose hardware company Purism is involved in this effort, hence the naming. The distro itself is based on Debian and appears to be intended for a range of hardware, from phones to tablets to PC’s. Naturally, ISO installation images can be downloaded as well.

Trisquel

Think of this as Ubuntu with only Free Software included and you have the point of this distro. Given that Richard Stallman of the FSF has been known to like it, meeting that goal seems to be assured now.

Ututo

This was the first distro that the FSF rated for software freedom and hails from Argentina. Unfortunately, there appears to have been a lull in activity since 2107, so it is difficult to know if this remains viable.

Free & Open-Source Software

The terms Free Software and Open-Source Software often are used interchangeably though a certain Robert Stallman could have a thing or two to say about that. The first of these refers to freedom in the sense that you can do whatever you want with the software. That even means reprogramming it if it doesn’t do what you need. The whole concept began in the mid-1980’s and has grown since then.

The term Open-Source means that you can look at the source code though that apparently doesn’t mean that you always can do what you want with it. For that, it needs to be in the software licence and that’s where GPL, the GNU Public Licence, comes, though there also are competing licences such as those from BSD, which are far more permissive and business-friendly.

What GPL and its counterparts do not restrict is the ability to earn money from the software. You only have to look at what Red Hat earns to see that it can be done. It also means that open-source software (even the copylefted GPL-licensed variety) need not be free of charge.

In practice though, it is amazing what you get without paying for it. Whole Linux distributions with a wide selection of software coming with the operating system are a big example and there are many different ones too. When you see what Microsoft offers for a fee, it could come as a fair shock.

With that in mind, I thought it to be useful to offer an insight into the world of open-source software, especially give how much choice there is. It’s good to have options though that they can confound when they’re so many. However, recent instances of new software releases not being to users’ tastes make it a more important attribute than ever before.

There used to be a single list of what I thought worth highlighting, but that’s been divided now it got every, very long. Here are the categories that I have used for dividing up things so that they might be more useful:

Operating Systems

While Ubuntu or Linux Mint are among the most prominent of the Linux bunch, there are a multitude of others. Then, there are UNIX counterparts and the ones that I have found largely are based on BSD UNIX though there are OpenSolaris forks out there too. As if that weren’t all, some Linux distros are looking at using BSD UNIX kernels in addition to the ones that they usually have so that hybridisation cannot be ignored either.

Assorted Desktop Packages

This selection is all desktop software and then only a little sample of what there is to be found. Some make their way onto installation discs, but others have to be sought. All should do the work for which they’re designed, though.

Desktop Environments

While other operating systems typical offer you one interface at a time, Linux and UNIX have a tendency to offer plenty of choice. Sometimes, it’s the cause of controversy too, although major changes made to the two main players have meant fewer arguments between any advocates for either. In their stead, we have had moaning about what an open-source project has done on its users. Hopefully, that will subside though a meeting of minds may be needed for that in one case.

Web Servers

Websites would not exist without web servers and it was a choice between Apache’s open source HTTPD and Microsoft’s proprietary IIS until the upstart Nginx made its appearance. It, too, is open source and has been popping up in all sorts of places so it was time to make a short list for the sake of reference.

Databases & Programming

UNIX and Linux tend to attract those with an interest in technical computing, so programming and scripting languages remain an integral part of those operating systems, as can databases too. Here are a few of each.

Getting custom Python imports to work in Visual Studio Code

While I continue to use Spyder as my preferred Python code editor, I also tried out Visual Studio Code. Handily, this Integrated Development Environment also has facilities for working with R and Julia code as well as MarkDown text editing and adding the required extensions is enough for these applications; it helps that there is an unofficial Grammarly extension for content creation.

My Python code development makes use of the Pylance extension and it works a little differently from Spyder when it comes to including files using import statements. Spyder will look into the folder where the base script is located but the default behaviour of Pylance is that it looks in the root path of your workspace. This meant that any code that ran successfully in Spyder failed in Visual Studio Code.

The way around this was to add the required location using the python.analysis.extraPaths setting for the workspace. That meant opening Settings by navigating to File > Preferences > Settings in the menu system and entering python.analysis.extraPaths into the search box. That took me to the section that I needed and I then clicked on Add Item before entering the required path and clicking on the OK button. That was enough to fix the problem and all worked as it should after that.

Sorting out a system update failure for FreeBSD

With my tendency to apply Linux updates using the command, I was happy to see that something similar was possible in FreeBSD too. The first step is to fire up a terminal session and drop into root using the su command. That needs the root superuser password in order to continue and the next step is to update the local repositories using the following command:

pkg update

After that, it is time download updated packages and install these by issuing this command:

pkg upgrade

Most of the time, that is sufficient but I discovered that there are times when the above fails and additional interventions are needed. What I had uncovered were dependency error messages and I set to looking around the web for remedies to this. One forum question that was similar to what I had met with the suggestion of consulting the file called UPDATING in /usr/ports/. An answer like that looks unhelpful but for the inclusion of advice where extra actions were needed. Also, there is a useful article on updating FreeBSD ports that gives more in the way of background knowledge so you understand the more about what needs doing.

Following both that and the UPDATING  file resulted in my taking the following sequence of steps. The first act was to download and initialise the Ports Collection, a set of build instructions.

portsnap fetch extract

The above is a one time only action so future updates are done as follows:

portsnap fetch update

With an up to date Ports Collection in place, it was time to install portman:

pkg install portman

A look through /usr/ports/UPDTAING revealed the commands I needed for updating Python and Perl to address the dependency problem that I was having:

portmaster -o devel/py-setuptools27 devel/py-setuptools
portmaster -r py\*setuptools

With those completed, I re-ran pkg update again and all was well. The extra actions needed to get that result will not get forgotten and I am sharing them on here so I know where they are. If anyone else has use for them, that would be even better.

Using multi-line commenting in Perl to inactivate blocks of code during testing

Recently, I needed to inactivate blocks of code in a Perl script while doing some testing. This is something that I often do in other computing languages so I sought the same in Perl. To do that, I need to use the POD methodology. This meant enclosing the code as follows.

=start

<< Code to be inactivated by inclusion in a comment >>

=cut

The =start line could use any word after the equality sign but it seems that =cut is needed to close the multi-line comment. If this was actual programming documentation, then the comment block should include some meaningful text for use with perldoc but that was not a concern here since the commenting statements would be removed afterwards anyway and it is good practice not to leave commented code in a production script or program to avoid any later confusion.

In my case, this facility allowed me to isolate the code that I needed to alter and test before putting everything back as needed. It also saved time since I did not need to individually comment out every executable line because multiple lines could be inactivated at a time.

Compressing a VirtualBox VDI file for a Linux guest

In a previous posting, I talked about compressing a virtual hard disk for a Windows guest system running in VirtualBox on a Linux system. Since then, I have needed to do the same for a Linux guest following some housekeeping. The Linux distribution used is Debian so the instructions are relevant to that and maybe its derivatives such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint and their kind.

While there are other alternatives like dd, I am going to stick with a utility named zerofree to overwrite the newly freed up disk space with zeroes to aid compression later on in the process for this and the first step is to install it using the following command:

apt-get install zerofree

Once that has been completed, the next step is to unmount the relevant disk partition. Luckily for me, what I needed to compress was an area that I reserved for synchronisation with Dropbox. If it was the root area where the operating system files are kept, a live distro would be needed instead. In any event, the required command takes the following form with the mount point being whatever it is on your system (/home, for instance):

sudo umount [mount point]

With the disk partition unmounted, zerofree can be run by issuing a command that looks like this:

zerofree -v /dev/sdxN

Above, the -v switch tells zerofree to display its progress and a continually updating percentage count tells you how it is going. The /dev/sdxN piece is generic with the x corresponding to the letter assigned to the disk on which the partition resides (a, b, c or whatever) and the N is the partition number (1, 2, 3 or whatever; before GPT, the maximum was 4). Putting all this together, we get an example like /dev/sdb2.

Once, that had completed, the next step is to shut down the VM and execute a command like the following on the host Linux system ([file location/file name] needs to be replaced with whatever applies on your system):

VBoxManage modifyhd [file location/file name].vdi --compact

With the zero filling in place, there was a lot of space released when I tried this. While it would be nice for dynamic virtual disks to reduce in size automatically, I accept that there may be data integrity risks with those so the manual process will suffice for now. It has not been needed that often anyway.