free software

All posts tagged free software

TODO - tested and working, though my most recent Lubuntu experimentation has problems I'm still troubleshooting.

At best, my computer hangs when prompting for a password. I think this is related to the 4.4.14 kernel but have not confirmed this.

Projects >

dm-crypt
https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup
https://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/cryptfs/cryptfs.html

These instructions are a lot easier than they seem, and a smart and patient beginner will be able to follow them!

  • These notes were made from instructions from Slackware "current", as of 2016-11-05, and have been tested on Slackware 14.2, and 14.2 32bit.
  • These notes were made on an everyday system with one hard drive which I completely formatted for this purpose.

    • If you are a new user, it is strongly recommended that you remove all hard drive's your using and do this on a spare unused/empty drive.
  • This concept and these notes build a full-disk Slackware installation which also uses LVM. You can safely ignore the entire LVM post and just follow this one.

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boot-repair logo

Linux distributions + Debian >

https://launchpad.net/~yannubuntu/+archive/ubuntu/boot-repair
https://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair/home/Home/

Automagically repairs a boot loader.

This is something I wish I had/knew about a long time ago. I've had bootloader misadventures that really stressed me out.

I'll accept this, even though it uses systemd.

See also:



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Software (YouTube) >

https://www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedown

Given a YouTube or Vimeo URL, downloads the underlying video file, with a sensible file name. It downloads the highest resolution version of the video available: first it tries HD MP4, then regular MP4, then WebM, and finally FLV. It also works on playlists, and works as a bookmarklet to download the video you're watching.

I liked it well enough.

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https://www.jwz.org/hacks/galdown

Given a URL of a photo gallery, this downloads the largest versions of all of the photos.

  • Flickr
  • Facebook
  • Picasa
  • OvaHere
  • Google Drive
  • SF Weekly (and related sites)
  • Instagram
  • and sites using SmugMug or Zen Folio

Tested 2016-03-18 on Lubuntu - Tested and works for instagram, but I couldn't get proper filenames.

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7zip logo

(on Wikipedia)
Chocolatey: 7zip
https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/7-zip_portable
https://www.7-zip.org/

An archival program.



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Linux logo - 'Tux'

This was a piece I had rattling around in my head for some time. It gets weak at the end, and has no real flow to it, but it's interesting enough in places that I thought I'd clean it up and publish it. Enjoy my dark sarcasm!


In a mass-market scenario, the larger the population the higher the chance for one or more free software projects to appear.

Since software can, in theory, be inherited by additional programmers and indefinitely updated, even the smallest chance for a free software project to be created becomes an inevitability over time. This means that even a niche market scenario can have competition from free software.

A crowd of hobbyists will have more time and expertise for a general-purpose piece of software than a development house can bring to bear. Simply put, they can do it better.

It goes without saying that cheaper, better and more supported free software will eventually out-compete proprietary equivalents, displacing established businesses and markets.

How can this problem be addressed?



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Disambiguation: Chromium (dietary mineral)

chromium-logo.png

Google > Chrome >
Software > Web browsers >

(on Wikipedia)
https://www.chromium.org/Home/

A web browser compiled from the released source of Google Chrome.

It's simplicity is overdone to the point of losing functionality. Some of its preferences are so wrong that I can't use it, and because it's inflexible I can't fix their mistakes.