This is a podcast presentation from the Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group on the topic of Saltstack, XMPP published on June 5th 2017. You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

To subscribe to the podcast add the feed here or listen to this episode by clicking here or choose from one of the following direct links:

• FLAC
• MP3
• OGG

You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

SoundConverter is an excellent little utility that makes it super simple to convert from one audio format to another. As an example case I had some WAV files that were taking up far too much space and so I wanted to convert them to FLAC files instead.

After firing up SoundConverter I clicked Preferences and selected my options:

Then I clicked Add File and selected the WAV file I wanted to convert:

Finally I clicked Convert and watched the program make the change. It was as simple as that!

Do you have a neat little utility like this that you can’t live without? Let us know about it in the comments below!

This is a podcast presentation from the Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group on the topic of Functional Programming and Haskell published on May 1st 2017. You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

To subscribe to the podcast add the feed here or listen to this episode by clicking here or choose from one of the following direct links:

• FLAC
• MP3
• OGG

You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

This is a podcast presentation from the Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group on the topic of OSSIM, A Brief History of Linux and Open Source published on April 3rd 2017. You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

To subscribe to the podcast add the feed here or listen to this episode by clicking here or choose from one of the following direct links:

• FLAC
• MP3
• OGG

You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

I’m back at it, looking for the latest open source alternative software gem. This time around I’m trying out the QupZilla web browser. Never heard of QupZilla before? Well it’s another alternative web browser but this one is built on top of Qt WebEngine, comes with a built in ad blocker and strives to have a native look and feel for whichever distribution/desktop environment you’re running.

QupZilla supports a number of extensions that expands the browser’s capabilities. These are presented in an easy to use settings dialog.

I figured that it would be a good test to quickly see memory usage when loading up a number of tabs:

Number of tabs	Memory Usage
1	184.4MB
2	238.8MB
3	275.3MB

While it’s hard to say if that’s a lot of memory usage or not it does seem like quite a bit of RAM to use up for just a single tab. The other thing I noticed was that the browser seems to use quite a bit of CPU when initially rendering the web page. I don’t know if that’s just related to my particular configuration or what but I regularly saw spikes up to ~70% CPU which seems excessive.

Overall though QupZilla seemed to work fine for the websites I tried in it. I suppose if you’re looking to run a browser that no one else is then this one is for you but just like Midori and Konqeror I don’t have a compelling reason to recommend this for every day use.

This post was originally published on December 8, 2010. The original can be found here.

Note that while you can still write GTK+ applications on Linux using Objective-C as outlined in this post you may want to check out my little project CoreGTK which makes the whole experience a lot nicer 🙂

---

As sort of follow-up-in-spirit to my older post I decided to share a really straight forward way to use Objective-C to build GTK+ applications.

Objective-what?

Objective-C is an improvement to the iconic C programming language that remains backwards compatible while adding many new and interesting features. Chief among these additions is syntax for real objects (and thus object-oriented programming). Popularized by NeXT and eventually Apple, Objective-C is most commonly seen in development for Apple OSX and iOS based platforms. It ships with or without a large standard library (sometimes referred to as the Foundation Kit library) that makes it very easy for developers to quickly create fast and efficient programs. The result is a language that compiles down to binary, requires no virtual machines (just a runtime library), and achieves performance comparable to C and C++.

Marrying Objective-C with GTK+

Normally when writing a GTK+ application the language (or a library) will supply you with bindings that let you create GUIs in a way native to that language. So for instance in C++ you would create GTK+ objects, whereas in C you would create structures or ask functions for pointers back to the objects. Unfortunately while there used to exist a couple of different Objective-C bindings for GTK+, all of them are quite out of date. So instead we are going to rely on the fact that Objective-C is backwards compatible with C to get our program to work.

What you need to start

I’m going to assume that Ubuntu will be our operating system for development. To ensure that we have what we need to compile the programs, just install the following packages:

1. gnustep-core-devel
2. libgtk2.0-dev

As you can see from the list above we will be using GNUstep as our Objective-C library of choice.

Setting it all up

In order to make this work we will be creating two Objective-C classes, one that will house our GTK+ window and another that will actually start our program. I’m going to call my GTK+ object MainWindow and create the two necessary files: MainWindow.h and MainWindow.m. Finally I will create a main.m that will start the program and clean it up after it is done.

Let me apologize here for the poor code formatting; apparently WordPress likes to destroy whatever I try and do to make it better. If you want properly indented code please see the download link below.

MainWindow.h

In the MainWindow.h file put the following code:

#import <gtk/gtk.h>
#import <Foundation/NSObject.h>
#import <Foundation/NSString.h>

//A pointer to this object (set on init) so C functions can call
//Objective-C functions
id myMainWindow;

/*
* This class is responsible for initializing the GTK render loop
* as well as setting up the GUI for the user. It also handles all GTK
* callbacks for the winMain GtkWindow.
*/
@interface MainWindow : NSObject
{
//The main GtkWindow
GtkWidget *winMain;
GtkWidget *button;
}

/*
* Constructs the object and initializes GTK and the GUI for the
* application.
*
* *********************************************************************
* Input
* *********************************************************************
* argc (int *): A pointer to the arg count variable that was passed
* in at the application start. It will be returned
* with the count of the modified argv array.
* argv (char *[]): A pointer to the argument array that was passed in
* at the application start. It will be returned with
* the GTK arguments removed.
*
* *********************************************************************
* Returns
* *********************************************************************
* MainWindow (id): The constructed object or nil
* arc (int *): The modified input int as described above
* argv (char *[]): The modified input array modified as described above
*/
-(id)initWithArgCount:(int *)argc andArgVals:(char *[])argv;

/*
* Frees the Gtk widgets that we have control over
*/
-(void)destroyWidget;

/*
* Starts and hands off execution to the GTK main loop
*/
-(void)startGtkMainLoop;

/*
* Example Objective-C function that prints some output
*/
-(void)printSomething;

/*
********************************************************
* C callback functions
********************************************************
*/

/*
* Called when the user closes the window
*/
void on_MainWindow_destroy(GtkObject *object, gpointer user_data);

/*
* Called when the user presses the button
*/
void on_btnPushMe_clicked(GtkObject *object, gpointer user_data);

@end

MainWindow.m

For the class’ actual code file fill it in as show below. This class will create a GTK+ window with a single button and will react to both the user pressing the button, and closing the window.

#import “MainWindow.h”

/*
* For documentation see MainWindow.h
*/

@implementation MainWindow

-(id)initWithArgCount:(int *)argc andArgVals:(char *[])argv
{
//call parent class’ init
if (self = [super init]) {

//setup the window
winMain = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);

gtk_window_set_title (GTK_WINDOW (winMain), “Hello World”);
gtk_window_set_default_size(GTK_WINDOW(winMain), 230, 150);

//setup the button
button = gtk_button_new_with_label (“Push me!”);

gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (winMain), button);

//connect the signals
g_signal_connect (winMain, “destroy”, G_CALLBACK (on_MainWindow_destroy), NULL);
g_signal_connect (button, “clicked”, G_CALLBACK (on_btnPushMe_clicked), NULL);

//force show all
gtk_widget_show_all(winMain);
}

//assign C-compatible pointer
myMainWindow = self;

//return pointer to this object
return self;
}

-(void)startGtkMainLoop
{
//start gtk loop
gtk_main();
}

-(void)printSomething{
NSLog(@”Printed from Objective-C’s NSLog function.”);
printf(“Also printed from standard printf function.\n”);
}

-(void)destroyWidget{

myMainWindow = NULL;

if(GTK_IS_WIDGET (button))
{
//clean up the button
gtk_widget_destroy(button);
}

if(GTK_IS_WIDGET (winMain))
{
//clean up the main window
gtk_widget_destroy(winMain);
}
}

-(void)dealloc{
[self destroyWidget];

[super dealloc];
}

void on_MainWindow_destroy(GtkObject *object, gpointer user_data)
{
//exit the main loop
gtk_main_quit();
}

void on_btnPushMe_clicked(GtkObject *object, gpointer user_data)
{
printf(“Button was clicked\n”);

//call Objective-C function from C function using global object pointer
[myMainWindow printSomething];
}

@end

main.m

To finish I will write a main file and function that creates the MainWindow object and eventually cleans it up. Objective-C (1.0) does not support automatic garbage collection so it is important that we don’t forget to clean up after ourselves.

#import “MainWindow.h”
#import <Foundation/NSAutoreleasePool.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {

//create an AutoreleasePool
NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

//init gtk engine
gtk_init(&argc, &argv);

//set up GUI
MainWindow *mainWindow = [[MainWindow alloc] initWithArgCount:&argc andArgVals:argv];

//begin the GTK loop
[mainWindow startGtkMainLoop];

//free the GUI
[mainWindow release];

//drain the pool
[pool release];

//exit application
return 0;
}

Compiling it all together

Use the following command to compile the program. This will automatically include all .m files in the current directory so be careful when and where you run this.

gcc `pkg-config –cflags –libs gtk+-2.0` -lgnustep-base -fconstant-string-class=NSConstantString -o “./myprogram” $(find . -name ‘*.m’) -I /usr/include/GNUstep/ -L /usr/lib/GNUstep/ -std=c99 -O3

Once complete you will notice a new executable in the directory called myprogram. Start this program and you will see our GTK+ window in action.

If you run it from the command line you can see the output that we coded when the button is pushed.

Wrapping it up

There you have it. We now have a program that is written in Objective-C, using C’s native GTK+ ‘bindings’ for the GUI, that can call both regular C and Objective-C functions and code. In addition, thanks to the porting of both GTK+ and GNUstep to Windows, this same code will also produce a cross-platform application that works on both Mac OSX and Windows.

Source Code Downloads

	Source Only Package
File name:	objective_c_gtk_source.zip
File hashes:	Download Here
File size:	2.4KB
File download:	Download Here

Originally posted on my personal website here.

This post was originally published on June 15, 2014. The original can be found here. Note that there are other direct, compatible, alternatives and proper successors to TrueCrypt these days, including VeraCrypt. This post is simply about a different option available to Linux users.

---

With the recent questions surrounding the security of TrueCrypt there has been a big push to move away from that program and switch to alternatives. One such alternative, on Linux anyway, is the Linux Unified Key Setup (or LUKS) which allows you to encrypt disk volumes. This guide will show you how to create encrypted file volumes, just like you could using TrueCrypt.

The Differences

There are a number of major differences between TrueCrypt and LUKS that you may want to be aware of:

• TrueCrypt supported the concept of hidden volumes, LUKS does not.
• TrueCrypt allowed you to encrypt a volume in-place, without losing data, LUKS does not.
• TrueCrypt supports cipher cascades where the data is encrypted using multiple different algorithms just in case one of them is broken at some point in the future. As I understand it this is being talked about for the LUKS 2.0 spec but is currently not a feature.

If you are familiar with the terminology in TrueCrypt you can think of LUKS as offering both full disk encryption and standard file containers.

How to create an encrypted LUKS file container

The following steps borrow heavily from a previous post so you should go read that if you want more details on some of the commands below. Also note that while LUKS offers a lot of options in terms of cipher/digest/key size/etc, this guide will try to keep it simple and just use the defaults.

Step 1: Create a file to house your encrypted volume

The easiest way is to run the following commands which will create the file and then fill it with random noise:

# fallocate -l <size> <file to create>
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=<file to create> bs=1M count=<size>

For example let’s say you wanted a 500MiB file container called MySecrets.img, just run this command:

# fallocate -l 500M MySecrets.img
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=MySecrets.img bs=1M count=500

Here is a handy script that you can use to slightly automate this process:

#!/bin/bash
NUM_ARGS=$#

if [ $NUM_ARGS -ne 2 ] ; then
    echo Wrong number of arguments.
    echo Usage: [size in MiB] [file to create]

else

    SIZE=$1
    FILE=$2

    echo Creating $FILE with a size of ${SIZE}MB

    # create file
    fallocate -l ${SIZE}M $FILE

    #randomize file contents
    dd if=/dev/urandom of=$FILE bs=1M count=$SIZE

fi

Just save the above script to a file, say “create-randomized-file-volume.sh”, mark it as executable and run it like this:

# ./create-randomized-file-volume.sh 500 MySecrets.img

Step 2: Format the file using LUKS + ext4

There are ways to do this in the terminal but for the purpose of this guide I’ll be showing how to do it all within gnome-disk-utility. From the menu in Disks, select Disks -> Attach Disk Image and browse to your newly created file (i.e. MySecrets.img).

Be sure to uncheck “Set up read-only loop device”. If you leave this checked you won’t be able to format or write anything to the volume. Select the file and click Attach.

This will attach the file, as if it were a real hard drive, to your computer:

Next we need to format the volume. Press the little button with two gears right below the attached volume and click Format. Make sure you do this for the correct ‘drive’ so that you don’t accidentally format your real hard drive!

From this popup you can select the filesystem type and even name the drive. In the image above the settings will format the drive to LUKS and then create an ext4 filesystem within the encrypted LUKS one. Click Format, confirm the action and you’re done. Disks will format the file and even auto-mount it for you. You can now copy files to your mounted virtual drive. When you’re done simply eject the drive like normal or (with the LUKS partition highlighted) press the lock button in Disks. To use that same volume again in the future just re-attach the disk image using the steps above, enter your password to unlock the encrypted partition and you’re all set.

But I don’t even trust TrueCrypt enough to unlock my already encrypted files!

If you’re just using TrueCrypt to open an existing file container so that you can copy your files out of there and into your newly created LUKS container I think you’ll be OK. That said there is a way for you to still use your existing TrueCrypt file containers without actually using the TrueCrypt application.

First install an application called tc-play. This program works with the TrueCrypt format but doesn’t share any of its code. To install it simply run:

# sudo apt-get install tcplay

Next we need to mount your existing TrueCrypt file container. For the sake of this example we’ll assume your file container is called TOPSECRET.tc.

We need to use a loop device but before doing that we need to first find a free one. Running the following command

# sudo losetup -f

should return the first free loop device. For example it may print out

/dev/loop0

Next you want to associate the loop device with your TrueCrypt file container. You can do this by running the following command (sub in your loop device if it differs from mine):

# sudo losetup /dev/loop0 TOPSECRET.tc

Now that our loop device is associated we need to actually unlock the TrueCrypt container:

# sudo tcplay -m TOPSECRET.tc -d /dev/loop0

Finally we need to mount the unlocked TrueCrypt container to a directory so we can actually use it. Let’s say you wanted to mount the TrueCrypt container to a folder in the current directory called SecretStuff:

# sudo mount -o nosuid,uid=1000,gid=100 /dev/mapper/TOPSECRET.tc SecretStuff/

Note that you should swap your own uid and gid in the above command if they aren’t 1000 and 100 respectively. You should now be able to view your TrueCrypt files in your SecretStuff directory. For completeness sake here is how you unmount and re-lock the same TrueCrypt file container when you are done:

# sudo umount SecretStuff/
# sudo dmsetup remove TOPSECRET.tc
# sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.

Historically linux distributions have created a dedicated partition to be used as swap space and while this does come with some advantages there are other issues with it as well. Being a fixed size partition means it is relatively difficult to later change your mind about how much swap your system actually needs.

Thankfully there is another way: using a swap file instead of a swap partition.

To do this all you need to do is create a file that will hold your swap, set the right permissions to it, format it and use it. The ArchWiki has an excellent guide on the whole process here but I’ve re-created my steps below.

I like to use fallocate but you could also use dd or whatever. For example the following will create a 2GB swap file in the root directory:

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile

Next up set the permissions:

sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

Format it:

sudo mkswap /swapfile

Use it:

sudo swapon /swapfile

That’s pretty much it. At this point you have the ability to add as much swap (via swap files) as you’d like. If you ever want to stop using swap, for example to get rid of the file when you’re done, simply issue the following command:

sudo swapoff /swapfile

One other thing to note is that every time you reboot your system you will have to re-run the swapon command above. To avoid this you can add it to your fstab file so that it is done on startup.

/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

The nice thing about using swap files is that they are really flexible, allowing you to allocate as much or as little as you need at any given time.

This is a podcast presentation from the Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group on the topic of Roundtable published on March 6th 2017. You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

To subscribe to the podcast add the feed here or listen to this episode by clicking here or choose from one of the following direct links:

• FLAC
• MP3
• OGG

You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

This post was originally published on October 6, 2010. The original can be found here.

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Open source software (OSS) is great. It’s powerful, community focused and, lets face it, free. There is not a single day that goes by that I don’t use OSS. Between Firefox, Linux Mint, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Pinta, Deluge, FileZilla and many, many more there is hardly ever an occasion where I find myself in a situation where there isn’t an OSS tool for the job. Unfortunately for all of the benefits that OSS brings me in my daily life I find, in reflection, that I hardly ever do anything to contribute back. What’s worse is that I know I am not alone in this. Many OSS users out there just use the software because it happens to be the best for them. And while there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, many of these individuals could be contributing back. Now obviously I don’t expect everyone, or even half for that matter, to contribute back but I honestly do think that the proportion of people who do contribute back could be much higher.

Why should I?

This is perhaps the easiest to answer. While you don’t have to contribute back, you should if you want to personally make the OSS you love even better.

How to I contribute?

Contributing to a project is incredibly easy. In fact in the vast majority of cases you don’t need to write code, debug software or even do much more than simply use the software in question. What do I mean by this? Well the fact that we here on The Linux Experiment write blog posts praising (or tearing to shreds supplying constructive criticism) to various OSS projects is one form of contributing. Did I lose you? Every time you mention an OSS project you bring attention to it. This attention in turn draws more users/developers to the project and grows it larger. Tell your family, write a blog post, digg stories about OSS or just tell your friends about “this cool new program I found”.

There are many other very easy ways to help out as well. For instance if you notice the program is doing something funky then file a bug. It’s a short process that is usually very painless and quickly brings real world results. I have found that it is also a very therapeutic way to get back at that application that just crashed and lost all of your data. Sometimes you don’t even have to be the one to file it, simply bringing it up in a discussion, such as a forum post, can be enough for others to look into it for you.

Speaking of forum posts, answering new users’ questions about OSS projects can be an excellent way to both spread use of the project and identify problems that new users are facing. The latter could in turn be corrected through subsequent bug or feature requests. Along the same lines, documentation is something that some OSS projects are sorely missing. While it is not the most glamorous job, documentation is key to providing an excellent experience to a first time user. If you know more than one language I can’t think of a single OSS project that couldn’t use your help making translations so that people all over the world can begin to use the software.

For the artists among us there are many OSS projects that could benefit from a complete artwork makeover. As a programmer myself I know all to well the horrors of developer artwork. Creating some awesome graphics, icons, etc. for a project can make a world of difference. Or if you are more interested in user experience and interface design there are many projects that could also benefit from your unique skills. Tools like Glade can even allow individuals to create whole user interfaces without writing a single line of code.

Are you a web developer? Do you like making pretty websites with fancy AJAX fluff? Offer to help the project by designing an attractive website that lures visitors to try the software. You could be the difference between this and this (no offense to the former).

If you’ve been using a particular piece of software for a while, and feel comfortable trying to help others, hop on over to the project’s IRC channel. Help new users troubleshoot their problems and offer suggestions of solutions that have work for you. Just remember: nothing turns off a new user like an angry IRC asshat.

Finally if you are a developer take a look at the software you use on a daily basis. Can you see anything in it that you could help change? Peruse their bug tracker and start picking off the low priority or trivial bugs. These are often issues that get overlooked while the ‘full time’ developers tackle the larger problems. Squashing these small bugs can help to alleviate the 100 paper cuts syndrome many users experience while using some OSS.

Where to start

Depending on how you would like to contribute your starting point could be pretty much anywhere. I would suggest however that you check out your favourite OSS project’s website. Alternatively jump over to an intermediary like OpenHatch that aggregates all of the help postings from a variety of projects. OpenHatch actually has a whole community dedicated to matching people who want to contribute with people who need their help.

I don’t expect anyone, and certainly not myself, to contribute back on a daily basis. I will however personally start by setting a recurring event in my calendar that reminds me to contribute, in some way or another, every week or month. If we all did something similar imagine the rapid improvements we could see in a short time.

This post was originally published on September 26, 2010. The original can be found here.

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Windows?? *GASP!*

Sometimes you just have to compile Windows programs from the comfort of your Linux install. This is a relatively simple process that basically requires you to only install the following (Ubuntu) packages:

To compile 32-bit programs

• mingw32 (swap out for gcc-mingw32 if you need 64-bit support)
• mingw32-binutils
• mingw32-runtime

Additionally for 64-bit programs (*PLEASE SEE NOTE)

• mingw-w64
• gcc-mingw32

Once you have those packages you just need to swap out “gcc” in your normal compile commands with either “i586-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 32-bit) or “amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 64-bit). So for example if we take the following hello world program in C

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
printf(“Hello world!\n”);
return 0;
}

we can compile it to a 32-bit Windows program by using something similar to the following command (assuming the code is contained within a file called main.c)

i586-mingw32msvc-gcc -Wall “main.c” -o “Program.exe”

You can even compile Win32 GUI programs as well. Take the following code as an example

#include <windows.h>
int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
char *msg = “The message box’s message!”;
MessageBox(NULL, msg, “MsgBox Title”, MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION);

return 0;
}

this time I’ll compile it into a 64-bit Windows application using

amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc -Wall -mwindows “main.c” -o “Program.exe”

You can even test to make sure it worked properly by running the program through wine like

wine Program.exe

You might need to install some extra packages to get Wine to run 64-bit applications but in general this will work.

That’s pretty much it. You might have a couple of other issues (like linking against Windows libraries instead of the Linux ones) but overall this is a very simple drop-in replacement for your regular gcc command.

*NOTE: There is currently a problem with the Lucid packages for the 64-bit compilers. As a work around you can get the packages from this PPA instead.

Originally posted on my personal website here.

This post was originally published on July 4, 2010. The original can be found here.

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Recently I decided to try out PowerTOP, a Linux power saving application built by Intel. I am extremely impressed by how easy it was to use and the power savings I am now basking in.

PowerTOP is a terminal application that first scans your computer for a number of things during a set interval. It then reports back which processes are taking up the most power and offers you some options to improve your battery life. All of these options can literally be enabled at a press of a button. It’s sort of like an experience I once had with Clippy in Microsoft Word; “it seems you are trying to save power, let me help you…” After applying a few of the suggestions the estimated battery life on my laptop went from about 3 and a half hours to almost 5 hours. In short, I would highly recommend everyone at least try out PowerTOP. I’m not promising miracles but at the very least it should help you out some.

This post was originally published on April 21, 2010. The original can be found here.

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Recently I have started to mess around with the Vorbis audio codec, commonly found within the Ogg media container. Unlike Theora, which I had also experimented with but won’t post the results for fear of a backlash, I must say I am rather impressed with Vorbis. I had no idea that the open source community had such a high quality audio codec available to them. Previously I always sort of passed off Vorbis’ reason for being regarded as ‘so great’ within the community as simply a lack of options. However after some comparative tests between Vorbis and MP3 I must say I am a changed man. I would now easily recommend Vorbis as a quality choice if it fits your situation of use.

What is Vorbis?

Like I had mentioned above, Vorbis is the name of a very high quality free and open source audio codec. It is analogous to MP3 in that you can use it to shrink the size of your music collection, but still retain very good sound. Vorbis is unique in that it only offers a VBR mode, which allows it to squeeze the best sound out of the fewest number of bits. This is done by lowering the bitrate during sections of silence or unimportant audio. Additionally, unlike other audio codecs, Vorbis audio is generally encoded at a supplied ‘quality’ level. Currently the bitrate for quality level 4 is 128kbit/s, however as the encoders mature they may be able to squeeze out the same quality at a lower bitrate. This will potentially allow a modern iteration of the encoder to achieve the same quality level but by using a lower bitrate, saving you storage space/bandwidth/etc.

So Vorbis is better than MP3?

Obviously when it comes to comparing the relative quality of competing audio codecs it must always be up to the listener to decide. That being said I firmly believe that Vorbis is far better than MP3 at low bitrates and is, at the very least, very comparable to MP3 as you increase the bitrate.

The Tests

I began by grabbing a FLAC copy of the Creative Commons album The Slip by Nine Inch Nails here. I chose FLAC because it provided me with the highest quality possible (lossless CD quality) from which to encode the samples with. Then, looking around at some Internet radio websites, I decided that I should test the following bitrates: 45kbit/s, 64kbit/s, 96kbit/s, and finally 128kbit/s (for good measure). I encoded them using only the default encoder settings and the following terminal commands:

For MP3 I used LAME and the following command. I chose average bitrate (ABR) which is really just VBR with a target, similar to Vorbis:

flac -cd {input file goes here}.flac | lame –abr {target bitrate} – {output file goes here}.mp3

For Vorbis I used OggEnc and the following command:

oggenc -b {target bitrate} {input file goes here}.flac -o {output file goes here}.ogg

Results

I think I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t tell you to just listen for yourself… The song in question is track #4, Discipline.

Note: if you are using Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or anything else that supports HTML5/Vorbis, you should be able to play the Vorbis file right in your browser.

45kbit/s MP3(1.4MB) Vorbis(1.3MB)

64kbit/s MP3(2.0MB) Vorbis(1.9MB)

96kbit/s MP3(2.9MB) Vorbis(2.8MB)

128kbit/s MP3(3.8MB) Vorbis(3.6MB)

Are you a Linux user? Thinking about trying your own Linux experiment? Have you ever come across something broken or annoying and figured out a solution? Or maybe you just came up with a really neat way of doing something to make your life easier? Well if you have ever done any of those and can write a decent sentence or two we’d be glad to showcase your content here.

Get the full details at our page here: Write for the Linux Experiment.

This is a podcast presentation from the Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group on the topic of Let’s Encrypt, Cryptocurrencies published on February 7th 2017. You can find the original Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group post here.

Read more…

Using the excellent Digital Ocean tutorial as my base I decided to setup an OpenVPN server on a Linux Mint 18 computer running on my home network so that I can have an extra layer of protection when connecting to those less than reputable WiFi hotspots at airports and hotels.

While this post is not meant to be an in-depth guide, you should use the original for that, it is meant to allow me to look back at this at some point in the future and easily re-create my setup.

1. Install everything you need

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openvpn easy-rsa

2. Setup Certificate Authority (CA)

make-cadir ~/openvpn-ca
cd ~/openvpn-ca
nano vars

3. Update CA vars

Set these to something that makes sense:

export KEY_COUNTRY=”US”
export KEY_PROVINCE=”CA”
export KEY_CITY=”SanFrancisco”
export KEY_ORG=”Fort-Funston”
export KEY_EMAIL=”me@myhost.mydomain”
export KEY_OU=”MyOrganizationalUnit”

Set the KEY_NAME to something that makes sense:

export KEY_NAME=”server”

4. Build the CA

source vars
./clean-all
./build-ca

5. Build server certificate and key

./build-key-server server
./build-dh
openvpn –genkey –secret keys/ta.key

6. Generate client certificate

source vars
./build-key-pass clientname

7. Configure OpenVPN

cd ~/openvpn-ca/keys
sudo cp ca.crt ca.key server.crt server.key ta.key dh2048.pem /etc/openvpn
gunzip -c /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/sample-config-files/server.conf.gz | sudo tee /etc/openvpn/server.conf

Edit config file:

sudo nano /etc/openvpn/server.conf

Uncomment the following:

tls-auth ta.key 0
cipher AES-128-CBC
user nobody
group nogroup
push “redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp”
push “route 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0”
push “route 192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0”

Add the following:

key-direction 0
auth SHA256

Edit config file:

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Uncomment the following:

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Run:

sudo sysctl -p

8. Setup UFW rules

Run:

ip route | grep default

To find the name of the network adaptor. For example:

default via 192.168.x.x dev enp3s0  src 192.168.x.x  metric 202

Edit config file:

sudo nano /etc/ufw/before.rules

Add the following, replacing your network adaptor name, above the bit that says # Don’t delete these required lines…

# START OPENVPN RULES
# NAT table rules
*nat
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
# Allow traffic from OpenVPN client to eth0
-A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/8 -o enp3s0 -j MASQUERADE
COMMIT
# END OPENVPN RULES

Edit config file:

sudo nano /etc/default/ufw

Change DEFAULT_FORWARD_POLICY to ACCEPT.

DEFAULT_FORWARD_POLICY=”ACCEPT”

Add port and OpenVPN to ufw, allow it and restart ufw to enable:

sudo ufw allow 1194/udp
sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw disable
sudo ufw enable

9. Start OpenVPN Service and set it to enable at boot

sudo systemctl start openvpn@server
sudo systemctl enable openvpn@server

10. Setup client configuration

mkdir -p ~/client-configs/files
chmod 700 ~/client-configs/files
cp /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/sample-config-files/client.conf ~/client-configs/base.conf

Edit config file:

nano ~/client-configs/base.conf

Replace remote server_IP_address port with the external IP address and port you are planning on using. The IP address can also be a hostname, such as a re-director.

Add the following:

cipher AES-128-CBC
auth SHA256
key-direction 1

Uncomment the following:

user nobody
group nogroup

Comment out the following:

#ca ca.crt
#cert client.crt
#key client.key

11. Make a client configuration generation script

Create the file:

nano ~/client-configs/make_config.sh

Add the following to it:

#!/bin/bash

# First argument: Client identifier

KEY_DIR=~/openvpn-ca/keys
OUTPUT_DIR=~/client-configs/files
BASE_CONFIG=~/client-configs/base.conf

cat ${BASE_CONFIG} \
<(echo -e ‘<ca>’) \
${KEY_DIR}/ca.crt \
<(echo -e ‘</ca>\n<cert>’) \
${KEY_DIR}/${1}.crt \
<(echo -e ‘</cert>\n<key>’) \
${KEY_DIR}/${1}.key \
<(echo -e ‘</key>\n<tls-auth>’) \
${KEY_DIR}/ta.key \
<(echo -e ‘</tls-auth>’) \
> ${OUTPUT_DIR}/${1}.ovpn

And mark it executable:

chmod 700 ~/client-configs/make_config.sh

12. Generate the client config file

cd ~/client-configs
./make_config.sh clientname

13. Transfer client configuration to device

You can now transfer the client configuration file found in ~/client-configs/files to your device.

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.

This post was originally published on October 16, 2009. The original can be found here.

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As part of our experiment, everyone is required to try a different desktop manager for two weeks. I chose KDE, since I’ve been using GNOME since I installed openSUSE. However, I’ve found that while trying to get a desktop manager set up one wrong move can cause everything to fall apart.

Switching from GNOME:

This was fairly simple. I started up YaST Software Management, changed my filter from “Search” to “Patterns”, and found the Graphical Environments section. Here I right clicked “KDE Base System”, and selected install. Clicking accept installed the kdebase and kdm packages, with a slew of other KDE default programs. Once this was done, I logged out of my GNOME session, and selected KDE4 as my new login session. My system was slightly confused and booted into GNOME again, so I restarted. This time, I was met with KDE 4.1.

My Thoughts on KDE 4.1:

As much as I had hated the qt look [which I erronously call the ‘quicktime’ look, due to its uncanny similarity to the quicktime app], the desktop was beautiful. The default panel was a very slick, glossy black, which looked quite nice. The “lines” in each window title made the windowing system very ugly, so I set out to turn them off. Its a fairly easy process:

KDE Application Launcher > Configure Desktop > Appearance > Windows > Uncheck the “Show stripes next to the title” box.

Once completed, my windows were simple and effective, and slightly less chunky than the default GNOME theme, so I was content.

Getting rid of the openSUSE Branding:

openSUSE usually draws much ire from me – so its not hard to imagine that I’d prefer not to have openSUSE branding on every god damn application I run, least of all my Desktop Manager. From YaST Software Management I searched for openSUSE and uninstalled every package that had the words “openSUSE” and “branding”. YaST automatically replaces these packages with alternate “upstream” packages, which seem to be the non-openSUSE themes/appearances. Once these were gone, things looked a lot less gray-and-green, and I was happy.

Oh god what happened to my login screen:

A side effect of removing all those openSUSE packages my login screen took a trip back in time, to the Windows 3.1 era. It was a white window on a  blue background with Times New Roman-esque font. After a bit of researching on the GOOG, I found out that this was KDE3 stepping up to take over for my openSUSE branding. Uninstalling the package kde3base or whatever the shit it’s called forced KDE4 to take over, and everything was peachy again.

Installing my Broadcom Wirless Driver

In order to install my driver, I followed this guide TO THE LETTER. Not following this guide actually gave YaST a heart attack and created code conflicts.

KMix Being Weird

KMix magically made my media buttons on my laptop work, however it occasionally decided to change what “audio device” the default slider was controlling. Still, having the media buttons working was a HUGE plus.

Getting Compositing to Work

I did not have a good experience with this. Infact, by fucking around with settings, I ended up bricking my openSUSE install entirely. So alas, I ended up completely re-installing openSUSE. Regardless, to install ATI drivers, follow the guide here using the one-click install method worked perfectly. After finally getting my drivers, turning on compositing was simple:

KDE Application Launcher > Configure Desktop > Appearance > Desktop > Check the “Enable Desktop Effects” box.

From KDE4.1 to KDE4.3

While KDE was really working for me, the notifications system was seriously annoying. Every time my system had an update, or a received a message in Kopete  an ugly, plain, slightly off center, gray box would appear at the top of my screen to inform me. Tyler informed me that this was caused by the fact that I wasn’t running the most recent version of KDE4. A quick check showed me that openSUSE isn’t going to use KDE4.3 until openSUSE 11.2 launches, however you can manually add the KDE 4.3 repositories to YaST, as shown on the openSUSE KDE Repository page.

After adding these repositories, I learned a painful lesson in upgrading your display manager. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt a Display Manager upgrade/switch untill you have an hour to spare,  and enough battery life to last the whole time. I did not, and even though I cancelled the install about 60 seconds in, I found that YaST had already uninstalled my display manager. Upon restart, I was met with a terminal.

From the terminal, I used the command line version of YaST to completely remove kdebase4 and kdm from my system. After that, re-installing the KDE4.3 verison of  kdm from YaST in the terminal installed all the other required applications. However, there are a shitload of dependency issues you gotta sort through and unfortunately the required action is not the same for each application.

KDE4.3

KDE4.3 is absolutely gorgeous, I’ve had no complaints with it. KMix seems to have reassigned itself again, but it assigned itself correctly. Removing the openSUSE branding was the same, but by default the desktop theme used is Air. I prefer the darker look of Oxygen, so I headed over to my desktop to fix it by following these steps:

Desktop > Right Click > Plain Desktop Settings > Change the Desktop Theme from Air to Oxygen.

Concluding Thoughts

Now that all these things are sorted out, I’m surprisingly impressed with KDE, and I might even keep it at the end of this test period for our podcast.

Let me know if you’ve ever had to change desktop managers and your woes in the comments!

This post was originally published on July 29, 2009. The original can be found here.

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100% fat free

Picking a flavour of Linux is like picking what you want to eat for dinner; sure some items may taste better than others but in the end you’re still full. At least I hope, the satisfied part still remains to be seen.

Where to begin?

A quick search of Wikipedia reveals that the sheer number of Linux distributions, and thus choices, can be very overwhelming. Thankfully because of my past experience with Ubuntu I can at least remove it and it’s immediate variants, Kubuntu and Xubuntu, from this list of potential candidates. That should only leave me with… well that hardly narrowed it down at all!

Learning from others’ experience

My next thought was to use the Internet for what it was designed to do: letting other people do your work for you! To start Wikipedia has a list of popular distributions. I figured if these distributions have somehow managed to make a name for themselves, among all of the possibilities, there must be a reason for that. Removing the direct Ubuntu variants, the site lists these as Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, gOS, Knoppix, Linux Mint, Mandriva, MontaVista Linux, OpenGEU, openSUSE, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Pardus, PCLinuxOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sabayon Linux, Slackware and, finally, Slax.

Doing a both a Google and a Bing search for “linux distributions” I found a number of additional websites that seem as though they might prove to be very useful. All of these websites aim to provide information about the various distributions or help point you in the direction of the one that’s right for you.

• DistroWatch
• Linux Online
• LinuxQuestions.org
• The Linux Documentation Project
• Linux HQ
• DesktopLinux.com

Only the start

Things are just getting started. There is plenty more research to do as I compare and narrow down the distributions until I finally arrive at the one that I will install come September 1st. Hopefully I can wrap my head around things by then.

This post was originally published on September 28, 2009. The original can be found here.

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Before I switched to Windows 7 for my laptop, I used a a dock software called RocketDock to manage my windows and commonly used desktop shortcuts. I liked being able to see my whole desktop ever since I found a good wallpaper site. Back when I rolled Ubuntu, I installed this application called Gnome Do. It’s a Quicksilver like program that just works. However, the newest feature of Gnome Do that I loved was its Docky theme. It puts a dock similar to RocketDock on the bottom of your screen, and integrates it’s OS searching features right into the dock.

I decided to install the application from YaST, the default system administration tool. It indexes a fairly large number of repositories, and it did have Gnome Do. A few minutes later I had the app running, but unfortunately the version was way out of date. Gnome Do is on roughly version 0.8.x, and YaST gave me 0.4.x.

So off I went trying to find a .rpm for Gnome Do that would install. I was met with a lot of failure, with a ton of dependencies unable to be resolved and so on. Next I tried the openSUSE file from Gnome Do’s homepage, but for some reason the servers were down and I was unable to install that way either.

Frustrated and not knowing what to do next, I decided to hop on IRC and see if anyone in #SUSE on irc.freenode.net could help me out. They told me about this service called Webpin. There I found a .ymp [which is an openSUSE specific installer file like a .deb or .rpm] for Gnome Do, and a ymp for Gnome Do’s plugins. Downloading and opening the files installed the programs without any problems. The last step I had to take to enable Docky was to install compiz and enable desktop compositing. After that, a quick trip to Gnome Do’s preference dialog allowed me to use the Docky theme, and I was up and running!

This post was originally published on August 21, 2009. The original can be found here.

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Like many of the other varieties of Linux, Debian gives the end user a number of different installation choices. In addition to the choice of installer that Tyler B has already mentioned, the Debian community maintains three different distributions, which means that even though I’ve picked a distribution, I still haven’t picked a distribution! In the case of Debian, these distributions are as follows:

1. Stable: Last updated on July 27th, 2009, this was the last major Debian release, codenamed “Lenny.” This is the currently supported version of Debian, and receives security patches from the community as they are developed, but no new features. The upside of this feature freeze is that the code is stable and almost bug free, with the downside that the software it contains is somewhat dated.
2. Testing: Codenamed “Squeeze,” this distribution contains code that is destined for the next major release of Debian. Code is kept in the Testing distribution as long as it doesn’t contain any major bugs that might prevent a proper release (This system is explained here). The upside of running this distribution is that your system always has all of the newest (and mostly) bug free code available to users. The downside is that if a major bug is found, the fix for that bug may be obliged to spend a good deal of time in the Unstable distribution before it is considered stable enough to move over to Testing. As a result, your computer could be left with broken code for weeks on end. Further, this distribution doesn’t get security patches as fast as Stable, which poses a potential danger to the inexperienced user.
3. Unstable: Nicknamed Sid after the psychotic next door neighbour in Toy Story who destroys toys as a hobby, this is where all of Debian’s newest and potentially buggy code lives. According to what I’ve read, Sid is like a developer’s build – new users who don’t know their way around the system don’t generally use this distribution because the build could break at any time, and there is absolutely no security support.

I’m currently leaning towards running the Testing distribution, mostly because I like new shiny toys, and (I think) want the challenge of becoming a part of the Debian community. Since we’ve been getting a lot of support from the various development communities lately, perhaps some of our readers could set me straight on any information that I might have missed, and perhaps set me straight on which distribution I should run.