Paul Sutton

debian

Adding games to Debian Xfce menu

Yesterday, I wrote briefly that I am now using snaps, this works really well, but does not add items to the Debian XFCE menu automatically.

To solve this I have installed menulibre, which helps users edit the menu.

apt install menulibre

So adding items to this is fairly straight forward.

  1. Load up the menulibre program.

menu —> accessories —> Menu Editor

Launch Program from menu

Once loaded you will be presented with:-

Main Program screen

The + in the corner allows users to add a new entry.

Click on the appropriate place in the menu to add your program to where you want it. You can also move items around with the up / down arrows at the bottom, don't forget to save (see later) what you have changed.

menu 1

You can then enter the details of the program. To save there is an icon to the right of the + Depicting an arrow pointing towards a disk drive. Click this to save.

You can then test to make sure your entry works.

#debian,#buster,#menu,#add,#item,#menulibre

Fresh Debian install

I spent some time, last night, re-installing Debian 10.x. I am now running a nice clean 10.5 desktop system.

desktop

As expected, this is a very simple process. After install I spent time restoring data, installing a few programs, I am likely to use more often.

Also nice to have lots of disk space left:-

df -h /home
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       143G   32G  105G  23% /

#debian,#buster,#install

Debian Academy Update 21/9/2020

So a quick update. I am currently working on a Moodle course to help teach how to edit and create presentations in LaTeX / Beamer. We can use this as part of the Debian Academy project. Still work in progress. But hopefully this course will help others.

Please see the Wiki page for details.

#debian,#teams,#academy,#education

Debian Academy update

As posted about on the 14th September I am involved in the DebianAcademy.

In addition making various related presentations in LaTeX / Beamer. I am currently working on a Moodle course how to do this.

So the LaTeX template, is being used as part of the course, and it can also be used as a basis for other presentations.

So far this is work in progress.

In other news I have submitted an article to the Torbay Weekly to promote the DebianAcademy and reach out to a few more potential contributors.

#debian,#teams,#academy,#education,torbayweekly,#moodle, #latex,#beamer,#course,#lessons,#article

Debian Academy

As I have started on my Paignton Code Club blog I am now part of the Debian Academy team.

I have been working on some presentations to help promote this.

Please join the team mailing list to ask questions and find out more. I am also on the team IRC channel on oftc.

Please see the Wiki page for details.

#debian,#teams,#academy,#education

Super Container OS

Just found this on Mastodon. Super Container OS, a Debian-Based Live Distro with a Built-In #Container Engine.

Could be good for anyone who would like to get up and running quickly as it is also installable.

If you would like to discuss further please join Mastodon as I don't much about container technology.

Related

#debian,#buster,#docker,#container,#live,#installable, #distribution

Run a basic web server locally.

A few years ago, at the Torbay Tech Jam I was shown a neat way to start up a really basic http web server using python3.

Using this method I decided to have a go, so that I could share this, as it is linked to this weeks Code Club tutorials.

Note: I am using Debian Linux for this.

So after creating a new directory for the server

mkdir http cd http

I created a new file index.html and added a few basic lines of html to this.

<html>
<body>
<h1>this is a test line</h1>
</body>
<html>

Then from the command line entered:

python3 -m http.server 8080

Note: 8080 is the port number, so you can use something different, the default for http is 80.

Then pointing my web browser at

127.0.0.1:8080

I am able to view the page in the web browser.

Hope this is useful, could be useful for testing out what you are learning with Freecodecamp if you don't want to create Repl for this.

#linux,#debian,#web,#server,#http,#testing

I can be contacted on Mastodon here.

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Get a free Repl.it online IDE account here Get an Overleaf account here, Online collaborative LaTeX Editor

Adding emblems to files

I have a large number of photos that I am slowly uploading to my Mastodon account. However this presents a problem, how to identify and keep track which photos have been uploaded.

I found a solution to this, the XFCE desktop in Debian allows small icons (called emblems) to be added to file icons, this helps to identify different files, but there seems to be quite a few more uses for this.

So in this context, you can add an emblem as follows

  • Right click on a file or file(s)
  • Go to properties
  • Select *emblems tab

add emblem

  • Select the required emblem
  • Click Close

Image icons will now display the selected emblem.

picture plus emblem

Hopefully this is helpful. Even in a different context.

#hints,#linux,#debian,#xfce,#icons,#emblems,

I can be contacted on Mastodon here. You can get a free account on the http://qoto.org instance by following this link.

Get a free Repl.it online IDE account here Get an Overleaf account here, Online collaborative LaTeX Editor

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Debian Admin Handbook

The latest edition of the Debian Administrator's handbook, which covers the latest release Debian 10 (Buster) has been released.

You can download or view online.

#Linux,#debian,#handbook,#buster,#user,#admin,#guide

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Youtube-dl out of date

The youtube-dl tool on Debian 10 is out of date, it seems even the sid version is behind, by a good few months.

After some searching I have found a way to fix this.

Please note you need to do you OWN RESEARCH in to fixing this. I am not responsible for loss or problems caused by following what I have put here.

Firstly I was getting the following error

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JSHubLg7NE [youtube] 0JSHubLg7NE: Downloading webpage [youtube] 0JSHubLg7NE: Downloading video info webpage ERROR: 0JSHubLg7NE: YouTube said: This video is unavailable.

The webpage here was a little helpful

*https://askubuntu.com/questions/1200552/youtube-dl-troubleshooting-error-this-video-is-unavailable

In providing an explanation and some fixes.

Firstly on Debian the internal update option is disabled so

youtube-dl -U

Won't work, reading further this seems to download the latest version

While the above instructions worked for me, The old version was still installed, this needs to be removed so doing this before hand may help.

However if you want to check the current version before removing you can use:

youtube-dl —version

Then remove with:

apt remove youtube-dl -

The instructions

wget http://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

You will still need to change the permissions as per above website. I am not repeating them here, you need to read up.

However – Debian appears to expect youtube-dl to be in /usr/bin.

The above solution downloads to /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl, you can either put in the path manually when running as in:

/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JSHubLg7NE

Which gets rather tedious to keep doing that.

In order to get round this, I have copied the binary to where Debian wants it

cp /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl /usr/bin/youtube-dl

Which seems to work for me, but is probably the wrong way to go about doing this.

You can now find the version that is now installed by using

youtube-dl —version

2020.01.24

Hopefully this is useful. You need to do your own research but the problem is fixable.

Once you have upgraded you can download youtube videos in the normal way with youtube-dl.

#debian, #youtube-dl, #error, #fix, #solution, #gnu, #linux

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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