Linux

Solaar is software for more than just pairing wireless keyboards and mice Back on April 8th, 2025 I wrote about Using Logitech unifying devices with Linux in which I discussed how to use Solaar under Linux Mint, or Xubuntu, to pair Logitech unifying wireless devices. My goal with that article was just to provide simple instructions for people looking to pair their Logitech wireless unifying devices, but it turns our Solaar has other functions depending on the device. ...

I tried AI on my Lenovo ThinkPad T430s under Xubuntu Linux and it did something shocking! Yes, the heading above makes this seem like zoo of bad artificial intelligence videos on Youtube, but I was actually shocked at what happened when I tried to install Ollama on my ThinkPad T430s running Xubuntu Linux 24.04.2. Entertain me for a second and let me briefly explain why I was surprised: I’ve installed Ollama a bunch of times on hardware several years newer than my laptop. Ollama will run if you don’t have a modern graphics card (which sounds a bit strange since it’s mostly text based, but having a decent, modern Nvidia graphics card can really boost Ollama’s performance). ...

OnlyOffice is NOT OpenOffice, nor LibreOffice! Whenever I’ve mentioned OnlyOffice to someone in person, it inevitably gets confused with the Apache foundation’s OpenOffice office suite. OnlyOffice and OpenOffice are not the same, they don’t share the same codebase, and they’re not from the same organizations. Because OpenOffice was at one time the main free alternative (until the LibreOffice fork, which we recommend over OpenOffice) to Microsoft Office, it’s fairly well known. OnlyOffice sounds a lot like OpenOffice, but similarities end there. ...

Logitech unifying, but needs configuration Logitech’s unifying system is nice for a few reasons: Any device with the Logitech unifying symbol should work with a unifying dongle. Up to 6 devices can attach to one unifying dongle. There are plenty of Logitech devices that are part of the unifying ecosystem. If you buy a new Logitech wireless keyboard direct from a retailer, chances are you can just plug the dongle into your computer, turn on your wireless keyboard, and work. But if you buy Logitech devices used, and/or they don’t come with the unifying dongle, a little work might be needed to get the device paired with the dongle. ...

Don’t physically remove a USB key without unmounting or ejecting it first I have destroyed my fair share of USB keys in the past by prematurely removing the key before it was safe to do so. I remember being particularly irked when my $70CDN 1GB Kingston flash drive stopped working. I think at the time I swore I’d never buy Kingston crap again, but I’m not so sure it was ever Kingston’s fault (to be fair, USB keys were fairly new on the market back then). Like a lot of people, I assumed you could just save a document, or copy your files over, and then pull the USB drive out. Maybe this was just a bad habit I picked up from my days of removing floppy disks (they never got corrupted either)? ...

PXE network installation Most Linux distribution web sites describe the process of how to download an ISO, and create a bootable USB key. While USB keys are great if you’re working on your own computer, when you need to scale up and install across a number of systems there are more efficient ways of deploying Linux. One of those ways is to network boot, and install from a PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) server. ...

Debian package over flatpak, but get it from Steam Moving from Xubuntu to Linux Mint XFCE was not as seemless as I’d hoped it would be. The last time I gave Linux Mint serious consideration was over 13 years ago when the Computer Recycling Project at The Working Centre was looking for a replacement for Ubuntu 10.04 (the next version would include the Unity desktop which wouldn’t run on a lot of our laptops at the time). ...

Hardware and Linux Distribution Differences This post covers a bunch of areas of media decoding and encoding that I’ve discovered over a number of years using Debian-based distributions like Xubuntu, and Linux Mint. Primarily I’ll cover some of the differences between Xubuntu and Linux Mint, how various hardware (CPUs and graphics cards) encode video, and some of the “gotchas” when it comes to different methods as they apply to Handbrake (software) and MakeMKV. ...

Jazz Jackrabbit – an introduction Back in 1994 the World Wide Web (WWW) was just starting to catch on, mostly via a dial-up connection. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were starting to be on the way out, but at the time I was running a bulletin board for a local computer club. One of the attractions of bulletin board systems (besides online games/aka doors, message boards, and chatting) were the extensive “shareware” software collections. If you weren’t going to a computer store to buy software, you were probably calling a bulletin board to download shareware or freeware software. Shareware software became known as “try before you buy” software. In most cases software was fully functional, but limited in some way (for example: a game where you could play the first few levels, but if you wanted more, you had to send the shareware author money for the rest of the software). ...

Introduction Recently I was checking out Youtube videos about a Linux-related program, and I came across a comment in one of the videos that I’ve seen before (I’m paraphrasing this to not identify the video or commenter): random comment on a Linux video: “Those commands don’t work. In Windows, you don’t have to write a book to install something. I’m going back to Windows.” The comment isn’t a question, but a statement: Linux is difficult, Windows is easier. ...