Software

What is Solaar Solaar is a graphical Linux application for pairing Logitech Unifying mice and keyboards with a unifying receiver. Both unifying keyboards/mice and receivers typically have a small orange 6 pointed star on the device. Fig 1. Logitech M310 wireless mouse and unifying receiver Using Solaar Using Solaar is simple: With the mouse off Ensure the wireless mouse has a good battery but is switched off (test with multimeter or battery tester) Launch Solaar Plug the unifying receiver into the Linux machine Click the pair new device button Turn on the mouse At this point the mouse will either pair (and you may see the Found a new device devicename and the wireless link is not encrypted message), or fail to pair. ...

dpkg: error processing package libglib2.0 – too many errors, stopping Recently we found that a number of our Linux Mint 22.1 installations that sat for awhile without updates ran into an issue processing the update for libglib2.0 when we tried running: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y From what I can tell the issues seems to be that certain dependencies need to be updated and configured before libglib2.0 as most of the errors are similar to: ...

Origins of Linux at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project While I’ve been around The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project for almost 24 years (November, 2001), the origins of Linux at the project predate my arrival. It was in fact the efforts of volunteers who came before me, working on a custom Linux distribution called WCLP (Working Centre Linux Project), that first attracted me to the project. Like Linux Mint, WCLP was Debian-based, with a goal of getting a “usable desktop” on Pentium computers with 16MB of RAM and 500MB hard drives. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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). ...

Suspend doesn’t work on some Linux distributions – Lenovo Yoga S1 Our experience with Linux Mint XFCE has been pretty good so far at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project, but we recently ran into an issue where a couple of Lenovo Yoga S1 laptops refused to suspend when the suspend button was clicked. Now before someone goes on about Linux, I want to point out a couple of things: ...

On systemd-based distributions it’s possible to boot to the BIOS from Linux Have you ever found yourself working on a computer that’s just so blindingly fast that you just cannot mash the key you need to get into the BIOS fast enough? It might be possible to reboot from your Linux system into the BIOS of your computer. Not all systems support this feature. On the one system we tested this on which didn’t boot to the BIOS the error message mentioned something about the EFI partition. But I was able to successfully run the command on a couple of systems, a 4th gen and 8th gen system. ...

Vikings – Wolves of Midgard (crashes after the Kalypso video) Vikings – Wolves of Midgard is a linear action role playing game (ARPG) that lets you go back and repeat quests several times until you’re overpowered. Recently I’ve tried a number of role playing games only to find they were lacking in graphics, the controls were too jank, or they just required obscene amounts of time to make any progress. I like Vikings – Wolves of Midgard, because I find that despite the fact that the story is almost aways the same, you can complete quests over and over again until you’re overpowered. The controls are not bad, especially compared to some of the games I’ve played lately. Best of all it runs natively under Linux. ...